That voyeur thing

Updated Thursday afternoon.

Got mad at myself this morning when I was out walking around and as I sometimes do when I’m mad at myself and alone I started to tell myself off in no uncertain terms.  Out loud. 

I was giving myself a pretty stern talking to and I had worked my way about halfway through my list of reasons why I’m an idiot before I realized this conversation wasn’t taking place inside my head.  What shut me up was the realization that along with my own voice I’d also been listening to the sound of typing and suddenly I wasn’t listening to it anymore.  I looked around and saw that I was passing by one of the quainter and handsomer of the old inns in town.  Sitting out on the front porch was a young woman with a cup of coffee and her laptop.

Who knows what she’d been working on?  Email.  A novel.  Her MySpace page.  Her blog.  Whatever it was, she wasn’t working on it anymore.  She was too busy staring at me.  She was wearing the obvious look of someone trying to decide if she was dealing with a drunk or a lunatic and, whichever, whether or not he was dangerous.  Our eyes met.  There was an awful second of mutual embarrassment, probably augmented by stark terror on her part—“Oh no!  He’s going to talk to me!”—and then she quickly went back to her typing and I hurried on down the road, my head down and my jaw clamped shut. 

Foolish as I felt, though, I couldn’t help laughing—silently—at the possibility that she was a blogger too and she was doing to me what I’m now doing to her, turning me into a character in her vacation notebook.

“Some crazy old coot just staggered by ranting to himself about—“

You’ll have to read her blog to find out what crazy thing I was ranting about.

Google Chatham Surf Side Inn coot.

Serve me right if you find her post.

I wouldn’t complain though.  Or care.  Much.  Whatever she wrote about me, I wouldn’t take it personally.  I wouldn’t see it as me.  I would see it as part of her attempt to put her world into words in order for her to make sense of it.  I would see it as writing. 

Turning people into characters is a regular feature of my blog.  Turning people into words, I could say.  If this blog is about any one thing, it is about the writing.  It is about turning the world into words.  My words.  A less than generous way to describe what I, like most other bloggers and writers, am up to is trying to colonize your head.  I’m trying to force you to use my words to think about what I’ve been thinking about.  I prefer to call what I’m doing sharing.

“Here,” I’m saying, oh so generously, “is something I thought you’d find interesting.  Pardon me, if the only way I can share it with you is by turning it into words of my choosing.”

It doesn’t matter what you look at, Thoreau said, what matters is what you see.

This was a boast, his way of saying that his readers shouldn’t judge his writing on his chosen subject but on the words he's used to describe his subject.  Some supposedly fine writers wrote badly on great themes.  Thoreau wrote very well about seeds.  Better to see a lot in a single seed waiting to be planted on a plain desk in a homemade cabin on an obscure pond in a small village in the homely state of Massachusetts than to go to Europe, visit all the capitals, tour the cathedrals and the ruins, and notice nothing.

But what you choose to look at is just going to have an effect on what you see.   Thoreau could spend hours looking at seeds.  I spend hours looking at people.  He did too, but he was happier with seeds.  I look at people.  I turn them into words, then I share the words.  I don’t worry much about the ethics of this.  Before I started blogging, I never would have thought there were any ethics to consider.  Writers turn people into words the way painters turn them into splotches of paint on a canvass.  The words belong to the writer, the splotches belong to the painter, neither the words nor the splotches are the people they are meant to describe or represent, and there’s no reason for anyone to complain or to care.  Most of the time nobody does care or complain because the words and the splotches don’t get identified.  In the four years I’ve been blogging I’ve only unpublished two posts and both times I did it was because the person I’d turned into words in the post recognized themselves and wrote to complain.  I have to admit that I wouldn’t have taken down either post if I hadn’t decided on my own that the words I’d used were unfair or contained too many clues to the originals’ identity.

Usually, I don’t worry when I write about a person I saw any more than I worry about it when I write about a bird, a movie star, a politician, or something else non-human.

Still, I’m a spy and, objectively, I’m violating people’s privacy twice—once when I do the spying and again when I give you the words that let you spy on them second-hand.

As I said, though, I don’t worry about this.

So what’s different about posting photographs?

Last Wednesday evening we went up to Nauset Beach.  To the young men Mannion’s delight, the waves were high.  Old man Mannion was pretty delighted about it too.  There were surfers in the water.  Real surfers on real surf boards really not watching what they were doing.  They were surfing too close in.  One rode a wave right at me and would have taken my head off if I hadn’t warned him off.  He bailed just in time.

There was a girl at the water’s edge when we hit the beach and set up our chairs and stuff.  Fifteen or sixteen.  Tall, lithe, beautiful, like a ballerina.  Coffee with cream colored skin with a touch of cinnamon.  She wasn’t in a bathing suit.  She was wearing white shorts and a tank top and had a pink sweater hugged around her shoulders like a shawl.  She was all alone, standing perfectly still and staring straight out to sea.  Nothing extraordinary about this, except that she hadn’t moved, at all, by the time we’d arranged everything and were ready to head into the water and she was still there, no sign of having moved, when we came out to dry off the first time, and she was still there, in the same spot, in the same pose, when we came back in again this time to pack up and go eat at the snack stand back up in the dunes, and she was still there when we’d gathered our stuff and started off the beach.  That puts her there for close to an hour.

At that age you think a lot of deep thoughts.  But still that’s a long time to stand so still.

Now here’s the thing.

I took her picture.

And I felt bad about that.

But I took pictures of the surfers too.

And I did not feel bad about that.

There’s more.

Obviously I do not feel bad about writing about her or about the surfers.  But I would nor feel right about posting the picture I took of her.  It’s in long shot.  You can’t see her face.  You’d have to know her well to be able to identify her.  It’s extremely unlikely she would ever find it on the web herself.  But I still won’t post it.

I don’t have any problem posting a picture of one of the surfers though.

I have another picture of another one of the surfers.  He’s carrying his board across the beach.  Big, beefy guy with a long ponytail.  And she’s in it.  She’s there in the background, off to the left, at the waterline, staring out to sea.  And if I hadn’t written about her I’d have posted that picture.

There are a lot of other people in that picture.  I wouldn’t have been at all concerned about their feelings either.

I’m not sure I understand this, so I can’t explain it, why I think writing about her here is ok, but posting her picture would be wrong, why I think writing about the surfers and posting a picture is ok.

I don’t know if I’m making distinctions without differences, if I’m kidding myself, or what.

I just know that there’s something bothering me now that hadn’t bothered me much before.

Foggy this morning when I was out walking around, talking to myself.  After I gave that young woman on the inn porch fodder for her blog, if she wants to use it, I wandered down to the small beach that’s up around the riprap from Lighthouse Beach.  The sand was heavy and wet from the rain that had fallen overnight.  I had the beach to myself, except for two seagulls and a plover down at the waterline and a cormorant cruising by in the shallows.  The plover flew off as soon as it became aware of me.  The gulls glared at me over their shoulders and hung around for a bit, just to let me know they weren’t scared of me, they just didn’t care for my company, before they flapped away.  The cormorant disappeared into the fog, keeping its thoughts about my presence a complete mystery.  A skimmer flashed past, equally inscrutable.

The gulls came back soon enough, though.  Or some gulls did.  Could have been the same pair.  Who can tell.  But one of them had just deposited a blue crab on the beach. The crab lay on its back, legs and claws flailing in the air, while the gull studied it, with the cool eye of a practiced killer trying to decide just which spot on the crab’s belly to drive its beak into.  Then the bird saw me.

I wasn’t about to come near, but he clearly thought I was out to steal his breakfast.  He lifted his wings, thrust his head and neck out, opened his beak horribly, and made a run at me.  I stood my ground and he veered off and flew away.  But he circled back and landed on the beach again, a dozen yards away from me and the crab.  He paced back and forth on the sand, giving me the evil eye, thinking, I’m pretty sure, The nerve of some humans.

I waited where I was, giving him time to realize I had no intention of rescuing the crab.   Probably could have given him all day.  He was too busy giving me time to realize he wanted to be left alone with his snack.  After a while, he gave up and flapped off.  I saw no point in leaving the crab to suffer now.  I went over to him, and remembering what I’d just read about blue crabs in Wyman Richardson’s The House on Nauset  Marsh, that they are mean little buggers who unlike other crabs can reach over their shoulders with their claws to snap at you if you try to pick them up from behind, I used my coffee cup to flip him right side up.  He showed me that Richardson knew his blue crabs by trying to pinch holes in the cup before he scuttled away.

He started off in good crab-fashion, sideways, but then he began turning around and around in circles, as if tied to a stake.  That’s where and how I left him.  When I reached the top of the beach I turned around and saw three seagulls swooping in towards him.

The fog was heavy enough that I couldn’t see more than twenty or thirty yards out.  Across the water from where I was standing is a long spit of sand that reaches all the way here from Orleans.   Up there it’s called Nauset Beach.  Down here it’s known as North Beach.  The water on this side of it is called Pleasant Bay the whole length of itself..  Somewhere out on North Beach something was making a melancholy sound like wind blowing steadily through a chink in a drafty house.  There happen to be a bunch of drafty houses over on North Beach, cabins really, large shacks in some cases, but enough of them that I suppose the wind whistling through them together could be heard where I was.  But it might not have been the wind.  It might have been a colony of seagulls bemoaning their sad lots in life together.  There was a roughness in the sound too, a sound that might have been barking along with it, so there might have been a herd of seals out there.  The sound could have been a combination of a wind, gullsong, sealcall, and my imagination.  I don’t know.

Whatever it was, it, they, the wind, the shacks, the birds, the seals, the by-now pecked apart and devoured crab, the gull I robbed of his breakfast with my intrusive humanness, none of them are going to mind that I’ve turned them into words.

Updated to paint a portrait of the blogger as knight with a woeful countenance:  Over at Blog Meridian, John B. detects the subconscious literary influences behind this post.

Comments

[Linkmeister]

If it's all about the words, try Wordle.

[Ken Muldrew]

If you had sketched the girl (assuming you could get a reasonable likeness), would you worry about posting it?

[Lance]

Ken, good question. I would have posted a sketch in a heartbeat.

[John B.]

Part Don Quixote (as the Knight-to-be imagines the words his future chronicler will write about him), part Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Stephen's seeing the girl on the beach). I don't care if you had either/neither in mind; this was wonderful to read.

[actor212]

See, Lance, this is why I always wear my Bluetooth headset, even when I don't carry my phone.

[CaliBlogger]

I wonder if a photo is too close to reality, not filtered through our artistic brains the way writing, or even a sketch would be.

Why the surfers, not the girl? Her solitude perhaps?

Just guessing.

Lovely essay though.

[eloriane]

I wonder if if has to do with her being involved in a very private act, thinking deeply, versus the surfers who were more public in their actions. Part of surfing is showing off, I think, whereas she was clearly not desiring or expecting an audience. It's the difference between photographing a stranger in a park, and the same person in their living room.
And choosing a sketch or words over a photo puts more space between the girl herself and your representation, making it more about your craft, less about her, and therefore more acceptable?
Interesting puzzle.