Small Time Voyeur
Summertime, and the livin’ seems to be easy. School buses are out, schools of striped bass are in and yes, the corn mazes are getting high. Oh boy, how that next couplet fits Hamptons folks. Yeah, your daddy’s rich and your mamma’s good looking, so hush, little baby, don’t you cry—-at least not on Main Street. If Gershwin only knew.
Summertime is lightning, gone before heard, but in the in-between schedules get fixed. The Dan’s Papers literary competition, Shakespeare Festival dates, Cano’s readings; they all find a way into our calendars and time is gone. Should becomes must, next morphs into now, and now has to be accomplished immediately.
Immediacy. Besides the element of time implicit in the term, there’s a quasi-licit aspect to it. In a social compact where an employee in the legal profession earns four times more than a writer or an editor, it’s obvious that the legal influence will prevail and so we have time is of the essence, an abstraction confirming another abstraction–actually a verbal contraption, which permits an infinite subdivision of time in which hours, minutes, and seconds all become billable to the client’s account.
The essentiality of time also poses the issue of who has the authority to parcel, allocate or move Time around. In the early period of the telegraph and the first phone communications, Wall Street moved Time in order to trade with London. Since then, the competition to move Time has been fierce. Every entity, every pope, king, and president asserts its authority to manage Time for You. Just for You and Your Benefit. Competition to parcel Time has been so fierce that Andy Warhol was forced to limit stardom to fifteen minutes. And that was over half a century ago.
Time is of the essence, otherwise parceling, raises intriguing questions as well. Example: if you cast a glance at someone, it’s fine, but if you look at that person just a little bit longer, suddenly you may become a vulgar voyeur. But what if you’re looking at something beautiful, doesn’t it deserve to be appreciated a little longer? Indian Wells, Fire Island and Far Rockaway come to mind, places where nudists permitted themselves to be admired by the casual transient torn between glancing or looking a bit longer and becoming a voyeur. That uncertainty between glancing and looking was not helped by the fact that many times it was difficult for the transient to distinguish whether or not a particular body was actually naked or just looked like it might be. From a distance of a hundred feet or so, it was not at all easy to differentiate between flesh and those articles designed to cover it: an equilateral triangle of skin-colored material four inches square and two well-positioned Coca-Cola caps obscuring the nipples.
Obscuring reality and casting shadows on our beaches is also the celebrated Hamptons real estate. The Shakespearian “to be or not to be” acquires new meaning here, where a single resident can buy the most expensive waterfront acre in the Hamptons with one hand, and the hundred remaining burial plots in the local cemetery with the other. Real estate here means being, with the exception of those underground plots, in which case the point is not to be. On our shores, time, being and family planning get consolidated beyond even the Bard’s imagination.
The Bard being the Bard, apart from tackling issues of real estate, kingdoms over and underground, also tinkered with the essence of infinite time and the unending sea. His Prospero and Miranda have significant names, meaning literally to prosper and to be admired. Their island refuge reminds us of our own shores, say Sag Harbor, where long ago, time and being were associated with waiting.
From Sag Harbor, whaling ships sailed out many times, returning two or three years later. It was so, that the monotony of a tall ship sailing for England was interrupted by the watchman’s call (this ship was not Conrad’s Narcissus, but it should have been, given its apt name); he had sighted a vessel far off. Hours later he could see that it was a whaler, looking for prey on the vast expanse of the Indian Ocean. Once close enough, the ships exchanged words.
“Everything good?” the skipper of the Narcissus shouted.
“We’re good. Thanks.”
“Where you’re from?” the skipper inquired, observing no particular flag on the small, compact sailboat.
“Sag Harbor” was the answer and the conversation ended as the sailboats became separated. We know that the actual Narcissus made it back to Liverpool; first mate Joseph Conrad, being scrupulous, left the record of it. However, we will never know if the whaler made it back to the waiting women of Sag Harbor.
Waiting had its own real estate, in Sag Harbor especially: the widow’s walk. Above the second floor, houses used to have one more room. That is where women awaiting the return of their husbands after years of fishing thousands of miles away, spent hours seeking the sight of a particular sheet of canvas. And that’s where “to be or not to be” comes again into play. The widow’s walk and its room were dedicated to the act of waiting and brooding on that existential question. Its windows kept widow’s cries from being heard and their tears from flowing back into the sea. Happy or desperate, it did not matter.
But these issues are not really why I consider myself an onlooker. The real reason is that I have a tendency to keep looking at events, and many times people, long after the actual action or performance is considered finished. I thought about that some days ago, while looking at the stage of a theater. The show had finished, the performer had received a standing ovation and when the clapping of hands had finished, many of the spectators drifted onto the stage. Some chitchat and some serious conversation were conducted and several people congratulated the author of the performance. It was a very touching moment commemorating the loss of a significant other, the significant other in this case being the mother of the author. It is difficult to imagine a greater loss than that of a mother, loved or hated, since she is the only physical connection to the past that we have. The father, yes, he is there, but as saying goes in countries of hot climate, “we know whose womb we were born of, but the progenitor, of that we may never be sure”, at least up until now.
I did not join the crowd. I find myself joining in less and less these days. Instead, I stay in my seat on the tertulia, way up, savoring the aftertaste of the performance and reflecting on the many wonderful tidbits of monologue. The play had been rendered as a puppet show and now the stage on stage began to be dismantled. One by one the different pieces of the puppet stage were broken down and stored in a suitcase; the elegant puppet with his supernatural memory was laid down, all his parts carefully piled up, leg upon leg, the trunk, all of it, the stage, the curtains, the story and the memories neatly arranged in a suitcase, ready to travel and to be reenacted in front of a new audience. It may be that after a while, the props will wear down and may have to be replaced or rebuilt, but we do not know what will happen to the memories. Will they erode and fade? Will they transform into something else? Will they stay as they are now? We don’t know, only time will tell. That’s why I consider myself a small time voyeur.
When I was twenty, often in the tertulia of theaters or cafes, depending on the occasion, I eagerly went backstage to converse with the performers or jumped into conversations at cafés. In one word, I tended to be a participant. At forty, I tended to sit in sidewalk restaurants and observe people walking by, the first step to my kind of voyeurism. Now, in my older age, I love to stay in my seat and observe the after-performance happenings.
The music stops, people applaud, the public leaves gradually, musicians or singers disperse; sheet music is collected and stored; benches are put away; all of that gets done while I’m still hearing the last chords, or seeing the last scenes. It gives me time to reflect under the influence, to think while the communion lasts, while one is still part of everything. It makes me think how at certain moments in our own lives, with or without applause, the stage where we have performed all our lives gets slowly dismantled, props we have used so copiously get taken away and stored, never to be used again. It makes me think about our colleagues, friends and family members, exiting our immediate consciousness and how we suddenly start living in a timeless dimension.
