The Eye Experiment

While I am here, I’ve been experimenting with the power of eye contact.  No, that’s not true, I always experiment with eye contact.  At home, and here.  Mostly when I’m walking—walking to class with my headphones filling my skull with guitars, walking to church and admiring the early Sunday light, crossing the street to the library, strolling around the red brick of my Dublin neighborhood, the strewn beer cans of my Athens one, both bursting with oak trees and lilac bushes.  When I am walking, I make eye contact with the people I pass, even if I shouldn’t.  To be honest, I don’t know how not to make eye contact with them.  The man walking towards me is easily the most interesting thing on the street this morning, and if I look at his pale, button-down shirt or his swishing blue jeans, he might get the wrong idea—though that’s not really the point, because it’s not his clothes that are the most interesting thing, it’s his face, let’s be honest—it’s his pale, not-shaved-for-three-days face with brown stubble shadowing his chin and cheeks, his almost-black eyes, bushy eyebrows and pleasantly straight nose.  It’s the way one corner of his mouth turns down more than the other, the long-faded scar on his left temple, the dark, dark eyes.  The most interesting thing.  And if I look at anything else I feel stupid, like a person walking down the road staring straight up into the sky—I’m sorry, Sir, but I really want to make eye contact with you.  Please, please, please, don’t freak out.  No I’m not a creep, I don’t think.  And no I’m not hitting on you, unless you’re eyes are a surprising shade of blue/green/brown, and unless you lift one corner of your mouth when you look at me.  Then I might be hitting on you, but please, just carry on and forget about my prying as soon as our shoulders pass.

So the experiment goes.  The trouble is that here in Dublin, I walk much more than I do at home, and I pass more people on these busy streets than I do in my sleepy town.  Many more eyes to build bridges to.  And when I’m not walking—instead of sitting in class with eyes I know, or at home with essays and assignments—I’m sitting in pubs or cafes with tables and tables of new eyes with new faces around them.  Sitting in my favorite local coffee shop, a comfy green armchair, tea at my left elbow, and across the way, under a red and yellow painting of a woman with startling, bright eyes—can you imagine what they were in the flesh!—is a twenty-something woman with half her head shaved, the other half thick with dark curls.  Her features are almost masculine in their straight, clean angles, a stud in one nostril, many rings on her fingers—silver, jade, bronze.  She sits back in her chair with her legs crossed, unabashed and emphasizing her strong, broad shoulders, her muscular thighs.  When she notices my gaze, her eyes—an unexpected pale green—flash back.  The very left corner of her mouth pulls up, then more.  I squint slightly.  We look away.  Experiment 6235, Result – Positive.

In a club I scan the room while my housemates return to their native languages.  So I’m slightly bored, but there is a man—long and clean limbed, dark brown hair cut short.  Jaw bone like the flint edge of an arrowhead only slightly hidden by a short beard.  I can’t tell the color of his eyes.  But he sits at a table across the room and listens to his friend, who does most of the talking.  Patience in the easy rest of his shoulders against the leather booth, patience in the stead tilt of his head, patience in listening to the other’s monologue, patience the way we indulge those we love, not because we are willing to wait out their long soliloquies, but because we love to watch them be who they are.  Absolutely attentive.  And in his absolute attention, he looks at nothing else.  Experiment 6236, Result – Inconclusive.

 

 

In a sense I’m testing love at first sight—well, not love in the romantic sense, at least, not always.  Connection at first sight.  Is it all in the eyes?

I’m testing Socrates’ theory that each of our souls takes after a god, and that physical attraction is a recognition of compatible godliness in another—are you the Hephaestus to my Aphrodite, or the Hestia to my Hera?  Can you see that in my eyes?  Can I?

 

 

Walking out of St. Stephen’s Green towards home, the afternoon slipping over into sunset, light going gold.  I turned the corner at the motorcycle shop, the bright shiny bikes already removed from the sidewalk, and begin my long straight-shot down Camden Road.  But just past the bike shop, cramped against the 7-11, is a glass-front café, and at the front table facing out, a pair of brilliant blue eyes, lit from the bright sun slanting in southwest to northeast.  Stop.  My boot soles slow in their steady long strides.  Arrested by blue.  And somehow, some trick of the setting sun, some slant to the light, my face is lit as well, bright and glowing amber, reflected in the glass, my own brown eyes reflected.  I see him looking at me, and I see me looking at him, side by side, our faces almost overlaid.  I watch the left corner of my mouth pull up.  I notice him set down his mug of tea, back on the saucer in front of him. I see him.  I see him seeing me.  I see me.  I see blue.  His eyes still as bright as they were two seconds before, shot with lighter gray.

The brick wall of the 7-11 intercedes between us, as my steps carry me farther down this Dublin street.  Experiment 6237 – Conclusive.  No further tests necessary. 

First Lamb, Fresh Love

Last night we headed to O’Neill’s—my housemate Amelle, her colleague Aurelius, and I—for diner, drinks, and some traditional Irish music.  Night fell misty blue over the cobbled streets, speakers over every door spinning out whatever fiddle, flute or guitar sang inside, street lights coming on, little roads filled with the usual mixture of students, tourists, revelers.  I wanted to enjoy the hand-shaking, shoulder-slapping fellowship of the streets—so different from the carnival-feel of Spain, the sweaty-clubs of Tel Aviv or the drunk boredom of Ohio.  I wanted to have people to call out to across the street, to meet and mingle with, travel in a pack that goes rolling down the street.  But I was—am—still so knew to this city, and last night I was hungry from a pricey afternoon at the Guinness Storehouse which left me no money for a snack between “black stuff” and the pub.  I was cranky, and Amelle—in the measured quietness of her dark French curls and impeccable Paris fashion—did most of the navigating.

We wandered about, asking directions, getting contradictory answers, shuffling down side streets, realizing we were going in circles; I would have thoroughly enjoyed being so lost if my stomach had been a little less vocal.

Finally we asked a man taking a smoke outside the bright red façade of the “Auld Dubliner.” He seemed to know what he was about—“O’Neill’s?  Yeah, O’Neill’s,” he leaned into the pub to ask the bouncer, then he turned back to us, rubbing his shiny bald head with his free hand.  “Yeah, it’s not far, it’s not far.”  The bouncer joined, “You’re gonna turn here, yes, right here, turn right to Dame Street, an’you’ll see Ulster Bank across the way? Yeah, it’s in the same building, jus’ on t’ot’er side.”

We thanked him and set off down a road we’d walked at least three times, crossed over Dame Street with it’s towering bronze statues, heading for the bank.

“There it is,” I said, pointing to a green and brown storefront complete with square-paned windows and glossy gold-on-black lettering.  Green vines draping down from the flowerboxes.  Going inside, we realized that the modest façade visible from Dame Street concealed a wide maze of dark wood paneling and leather benches, complete with two buffet lines and at least two bars.  The warm, hearty smells of gravy, meat and stuffing pulled us in until we were seated with menus in our hands and our wallets on the table.  I mentally luxuriated in the list of goodies—oysters, bacon-wrapped chicken, salmon, turkey—until the promise of food no longer satisfied. I ordered a steaming lamb shank with red wine and mushroom sauce over two scoops of mashed potatoes.

“What is that?” Amelle asked.

“Lamb, this is the first time I’ve ever had it,” as I sat down with my steaming plate.

“Oh it’s so good,” said Aurelius, “You’ve never had?”

“No, it’s not very popular in the states” with my fork poised over the food, wondering how to attack the hunk of meat.

“Y’ve never had lamb?” a fair-haired man leaned over, speaking thick Irish brogue. “You’ll love it, especially here. An’what’ve you got?” leaning over Amelle’s plate, “Just’a plate’a veggies?” Sounding appauled.

“There’s salmon hiding in there,” I said as Amelle delicately picked at the lemon slices covering her fish.

“You may need to help her, I think,” said Aurelius.

“Well, th’a’ won’be a problem.  I could start righ’ na-ow,” laughing with his companions.  We subsided back into our separate conversations.

The lamb was delicious, warm and heavy with enough fat in the meat to make a dieter cringe, but the muscle underneath so much better for it, the pink and brown meat falling of the bone if I held the knife too close.  I carved it down in fifteen minutes, then wolfishly considered the bone.

After dinner we headed upstairs for the music, squeezing between among a knot of young men enthralled by a televised boxing match and a group of French girls sharing drinks.  The band was tuning up on the small stage—a square-jawed man whose dark hair and beard matched the patina on his flute, a russet haired woman sitting aloof with her concertina, and a ruddy blond guitarist acting as spokesman.  He introduced “d’band” and “d’tunes” with the flute player throwing in jokes—“T’is’s what y’get folks, when I don’drink durin’ a gig,” toasting us with his McCafe cup.  They spoke low to each other under the pick-up of the mics.

The first song—Star of County Down—fingers flashing over frets, flute holes and button keys, the guitarist singing—I’ve travelled a bit, but never was hit since my roving career began—my eyes wandered to the light-fingered flautist, down to the French girls having a drink, a young man with honey-colored hair coming to sit on the stage steps, his long frame languid on his makeshift seat, but his shoulders and attentive face turned towards the group’s beauty—a heart-faced blond.  I’d a heart to let and no tenant yet . . . But in she went and asked no rent from the star of the County Down.  I couldn’t hear their conversation, but gradually she turned more and more from her tittering companions, barely even noticing when several stood to go.

Several more songs I—When off Holyhead I wished meself was dead, or better of instead on the rocky road to Dublin—then an instrumental reel, and I lost track of the music, too engrossed in the slowly shifting posture of the pair across the way, like watching a flower track the sun.  They sat apart facing each other, then leaning in, then further, then holding hands, then touching shoulders.  A slight feeling of jealousy at the sudden simplicity of their lives, of the two-point system they had found tucked within the whirly chaos of music, crowd and pub, their sudden simplicity across from my own life trying to make new friends in this new place, of trying to keep in contact with those back home, of trying to not keep in contact with some back home, balancing, balancing—send that email, not that text, have coffee even though you’re tired and want to go home, laugh even though you’re nervous, look interested even when Amelle and Aurelius speak only in French, go home and blog before falling into bed, connect, connect, fight you’re introverted tendencies, connect, connect, balance.  And here, for these few hours, these two cut themselves from the chatter, scaled down from the light noise of a galaxy to a binary-star, orbiting, orbiting, both around the other.  I was pleasantly envious, the way we envy fifty-year couples sitting on park benches or children chasing geese across the lawns, hand-in-hand parents behind.  Envious of things I might have.  Seeing them makes me hope and sink at the same time—not yet, by maybe.  Watching them lean together, slightly sad at their unawareness of my distant admiration, relieved that it was so, that my watching didn’t break the double gravity of two, for tonight, orbiting.

When the band closed, the flute player played the last song, a breathy baritone, like a wave pulling back to sea, or his wooden flute on its lowest notes.  I was glad to leave my bar stool, descend the steps back out into the Dublin streets, the mess of taxis and wobbly, high-heeled girls already four beers deep.  Flashing headlights, whining streetlights, the colored lights of dance clubs, sudden brightness of late-night snack bars.  All the fluorescents, neons, incandescents so much more confusing than the single, steady light of day.  Turn your face to the sun, become one to one, remember them as they were, forever in that corner of the bar, as if they never left, would never leave, honey and wheat on the steps below the flute, one and one, oribiting.