The External Gaze
About when things are so nice they must be illegal
I. Feeling good.
The ear is a remarkably sensitive, delicate organ. “A divine miracle”, my matric Biology teacher called it. Inner ears contain the cochlea, housing thousands of small hair cells that move in response to sound vibrations that are converted into electrical signals the brain can hear as sound! Music! Babies laughing! These elements are so fragile they do not regenerate. Even brief exposure to loud sounds can cause hearing loss.
But no matter, young and with my head in-the-middle of a two metre sound booth. Hands gripping the front, head moving with those brutal, jagged sounds - legs stomping - it feels so good, this being one with the music. This is real - I feel it, growing infinite as my surroundings fade.
Whether in a ballet studio or on grimy dance floor, you start aware of every movement - step, hand and finger. Gradually, flow takes over: diffidence fades, time stretches, your body is carried by rhythm, or guided by music. Neuroscience calls this entrainment, where motor-auditory systems synchronize to create ecstatic motion, and a trance-like suspension of self. When the music stops or reality intrudes, awareness returns - leaving the memory of a fleeting, indelible union of body, sound and abandon.1 Techno lands most gladly with the uninhibited, whose affected temporal perception allows the body to move in sync, to that steadily hypnotizing beat that deafens.
Harm accumulates - by way of pleasure we were made to feel.
But it appeared to Dorian Gray that the true nature of the senses had never been understood, and that they had remained savage and animal merely because the world had sought to starve them into submission or to kill them by pain, instead of aiming at making them elements of a new spirituality, of which a fine instinct for beauty was to be the dominant characteristic. As he looked back upon man moving through history, he was haunted by a feeling of loss. So much had been surrendered! And to such little purpose!2
II. Pedagogy of the Transient
Few capture an ideal as precisely as in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Victorian society - obsessed with respectability yet blind to basic human rights - practically wrote Wilde’s story for him, its blazing hypocrisy making the obvious fully-formed, just waiting for the authors message.
Hedonism was one of its most dangerous provocations. Wilde presented hedonism and vice (from being hidden behind closed doors) as an expression of life through beautiful art. Epicurus saw it not in indulgence, but in moderation and freedom from pain.3 Huxley, in Brave New World4, pushed further: what happens when a state engineers pleasure itself? His answer came in the form of a dystopian London - built on soma, sex, and entertainment - where instant gratification is compulsory, and pain is unthinkable. In stripping suffering and depth from life, he suggests we are left hollow.
III. Depraved pilgrims
In South Africa, there exists an annual pilgrimage of matriculants to the coast. Beginning in the late 1980s as a rebellious gathering, by the dawn of democracy it had hardened into a polished industry. “Rage passports,” headline DJs, and corporate sponsorship turned certain youthful abandon into a branded circus of excess.
In 2021, the pandemic had cancelled the official event, but not the appetite. Teenagers still descended on the Garden Route to delay growing up. Recall arrival as emblem of freedom, the recklessness of secret parties, the sense that the world was suddenly ours, that we were infinite. This is what Wilde framed as temptation, and Huxley as control.
In chapter 8 of Huxley’s clarion call, Bernard’s curious discomfort in the Reservation reveals his awareness of the limits of World State conformity. Unlike Lenina, he can recognize the authenticity and emotional depth of family and rituals, his outsider perspective making him acutely aware of the superficiality of his worlds ideals and norms. Emotional sensitivity and curiosity allow him, to perceive meaning beyond societal conditioning and engineered pleasure.
Unlike Bernard, whose sensitivity is shaped by alienation, John grew up exposed to natural human experiences like birth, suffering, and ethical bonds. Raised without being conditioned by norms, he experiences the World State as a morally troubling and alien society - it’s obsession with instant gratification, soma, and superficial pleasure provokes horror and confusion in him.
John’s rejection of Lenina’s sexual advances is a central example. Conditioned citizens see intimacy as a casual, consequence-free activity, but he values emotional connection and moral deliberation. He cannot reconcile the World State’s engineered promiscuity with his understanding of love, desire, and self-respect. Similarly, the constant pursuit of comfort and avoidance of pain strikes him as dehumanizing; it erases individuality and suppresses critical thought, the citizens left hollow in spirit.
IV. Consequences.
I came home with pneumonia.
What felt like rebellion was also conformity: an adolescent script of excess, sold back to us as freedom. Experiments with abandon sharpened the questions Wilde, Huxley, and my teachers had placed in front of me: What is the cost of excess? What does pleasure give us, and what does it strip away? How much of our “freedom” is chosen, and how much is arranged for us?
ENDNOTE
Robberg Beach in the middle of the night, I tell him the lights on the horizon are prawn fishing boats - shining their beams into the water so they reflect from the prawns.
“You are the funniest girl I have ever met. In a bad way”, the response.
The bar pulsed behind us, bass and youth shaking its boards. “Everyone’s having so much fun though,” he said. I demanded the moon, a swim, and his company: barefoot and bewildered in the surf, and imagined this countless times; waves lapping softly against the shore, sky revealing its treasures, laughter lingering longer than shadows. He was nice, tolerating my aversion to that crowd - the perfect distraction. Din trailing behind us - waves grew into the only sound, their stoic calm going on forever. Black water reflected pinpricks of light from the distant coast, and across the wet sand revealed by the retreating water, unspoken words sank like footprints for the surf to erase.
Hermit crabs emerged only at night. “Look! They are dancing in a corps de ballet,” I grinned. One of them skittered under his foot and he yelped, nearly squashing it. The thing had the audacity to claim recognition. He phoned his brother while I looked for houses.
“Why leave shells on the water’s edge?” came the question. “Houses for the crabs”, my stoney reply.
The strangeness accompanying the body – a mind with thoughts, ideas – is often less attractive than the body itself. Devoid of personality, it is insufficient for true recognition, but in this state garners the most attention. Social creatures, we recognise ourselves when acknowledged by others, their external gaze often revealing what’s invisible to us - a relational visibility. Desiring to be fully seen and understood, is a dangerous third dimension from Huxley and Wilde, an emotional / relational hedonism that seeks full acknowledgment as a source of delight. This kind of selfishness is instructive, a pleasure that is meaningful because it demands engagement, attention and recognition from another person. But deriving pleasure from being seen in a way that feels true is reckless, because it is fleeting.
To be truly seen takes effort, which he didn’t sign up for. Words come easier than action, and I was watching him stumble through them - fibs and awkward pauses, the smirk. He wanted a facade - and not me - in my sincere, belligerent, questioning ways. Every glance and gesture became its own negotiation, a test of what would draw him closer or push him away.
“What is the most beautiful place in the world to you?” I asked. “Anywhere I’m with you,” he shot back. Oh, what the hell, laughing at this simplicity, his easy lies, the absurdity of my grand ambitions clashing with this mundane, silly reality. Cold water lapping our ankles - crabs danced unseen and for one perfect moment - the world had narrowed to our deliberate, mortal selves. Whispers of sweet, oily nothing, scraps from his great silence, lent me the pleasure of pretending this is real.
The night turned cool, but not unpleasant - the moon spilled silver over the waves which stretched out endlessly over the broken, black mirror of the sea. I wanted to remember how nothing could touch us here, the World becoming ours, and that it was almost silent.
The night smelled of brine, of danger, and glimpses of something larger than us in the full moon fleeting over the bay. Distant music came from somewhere, maybe a lone owl calling from the marsh, then he laughed when I shivered, draped his jacket over my shoulders. In that motion the world contracted to become just breath and the small ache of humankind. Here too, there was tenderness and storm and then that brutal hurt much later.
In the end, we are armed only with the record of our choices and desire. If love in pure form is true, it’s pleasure should find us on the walk home. Those we happen across, choose to encounter will leave signs and inscriptions, marks upon us who, bearing the stains - are finally beautiful.
That is what I want: to be changed. Metal exposed to the elements.
AND IF I FALL
By Carl PhillipsThere's this cathedral in my head I keep making from cricket song and dying but rogue-in-spirit, still, bamboo. Not making. I keep imagining it, as if that were the same thing as making, and as if making might bring it back, somehow, the real cathedral. In anger, as in desire, it was everything, that cathedral. As if my body itself cathedral. I conduct my body with a cathedral's steadiness, I try to. I cathedral. In desire. In anger. Light enters a cathedral the way persuasion fills a body. Light enters a cathedral, the way persuasion fills a body.
I could be way off. Apologies to the scientists.
O. Wilde., The Picture of Dorian Gray, (1891) Macmillan publishing (2015), (page 150)
Hahmann, Andree, and Jan Maximilian Robitzsch. “Epicurus’ Divine Hedonism.” Mnemosyne 74.3 (2021): 401–422. Web.
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. London: Vintage Books, 2014. Print. (ch.3 and 17)