In the Eye of the Stranger

Artist: Samij Datta
Title: In the Eye of the Stranger (2008)
Medium: Charcoal on paper

Description: T.S. Eliot begins The Wasteland by invoking the origin of tradition and juvenescence of the year: “April is the cruelest month, breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/Memory and desire...” Indeed, “memory and desire” are the two key words that will help define this painting based on Charles Baudelaire’s poem “To a Passerby”. As a flaneur, Baudelaire had the opportunity to observe every possible sight/sound of a city life in its fleeting moments that were finally stored in his mental diary. And every detail from those precious moments is allegorized by the poet in his verse. The symbolism in his poetry is more lyrical, visual, odorous and not a result of a rational synthesis in the brain.

Of course, the dream imagery of his poetry is visually cinematic and so, is this painting that stands as a psychograph of the poem. In the realm of conscious language, words are cognizers of truth. But truth can never be uttered in an unmediated way.
When Lacan says that “the unconscious is structured like a language”, what he could have meant in the context of this painting and the poem is the inter-relationship of a
whole range of signifiers and signifieds carrying traces of other signifiers. Baudelaire has shared a moment of profound happiness that lasted few minutes from the chores of daily life in the city. What differentiates this moment from other moments of his life is the level of cognition that this one gives: “A lightning flash…then night! Fleeting beauty/By whose glance I was suddenly reborn,/Will I see you no more before eternity?” The poet understands the implication of this rebirth in him at that moment and also after he had written this poem. It’s a lived experience which he has shared with us. So, the transient is transcended once language is used to express “the sweetness that enthralls and the pleasure that kills”. But language too is not fertile to enunciate the purity of emotions and feelings- it’s an approximation which the poet too understands. So the necessary use of rhetoric and prosody to signify the desire he had for the woman he saw briefly at the café. First Baudelaire sees, then he writes. There is always a gap between seeing and writing. Seeing needs the biological eye, everyone can see but not everyone can write. Since he was a symbolist poet, his seeing is first realistic and then indexical. The intoxication in the woman’s eyes is compared to “pale sky where tempests germinate”. What is important here is the role of memory and perceptive quality of the poet. As language presupposes us, pre-exists us and assigns our places in the society and how we use it, it is rare where unconscious desires are expressed verbally or in written language. As Baudelaire sees with the eyes of a painter, he expresses his feelings almost in a surreal way which are key to the words/phrases and the lyrical quality of his poem.

The artist does the same what Baudelaire has done in his verse. Here too the role of memory and perception plays an important part in the painting. If the reading of the poem by the artist at a primal level be broken into perception of sounds/rhythms then that vibration when stored in the brain will bring out some form of expression. So the art that comes out is surreal and full of hidden symbols corresponding to that particular reading of the poem. The S-shaped snaky rounded structure that runs like a serpent is the space-time continuum where both ends are unclosed. The single eye in the middle is that of the woman whose beauty gives Baudelaire a “rebirth”. It’s a temporal moment in the space-time continuum but an important one to the poet because it gives him a new consciousness of rebirth, a new vision signified by a single eye. Metaphorically this single eye is gift to the poet by the chanced occurrence of the event at that moment of time. It’s also the eye of the subject of gaze. A closer look at that eye in the painting reveals that it’s surrounded by tear drops because Baudelaire asks “Will I see you no more before eternity?” It’s the transience of joy that brings the tears. Both the woman and the poet are travelers in the space-time continuum but temporality deceives them.

So, the poet says “For I know not where you fled, you know not where I go,/O you whom I would have loved, O you who knew it!”. The half-figure of the man with two hands and two legs is the poet himself standing like a “statue”. The poet describes the woman’s legs “agile and graceful” and “like a statue”. But the artist does the reverse, he makes the poet statuesque because Baudelaire already bears in his psyche and in his verse the feminine qualities. He is one with the woman at that instance and this merging of identities helps him define his own identity. Baudelaire is also seen by the woman but her words are not recorded. A male gaze (glace) is also reciprocated by a female gaze and the surveyor/surveyed binary is constructed within the subject itself. So the eye in the middle which literally corresponds to the eye of woman has an identical colour that is present in Baudelaire’s leg which is also the leg of the woman in the painting as well in the poem. This colour is also present in the flowery design corresponding to “hem and flounces of her skirt”. So the man that stands is both the poet and the woman. If the painting is turned upside down, we can see another figure standing in the same posture but looks feminine with a protruding belly. It’s the woman who Baudelaire glances for a while before she disappears. Her breasts are comically pronounced, her protruding belly over emphasized because it’s a particular male gaze and social construct. She is seen here by language/time (temporality) as an object of desire. Baudelaire’s glance is thus different from an average male gaze because he becomes the woman in his gaze and in his verse as well. His gaze is androgynous and so is his verse. But that is far from saying that he is an androgyne. Because of his high level of perception and sensitivity, he was able to possess this specific vision in some fleeting moments. A good example of this vision is in the poem Delphine et Hippolyte. - Joy Roy Choudhury