The Magic Eye

When I first watched Training Day, I was a much younger and less experienced person. One concept which resonated, however, was the concept of 'the magic eye'. This was presented as a sort of eye for 'the street', a way of looking at things which would reveal that which is hidden, that layer of existence which lies beneath the manicured and regulated stream of ordinary life. Of course, Training Day being Hollywood, the proof of this was that the young police officer was able to spot a rape in progress, which is something I don't actually believe anyone needs a magic eye to achieve. But then, for a mass audience, the obvious needs to elevated to the level of the arcane.

Having said that, the magic eye does exist, and people who have it recognise each other. It's very hard to explain, but there's a few ways to look at it. The most basic and simple is to notice the way people look at people. This creates a different kind of look in the eye of the observer, and somebody who is looking at the way other people look at things, will become noticeable to someone else who's doing the same thing. This is how it works at the lowest level, and I generally remember it mostly from my youth, with recognition generally taking place amongst other youths. When older people would notice and comment on this to me, they would generally loom up out of nowhere, surprising me.

As we move forward towards inevitable death in that process we euphemistically refer to as ageing, habits of life and thought harden and submerge such that they are pursued both imperceptibly and ineluctably. Now, it looks utterly different. Instead of individuals connecting across a crowd in a sort of freemasonry, it is now a matter of scenery versus protagonist. The eye flicks over a crowd of people walking up and down a footpath, and the vast majority of these people have a gaze which is internalised and, to all intents and purposes, blind. It can be easily seen that what they are seeing is at least half made up of things inside their own heads, rather than that which is around them. These people fade into a kind of moving backdrop, interesting enough in and of itself, but rather like the sky in that unless something extremely unusual is happening with it, it's not exactly of immediate importance.

But then there are the others. The man who stiffens and moves his bag whenever someone comes within half a meter. The other man, next to him, who turns his right hip away from whoever he's talking to. The girl sitting on a wall whose glance goes from waist to hands to face, in that order. The woman who makes a point of looking over her shoulder every fifteen paces. Or the man who does the same thing, only instead of looking back, he looks up at the windows and rooftops above him. The people who are scanning the crowd and who lock gazes as soon as they encounter one that's doing the same thing - lock and dismiss when there's no threat detected. And in that split second between lock and dismiss is a sort of recognition. Not the happy or hostile recognition of youth, but rather a more matter of fact, sometimes quite sad acknowledgement that here is another person who is just as damaged, frightened, alienated, or just plain suspicious as themselves.

In my old neighbourhood of Manly, after the gentrification, I could go for days without seeing such a look. Where I work now, in Lane Cove, there's a grand total of three people (in Lane Cove you see the same people every day) I've seen with this look over the whole of the four or five years I've been there on a daily basis. But in the street where I live, which is not more than twenty minutes away, I see that look every time I go outside, multiple times. What is it about the street on which I live, that so many of the people walking up and down it have been sufficiently smacked around by the world to have the magic eye? It's not as if I live in a particularly rough neighbourhood - in fact, it's so not rough that the idea is laughable. I don't know, but as soon as I'm able to convince one of them to stop and talk to me about something that isn't the weather or the transit system, I will post that conversation up on this blog.