S.G. Talmor

“When I Raise My Eyes to Us” was the title of a dance piece I saw in the 1980s.

I’ve never been able to remove that phrase from my memory. I once wrote it on a scrap of paper that stayed taped to my car’s dashboard for years.

Not to taunt me.

To remind me to remember something. But what, exactly?

Maybe this: most of the time — like everyone else — I don’t really raise my eyes to anything.

We throw an indifferent glance at the world around us, at the people crossing our path.

At the end of the day, we remember a fact or two, and that’s it.

There are entire stretches of life that teach us nothing at all. Where nothing new is seen. Where no discovery is made.

We fail to notice “the virgin, the vivid, the beautiful today” that Stéphane Mallarmé once praised.

Meanwhile, life—constantly renewing itself—keeps flowing. And we don’t even notice. We see no contradiction in it.

And then there’s that title again: When I Raise My Eyes on Us.

The sentence is logically impossible: You can raise your eyes toward a mountain. You can raise your eyes toward a face. You can raise your eyes toward a painting.

But on yourself? No.

On us? Even less so.

And yet everyone knows what it means, because everyone has been struck by it at least once —

that moment when you suddenly see your own life as though it has turned faintly unfamiliar.

You’re not fully inside it anymore, but you’re not outside it either.

You’re in a threshold space, and that threshold has power: it makes visible what had been steering your life in your stead.

The English philosopher Douglas Harding had a simple way of making you feel this impossibility. You were asked to point an index finger, for example at a table. “What do you see?” he would ask. You saw the table. Then you were asked to point at other objects, or at certain parts of your own body.

Naturally, if you play along with the exercise, you can name what you see: a table, a lamp, your feet, a knee, an elbow… But then, if you’re asked to turn your index finger toward your own face and describe what you see — what do you see? That’s the surprising part: all you see is an index finger, a finger in space.

This experience isn’t trying to prove anything. It does something stronger: it forces a perceptual obviousness. At the center, where a face should be, there’s a blind spot, a completely open space. We automatically fill that blind spot with an image, a story, an identity. Our inner narratives remain invisible because they work too well.

You think you’re living a life. You’re really living a script you believe with iron certainty. And when you examine that script, you see it isn’t thicker than the screen a film is projected onto. It holds together crudely, stitched with thick thread or only a few dots of glue. It holds because you repeat the same motions. It holds because it settled in early. It holds because it makes the world make sense. And that is exactly why it’s so hard to see.

The most unsettling thing is that other people can see — without any difficulty — the part we are playing. They perceive the repetitions. They see the role. They recognize the pattern. They talk about it among themselves as soon as our back is turned. But they never say a word to us.

They stay silent. Exposing the structure of a narrative is like trying to handle a bomb that’s already been primed. People say:

— He (or she) will figure it out eventually!

But it never happens. The wordless gaze of those around us only hardens the script. Or when someone does speak, it’s often at the worst possible moment, with the wrong charge — anger, contempt, weariness. We know exactly how that goes.

Someone once told me he lost a thirty-year friendship for opening his mouth one day.

His friend was married to a man who, under the guise of surrounding her with care, never stopped destabilizing her and putting her down in public. From the outside, it was unbearable to watch. One day, on a sunlit sidewalk terrace in a busy street, the two of them were sitting across from him. The wife was playing the lover, resting her head on her husband’s shoulder, while he rolled his eyes to the sky, cutting off every word she said, all while tracking the pretty women passing by in the street.

At one point, the husband got up from his chair and went to the bar to pay for the drinks. Their friend said to the wife, and only this:

— He doesn’t love you.

He was ushered out of their lives on the spot.

What he said wasn’t psychological analysis. It was a scalpel. A sentence like that feels like violence because it doesn’t correct an opinion. It pulls the ground out from under your feet.

A Moroccan marabout, whom people consulted for remedies, once gave me this instruction:

— Never take someone’s crutch away if you’re not able to offer a better one in its place.

Apparently, we need crutches. That explains why patterns last. A crutch, even a bad one, keeps you standing. A crutch, even an absurd one, lets you hold on a while longer. Look at Scarlett O’Hara, who can still say to herself: “After all… tomorrow is another day.”

When a script collapses, you think liberation will follow. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Sometimes there’s only a void. And the void scares you, because it has no grammar.

The patterns I’m talking about are adopted unconsciously, often very early. A friend of my son’s, no older than nine or ten, once explained to me, with excitement, that he wanted to race competition motorcycles when he grew up. That was what he’d do when he was older. I pointed out, maybe foolishly, that it was a dangerous sport. But he answered, dead serious: “When you truly love something, you’re ready to die for your passion.”

What hits me isn’t the motorcycle. It’s the structure.

At nine, he had already swallowed a collective, fully-formed script, ready to use. It breaks down roughly like this: a life must have a direction. A future must be chosen early. Risk is a value. Sacrifice is its proof. And death becomes an argument.

Was it his inner voice? No. It was a cultural script that had found a mouth.

That heroic script is seductive because it looks noble. It’s hard to challenge without being called lukewarm, overly cautious, or weak-spined. Yet it has already closed the open space. It has already installed the belief that a life is only worth something if it is put at risk, if it is exposed.
Raising your eyes on us is sometimes seeing this: a script being written in real time. It’s realizing it will have decades of consequences if nothing ever comes to crack it open.

What means do we have to make a perfectly transparent narrative visible to our own eyes?

That is the work of artists and philosophers.

It is, in a broader sense, the secret message of novels. Books do not console. They do not instruct. They do not “make you think,” as people sometimes say, because, in truth, we think very little. We keep our eyes drifting in the vague, and then we move on.

But books can do something rarer: they lay down an inner map.

Reading Anna Karenina, for example, will not stop anyone from being duped. The illusion of romantic love survives Tolstoy just fine. But it might, sometimes, help you recognize — one second before — that throwing yourself under a train was not fate. It was a narrative.
It is a modest role. And again, I insist: a book does not save you. But it can, at times, make visible what had been transparent to you. It gives us one idea to hold in mind when we have no idea at all about the story that’s holding us up. We have opinions, rationalizations, memories. But we don’t have the structuring idea, the one organizing everything else.

After a difficult divorce, I found myself alone with a tiny little boy and an enormous dose of guilt. If I have to describe how it felt back then, I felt as though I’d ended his world.
Little by little, I built a small community around us, with divorced or single mothers and a whole bunch of kids. The atmosphere was joyful. In any case, I had stirred constant commotion to prove to my son that we weren’t alone, that I wasn’t to blame. I could say, “— All right, kids, it’s bedtime.” It was a fairly festive period.

All in all, we were rarely one-on-one. One evening when it was just the two of us, my son said to me softly:

—You know, Dad, it’s good when it’s just you and me too.

At that time, he wasn’t even four yet. That one simple sentence collapsed my entire script in an instant. It opened a void. And life reorganized itself differently soon after. If it was still a crutch, it was a far better one than before, and it has kept evolving ever since. When my son was around twenty, for example, we took a long trip far from home, and we hated to see our stay come to an end. To cap it off, I quoted a line Marguerite Yourcenar’s father often repeated to her:

“We don’t give a damn. We’re not from here. We’re leaving tomorrow.”

My son answered me:

— I wouldn’t say that anymore. I’d say:“We don’t give a damn. We’re not from here. We are home.”

We adopted that motto, and since then, I feel at home anywhere.

When a pattern collapses, it becomes possible to make conscious decisions for a better life.

But it isn’t automatic. There is another side, a rougher one: when the script falls, sometimes there’s nothing left but mechanics.

In Raymond Carver’s Menudo, a married man is sharing a romantic bubble with his neighbor’s wife. Then, in a bar over coffee, she tells him that her husband knows everything, and has given her one week to leave his house and his life. “So we have to decide something real important, real soon, honey. You and I have to make up our minds pretty damn quick.”

The man answers sideways. He answers with narrative. Then he spends a sleepless night thinking about his first wife, his current wife, and his mother. At dawn, he goes out to mow his own lawn. And since it changes nothing, he mows the neighbor’s lawn too. The neighbor is leaving for work. He gives a casual wave, just in case.

In a scene like this, you see the thing people hate to hear: a real decision is not a narrative. It is an act. When a decision isn’t made, the man of the story ends up deciding for everyone: “No destiny. Just the next thing meaning whatever you think it does.”

The world decides for you. It isn’t tragic like theater. It’s worse. It’s ordinary. I said all those stories carrying us from cradle to grave are held to reality by a few dots of glue. And those dots are simply ideas we never think to question.

To break out of it, you need only one thing: an idea to hold in mind. One simple idea, like: “Why do I behave this way?” And once you find an answer, you can still ask again: why?
Nothing withstands that question. The varnish cracks. A short sequence of a few “why?” and the set is gone. You land on a naked fear, or a naked desire, or an old loyalty. The whole structure collapses like a house of cards.

There is another question, more brutal, more useful than a thousand analyses: “What do I risk if…?”
What do I risk if I say no?
What do I risk if I disappoint?
What do I risk if I’m no longer “the one who”?
What do I risk if I stop playing the part?
And you can apply this questioning, to every answer.

These are the kinds of questions that strike directly at the script, because a script is always a disguised form of insurance. It makes you believe it protects you. So you have to ask: what is it protecting me from, exactly? And at what cost?

These questions don’t topple a narrative by magic. They do better: they make the narrative visible.
And the moment a narrative becomes visible, it has already lost a great part of its power.

Who will make us raise our eyes on ourselves? This question has to stand.
Who will make you raise your eyes on yourself?
Who will tell you what everyone else can already see?
Who will tell you the pattern that’s been steering your life, without humiliating you, without reducing you, and who can take your crutch away only by offering a better one in its place.

Sometimes, no one. Sometimes, a child’s sentence. Sometimes, a book you read forty years ago, rising back at the worst — or the right — moment. Sometimes a guy who simply tells you: “He doesn’t love you.” Sometimes, it’s a slogan on a truck. Sometimes, a sentence overheard by chance.

It isn’t grand or especially spiritual. But it is alive.

For me, it can be that simple dance-piece title I still carry, When I Raise My Eyes on Us…

We don’t live the stories we believe we’re living. We live the decisions we make, and the ones we don’t.

And sometimes, the first real decision is simply to recognize — one second before the leap — that what we took for fate was only a narrative.

SG Talmor