This might be why the powerful throughout history have tried to associate themselves with the sun, the cosmic all-seeing eye whose gaze can never be met. Tribes and states and corporations are the ones that think and do things, and while they engineer various spectacles, they’re not zoo animals to be passively observed. For the powerful, this is unacceptable: Power tends to position itself as a kind of universal subject. Anyone who remains under an unbroken gaze is reduced to an object of consciousness, something to be scrutinized as carelessly as if it were inanimate. The gaze, as psychoanalytical and feminist theory has long documented, is objectifying, and in certain circumstances pitiless. Howitt, it’s expressly forbidden for you to make eye contact with your mother-in-law. In some Aboriginal Australian societies, as first documented by the 19th-century anthropologist A.W. Servants lower their gaze, and commoners bow before kings. The command to not look directly into the sun is mirrored in what are termed “avoidance relationships” between humans: In general, it’s a mark of disrespect to look a social superior right in the face. That’s the science, but it might be more illuminating to consider the matter anthropologically. It’s still something violent and alien, a light too powerful to be seen. Three-and-a-half billion years of evolution under a single unchanging sun, and life still hasn’t found a way to look at it, or safely contain its image. It’s a painless process that can result in blindness, sometimes permanently. Before long, the tissues of the retina break apart. Bright light floods the eyes, which become overstimulated. We’re at fault it’s a result of the human body’s inability to fully comprehend the sun in all its terrible glory. This is what causes the real damage, but it’s not actually caused by the sun itself. Keep staring, and you’ll develop solar retinopathy. Short exposure to direct sunlight, even for a few seconds, can cause photokeratitis - essentially a sunburn on your eyes, with all the itching and burning you might remember from childhood holidays - on the cornea and conjunctiva, the eye’s transparent outer casing. Not that looking at the sun is without its obvious dangers. Sungazing, with all its suggested Icarean hubris, is a crisis of common sense. And our world is the better for it, because staring directly into the sun is our moral and political duty. Burns echoes the sentiment: “Ever since the beginning of time, man has yearned to destroy the sun.” He’s not entirely wrong, but it’s madness to stare into the sun is to abolish the entire celestial hierarchy, to destroy it and yourself and everyone else with you. The Marquis de Sade knew it as his Curval exclaims in The 120 Days of Sodom, “How many times, by God, have I not longed to be able to assail the sun, snatch it out of the universe, make a general darkness, or use that star to burn the world! Oh, that would be a crime.” A crime, even though there’s no punishment in any jurisdiction for extinguishing the sun with its power, it creates a law all its own. The unwitting victim lays out her dogma: “Why among the stars should there be one star I may not see? The sun is not my master, and I will open my eyes and stare at him whenever I choose.” The gaze hovers uncertainly near a kind of domination over the sun, something close to blasphemy. Chesterton set one of his murder mysteries, The Eye of Horus, among a sun-worshipping cult. No, honey, never look directly into the sun. And then you say it once more, repeating your parents’ words, and theirs, in an unbroken tradition going back God knows how many millennia. You learn it, you internalize it, and never really think of it again until you have kids of your own. As unquestioned ideological precepts go, it’s enormously effective. Not to look directly into the sun is (at a guess) one of the first lessons everyone is taught by their parents. All the old rites and superstitions that once warded off mystical evils have been condensed into one single command, so vast and monolithic we’ve forgotten that it’s even possible to disobey: Don’t look directly at the sun. The only way to stay sane under its light is to not look at it, to almost pretend that it doesn’t exist. There’s one right there, up in the sky it passes over our heads every day. And then they all died, one after another, flashing into life and withering away again for tens of thousands of years - but it lived on. The ancients knew about it, all the way back to the grubby screaming infancy of the species. A being that is absolutely here but whose immenseness extends out into the cosmic distance of a fevered incomprehension. There are vast burning demons, things from far beyond our tiny world, things that you can’t even look at without going incurably mad.
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