gaze: definition, synonyms, antonyms
Serena Mola
Write on the look in the era of the image, mystified and mortified, abused and taken for granted, and having forgotten quickly is not easy, rather difficult and potentially very fruitful, as everywhere underpinned by moralistic traps, by trivializing underlying traps and so on. For this reason, you want to programmatically here to propose a "No more half-seasons" fell on the theme of the gaze, "yes was better when it was worse that builds on some of the most important literary and artistic experience from the Middle Ages to the present: all this with the sole purpose of cooling a bit 'memory, and why not get away from the glossy images of bloody or from which we are already overburdened, like it or not.
The game is simple, just open the dictionary, even the vocabularies and be transported by the evocative power of that strange but true, the aseptic lemmatiche definitions and suggestions synonymic go to him who only knows, not surprisingly, look beyond the encyclopedic classification, the taxonomy of speech, a strict alphabetical distribution.
This opens up four roads associated with exploration verbal retrospection is immediately historical, cultural and literary.
The very first definition comes to look like the act of looking : interesting use of the word Act, which gives this habit now a load of automatic and unconscious intentionality. The practice of observation is thus compensated and dignified, as if to pay homage, many centuries later to a 'time when the look was one of the most popular relational events and more valuable, if not the most valuable. The Stilnovo. Guinizzelli wrote in mid-'200, The your beautiful greeting e'l gentle gaze: the eyes in question were obviously those of his beloved, if only the poet turned to seizing, inflicting painful throes of love, making the slave woman (remember, it dominates).
value and the same, spelled differently, the same drama will return six centuries later, we are no longer in Bologna in Paris but soon dedicated to the metropolis. The lyric this time I was Charles Baudelaire, the woman also known, a passer, an atom of the crowd. From this emerges the glamorous female presence to the time of a love-at first as it had been one-Guinizelli but at the last look, and from which, a moment later, he anonymously reinghiottita. The power of the gaze, however, is identical, it is a spell that gives instant, and at the same time suicide all'innamorato: dans un oeil ... the bundles here douceur et le plaisir your here.
addition to the precious, therefore, in this first overview one can not overlook another feature of the eye, which, in effect, is suggested by the second dictionary definition, the lightning. At no 2 reads: look at first sight, at once.
If you go to No 3, the view changes completely, because the definition states: look that expresses a mood . The emotional just announced us from loving feelings, already widely explored, and leads us to two rather distant experiences, historically and culturally, but animated by the same intellectual tension, by the same force poetic, imaginative and creative: on the one hand, we evoke the look Don Quixote, which has the power to transform the world around him, to see the windmills valiant opponents to fight and a housewife all the princely Dulcinea, the other a look castrated, prevented, that the Leopards forced behind the hedge. In the first case the view is imagined in the latter only conceivable, but in both it's like, and more, if that were true.
The third stage, this time driven by the use of synonymy, it makes us think of the voyeuristic and morbid degeneration of the eyes, in reference to the suggestions: watched, peek. In this regard, the examples (in the first instance sets), much less noble precedents could really wasting, we want to mention Etant donnés, a work by Marcel Duchamp consists apparently of a wooden door, but instead was defined as "a device for peep pictures." Two holes is observed in fact a room, which in turn is an appendix to another room with a kind of window. Beyond the opening of the wall, lying on a pile of twigs, you can see a naked woman, holding one arm a small gas lamp lit, while in the background lit by a dim light, sets out a vision and exact real a picturesque natural landscape.
Finally the contrary, even if the dictionary in this case gives no indication, however, think you can look like the opposite of blindness, and dedicate these words to the legendary blindness of Tiresias. In fact, he received it as a sort of punishment of retaliation for his having granted a voyeuristic delight. In this punishment, however, was given some sort of mitigating or aggravating according to points of view: lost sight "sensory" experience the prophetic, oracular.
It is said that the game is better when it is short, then stop before they are fed up: the dictionary definitions are finite, so these ideas.