# On Being Seen
Dhaka. That was the next step, the beginning. It seemed to me then that without eyes upon me, I did not exist. No gaze, and I would simply be erased—existence itself would cease the moment sight ceased. When I drew the curtains, heavy cloth, dust fell onto my hands and face, a dry scratching filled my throat and I coughed, my eyes burned. Darkness descended on the room.
Noon darkness. Counterfeit night. In that dark, lying flat or turned on my side, I thought: if I do not see, then perhaps I am not. No eyes falling upon me, and I vanish. I tried—in the dark, eyes closed, seeing nothing, unseen. Trying to erase myself, to become nothing.
But I did not erase. Nothing could make me disappear. In the darkness, the body moved on, the heart beat, the lungs breathed. And the seeing, even with eyes shut—that eye behind the eyes, the inner eye—it went on watching. Watching you, in the dark, you caught in the effort of non-being, bound by your own hands and feet. Because the watcher was still awake, still seeing you through the darkness. And as long as he sees, you exist. Being seen is being alive.
The watcher will not stop looking. That knowledge wakes you at three in the morning, drenched in sweat, heart hammering with the certainty that perhaps you will never end, that eyes will never close, that even with curtains drawn and darkness thick, the inner eye will stay open. It will hold you in existence the way a hand holds a stone—a stone you never wanted to carry.
You are being seen, therefore you are. Against your will. Eyes holding you in being, refusing to let go.
You tried. Tried to escape the grip of that gaze, you fled—not from the room, but within it, fleeing from sight itself. You covered the mirror with a towel, which stiffened as it dried upon the glass. You turned the dog to face the wall so the glass eye could not catch you. You drew the curtains so the window would not see you, you covered every surface that might reflect your image, every place where you could be caught, trapped, fixed in seeing, kept alive through that seeing.
You moved through the room covering, turning, closing. The dog, the parakeet, the glass, the window—even the kettle you covered. The kettle too a witness, the kettle too had seen. The kettle, whose only crime was the gurgling of water in its belly, on whose curved surface floated a face—yours and not yours. You covered everything, and finally you sat in a chair, in that shrouded room, where nothing could see you, where no eye could possibly fall.
For a moment, you felt it: relief. No eyes. You had escaped the seeing.
And then—that eye. The inner one. The one no towel can cover, the one you had forgotten about, the one that sits behind your own eyes, looking outward from within, from the very beginning. Behind the coverings, behind the closing, beneath the flight. The eye you were fleeing from was always within you, in you all along—you yourself, which cannot be covered, cannot be turned to face the wall, cannot be shut.
The eye that looks from within, from which there is no escape anywhere, because it is you and you are it. Flight and seeing are the same thing. The one fleeing is the one watching. The hunted and the hunter are one—absurd as laughter, as if to laugh and to be chased and to do the chasing were all the same act.
You were fleeing from yourself through the room, covering things, turning them away. And the self you were fleeing from was with you all along, inside, looking out. Watching, seeing, holding you in existence through that sight. Through a seeing that is yourself, that is you, that will not stop.
Something moves at its own pace. You know this much. It always was moving. It will go on.
Long after your knowing and your caring have ceased, something will continue on its own way, without informing you, without you.
The gap itself is the condition, there is nothing beyond it. The state of being divided, forever, by yourself from yourself. The doer and the watcher, forever separate, forever together in the same skull. Two where one should have been, or one where no one was.
What was there before the stopping? Take a job—an office or counter or desk, forget the details, something like that, where you had to show up on time. Punishment without crime.
And other times to leave, work in between, what kind hardly matters, counting files answering questions sitting silent hour after hour day after day. Work to work again, like that.
The real work was filling the gap. Not external work, secret work—between the doer and the watcher, keeping that gap plugged, keeping the watcher occupied, dizzy, forgetful, so busy that they’d forget they were sitting watching themselves.
An old trick. Work, purpose, meaning. All of it instruments for filling the gap. And when you stop, when the work ends, the watcher has nothing left to see but themselves. Watching themselves watching, watching to watch, watching…the head spins, keeps falling deeper into the gap, which has no bottom, like that dark corridor in dreams that never ends, whose walls are cold to the touch, damp.
The day you couldn’t go, it was like all the other days, except that day you didn’t go. The feet wouldn’t rise, or rising didn’t seem necessary. Not the next day either, nor the one after.
And it turned out work had never wanted you, never at all. Others did it instead, they were already there beside you, they swallowed yours easily, as if you’d never been, didn’t even notice.
Like the sea quietly absorbs stones, erases them beneath itself. No mark, no wave, no memory. The sea doesn’t remember the stone, the workplace doesn’t remember you.
You’ve dissolved into silence, into not-being—which was always your share in the world. The shape of non-being, measured in the size of your shadow, cut and kept for you before birth. Now you’ve fully inhabited it, the way you were always meant to.
So what was it then? The stopping? What do you call it? A man’s collapse, who could bear no more—or a man’s first true sight, who’d been blind all along? Damage or discovery? Was moving health and stopping sickness, or was moving the disease and stopping the cure? You can’t say. You tried, sitting in that gray chair, to settle which. You can’t, because in the stopping both are there. Damage and discovery both, collapse and seeing both, falling and arrival both, in the same moment, the same breath.
You fell into the chair. The falling itself was arrival. Descent is destination; that word the Baul spoke—go down to the bottom and only then you find the root. You broke, and light entered through the cracks the way it enters a broken place, the way the whole person couldn’t see. That void—it was always there, beneath something, beneath moving, beneath doing.
Whether sight through breaking was worth the price of breaking, who knows! In what language? You can only sit in the broken place now and see. That’s all you have.
You didn’t announce it, didn’t declare anything. Just didn’t go one morning. Like leaves falling—there was an alarm, say. Did it ring or not, ringing an alarm to a sleeping person is like lighting a lighthouse for the sea. It makes no difference.
You didn’t go, you stayed in your bed at home, curled up, the smell of sheets in your mouth.
You were staring at a wall, or a ceiling, or the inside of your eyelids, all of it the same grey, and really you weren’t staring at all, you weren’t doing anything, your hand wasn’t moving, your eyes weren’t shifting. The doing itself seemed to have vanished, the place where doing happens had gone hollow.
Not rest either, not the kind that comes after exhaustion. You hadn’t been exhausted, hadn’t done anything to be exhausted from. You simply weren’t, weren’t doing, weren’t going, weren’t the kind-that-must-go-on—you were the kind-that-doesn’t-go, and there’s nowhere else to go from there.
And it seemed, those first days, curled up in bed, that stopping wasn’t something new, that stopping meant returning, going back to the beginning. Where you were before moving started, when you weren’t anywhere at all.
Before birth, say—birth, that word, that event, which you didn’t choose, which no one chooses, which was imposed on you because of others. You had no reason for it, you didn’t exist yet. And then one day, without your consent, without your knowing, you became you, here, in the light, in the noise, in the cold, in fear. Dragged out of darkness, where you were nothing. Into light, where you would have to become something, a thing that moves, a thing that does, a thing that knows.
You tried for years, say, to become what the light demanded. You failed—not dramatically. Not the kind of failure that draws pity. Quiet failure, small, that no one even notices.
Not grasping what moving means, what doing means, what it means to be here in the light, when darkness had been so easy, so much more honest—that darkness; where you were nothing, where nothing was asked of you, where you asked for nothing.
The darkness before birth. Warm darkness. That warmth you could only find in your mother, not body-warmth but something else, something deeper, from within the bones—wet darkness, soft darkness wrapped around your skin. Where you floated, weightless, nameless, unknowing. That darkness which held you, the way a room holds you now, but better, closer, without gaps, without witness.
There was no witness in that darkness, only darkness and you within it, not separate, part of it, like water in the sea. In darkness there is no object, only darkness itself, existing without knowledge, without desire, without becoming anything.
Paradise. Though the word isn’t quite right—say paradise and you bring loss with it, expulsion, the door closing and never opening again. Perhaps that’s it: birth itself is that door, closing behind you, pushing you into the light, where it hurts. You must breathe, you must cry, you must eat, you must grow, you must move, you must do, you must know.
A sentence. That’s the word itself, plain—not a gift, not a welcome. A sentence, the whole of which must be served without reprieve, because there’s no such thing as good behaviour, only serving time.
This is existence. An imposed sentence, without explanation, without appeal, before the darkness returns—if it returns—and whether the darkness you came from is the same as the darkness you’re going toward, who knows, it might not be, probably isn’t.
The first held you, the second won’t, the first was warm, the second will be cold, in the first there was no witness, in the second you don’t know—perhaps the watching will go on even in that second darkness, perhaps it will keep seeing nothing in the dark, forever.
This is the fear. Not dying, but continuing to see after death, eyes that won’t close, watching even when there’s nothing to see.