Eroticism
The situation in which the myopic experience occurs is one of privacy, of isolation – either complete, when there is no-one with whom the experience is shared, or partial, when it is shared with a small community consisting, typically, of other myopists. It is completely or partially hidden, taking place out of sight, under the blind eye of all or most others. In the refuge of the myopic experience, one is allowed the pleasure of non-surveillance, the joyful sensation of being uninhibited. It can surely be a most erotic experience; the lack of surveillance may in itself inspire a certain degree of improperness, of safe disobedience, since what takes place in myopia stays in myopia (as when the myopic experience is mediated it is also transformed and easily censored). But the eroticism of myopia also lies in the myopic gaze – in the looking at details, their captivating intricacies and exactitudes – as well as in the performative myopic practice – the ability to create and/or control such details. The myopist constantly shifts between these two modes, between looking and doing – always going back and forth. Think, for example, of the writer of a thesis who puts every new sentence, every word and every letter, on the scales, repeatedly weighing the nuances and discarding terms until finally arriving at the very most suitable, and the most pleasurable, phrasing. If the pleasure derived from this back-and-forth movement is mainly the result of the myopist’s checking his or her ability to exert control, we may call it masturbatory – a taking pleasure in oneself and one’s ability to fulfill the image of one’s desire. Yet, perfect control is hard to achieve; in striving for mastery over the written language, for example, there is always some trace of imperfection, some flaw that escapes the writer’s control – a clumsy word or an unintentional connotation, for example. In this lack of mastery lies another form of erotic pleasure, which is more subtle and less self-indulging: the pleasure in the elusiveness of the myopic object. The attraction towards the elusive, towards that which is hard to get, is a common occurrence, but when turned towards the myopic object it is many times amplified. In myopia, we get as near to the object as possible – it is never more closely within our grasp – but even so, our mastery over it is still incomplete. We are unable to fully reveal the object – to strip it bare, so to speak – and so are left all the more to wonder about its exposure.
