Never Look Back (The Gaze - Part II)

There’s been some pretty famous looks in history:

One look at the snake-haired Medusa would turn you to stone.

One look at Helen of Troy’s beauty would launch a thousand ships.

In Hollywood, the on- and off-screen pair of Bogart and Bacall’s looks smoldered,

“Here’s looking at you kid.”

And who could forget Zoolander’s epic Magnum?

 – eclipsed only by Orpheus’s look for sheer power and effect.

With just one look, he relegates Eurydice to the Underworld forever.

Such an ill-fated look is found elsewhere in stories. There are a whole bunch of stories where people are told not to look. Psyche, in Greek mythology, is told she has to marry a monster, but must never look at him when he comes to her in the night. The same thing happens in a Norse tale called East of the Sun and West of the Moon, except this girl has to marry a great white bear.

In both stories, the girls bow to family pressure and take a candle and look. They both see magnificent men and accidentally drop three drops of wax on their husband’s bodies. Their enchanted husbands have to leave the girls who looked. After arduous journeys, both girls win back their husbands and break their enchantments. The stories don’t always end so happily…

In The Crane Wife, a Japanese man is married to a woman who is really a crane who weaves her own feathers into exquisite sails for the man to sell. When he breaks his vow never to look while she is weaving, she flies away forever.

Perhaps one of the most ill-fated looks of all time was that of Lot’s wife in the Bible. Her family is commanded to leave the wicked city of Sodom before the Lord destroys it and to never look back. She looks… and is turned into a pillar of salt. Pretty harsh for one look, but perhaps it wasn’t what was in the look, but what was in her heart.

Lot’s Wife pillar on Mount Sodom, Israel

The message in all these ill-fated looks seems to be Never Look Back. What’s done is done; what’s dead is dead; it’s time to move forward.

The Japanese myth of Izanami is very similar to Orpheus and Eurydice. She dies and her husband, Izanagi braves a journey to the underworld to retrieve her. While there, he takes his light and looks at her sleeping. He sees her rotting flesh crawling with vile creatures and he runs away in terror. She wakes and in fury gives chase. Izanagi barely escapes the underworld alive.

Ruhl’s Eurydice is full of people looking back. The Father lives in a world of past memories; Eurydice is conflicted about leaving her father for Orpheus and Orpheus can’t seem to move on after Eurydice’s death. No one seems to be able to learn that:

To look back is death, to look forward is life.
The past is to be learned from but not lived in.