Seeable Relationship. Sayable connection. #01
When I first saw him.
Seeing is not about biological vision but rather a moment of recognition—a realisation of someone’s presence before you or in the same space. This can happen anywhere: at a first meeting, on a date, or at a party. Visibility can be triggered by anything—a voice, a scent, or a small gesture. In truth, it does not matter what makes him seeable, as there is no singular decisive factor in each case. That moment arrives without reason or definite timing, yet suddenly, he becomes visible. Only then does he truly enter your life, shifting your perception into a different perspective.
This is not like a romantic film, where such moments are illustrated with bright sunshine or the sound of bells. It is an ordinary moment—something that simply makes you notice him. From that point on, memories of him accumulate, layering into a part of your life.
I have some reservations about Foucault’s idea of the form of visibility. As Deleuze pointed out, he is an audiovisual thinker. His ideas about the relationship between space, knowledge, and power are fundamentally linked to visibility. Human interaction with spatiality generates seeable knowledge, shaping different disciplines and fields of thought. Yet this form of visibility does not entirely explain the moment of recognition within personal relationships.
My own experiment began long ago when I started taking off my glasses. Without them, I cannot clearly see his face or features. However, this restriction of vision does not prevent me from seeing him once I have recognised him. Once he becomes seeable, my lack of visual clarity is no longer an obstacle to perceiving him. I can pick him out in a crowd; I can sense his presence even without physically seeing him.
Perhaps this is what Foucault sought to emphasise—the power of the moment of becoming seeable, the instant of awareness.
This leads to several questions: When did I first "see" him? Why can I still "see" him? When does a connection become a personal relationship? In my own experience, a personal relationship becomes stronger than the moment of seeing when he is given a name—not the name he was born with, but a name of my own choosing. As that name becomes more personal, his presence within me grows stronger.
One of my favourite Korean poems, Kim Chun-soo’s Flower, expresses this sentiment beautifully:
Before speaking her name
she had been nothing but a gesture.
When I spoke her name,
she came to me and became a flower.
Now who will speak my name,
one fitting this colour and fragrance of mine,
as I had spoken hers
So that I may go to her and become her flower.
We all yearn to become something.
I yearn to become an unforgettable meaning to you
And you to me
Seeable, is more to see the gesture of the form. It has no particular subjectivity until it gets its name. However, I am still questioning how I noticed him, his form of gesture, the feelable gesture, and the moment of the seeable to feelable. When he was “nothing but a gesture.” It is a difficult question, and I have, yet, no answer to this question. I can only say that it is beautiful changing, beautiful my own changing, and beautiful forgetting. But I cannot figure out what happened at that moment. This visibility is strong enough to make me forget about before the seeable moment.
What happened exactly?
Why can I see you?
Why am I looking for you?
Why does your gesture make me feel?
