Eye Contact Experiment
Jim Ross
Sue worked the front desk at the YMCA. She viewed her job as chatting with as many members as she could. If she’d gotten me to stop to talk with her and awhile later somebody else was going by, she slid her elbows along the counter to catch their attention. If that failed to slow them down, and I was still there, she returned to me. If she got someone else to stop, I moved on. Same happened if she was talking with someone else and I went by. She slid away from them to slow me down. If I didn’t talk with her, she called me out as I was leaving.
There was a rumor Sue was interviewing for a father and that Bill and I were among the candidates. Bill and I were 65 and 45 years older, respectively, than Sue, who finished college two years prior. It might have been more plausible to think she was looking for a grandfather. Sue had given both of us her email address and asked us to write. We both did, though her scant responses were limited to meticulously crafted form letters. Bill complained to me about that.
What he didn’t understand was that by writing her, we became the two finalists.
Sue called Bill, “Cary Grant,” because of the dashing curl that graced his forehead. He, in turn, called her, “Claudette Colbert.” After Cary’s curl disappeared in a haircut, Sue frowned whenever she saw him, then cheered Cary’s return. She liked to talk about old movies from the 30s through 50s. Asked how she knew so much, Sue explained that her mother kept their home filled with people from “an older generation.” Living at home, Sue was accustomed to the company of people and movie characters from another time.
Sue liked getting people to reveal something of themselves to her, but she rarely disclosed much if anything about herself, and avoided conversations about religion or politics. An older member of the Y’s front desk staff confided, “You wouldn’t believe the number of people who want to take Sue somewhere and do something with her.” As far as I know, Sue always arrived at and left the Y solo, usually on foot. She sometimes ran both coming and going, looking like the soccer midfielder she’d been in college.
Sue began telling me and Cary that she applied for a position teaching English as a foreign language to children in South Korea. It was a one-year position, renewable for a second year. She confided, “I need that much space between me and home to make friends my own age and be allowed to finally grow up.” Once selected, she became ecstatic, smiling with the abandon of a sun-drunk child.
It became clear that I had won out over Bill and had been selected to be Sue’s father. In reality, Bill had withdrawn the application he didn’t know he submitted. He told me later that he resented that Sue asked people to give but rarely reciprocated.
I suspect the reality was, Sue reciprocated with everything she had found in herself to give.
Before Sue left, she said I would hear from her so often that I would think she was still here. I first heard from her soon after her August arrival in Seoul. For the most part, her initial messages focused on getting used to Korean style toilets and the oppressive humidity.
I dreamed Sue is coursing the open seas on a one-person sailboat, following the green clouds. Looking through those clouds, she sees the eyes of God.
The tone of her communications changed at the end of her two-week orientation after she was finally assigned an apartment where she would live for the year of her teaching contract. Sue’s apartment had pervasive black mold. From what I’ve read, that’s common in apartments assigned to temporary English teachers in Korea. The same apartments with recurrent black mold infestations are passed on from one teacher to the next, year after year.
Viewing the presence of black mold as tantamount to putting strychnine in an air diffuser, Sue refused to stay in her apartment for a single night. Instead, she spent that entire first night walking the streets. I heard from her the next day via email. So did her mother. And, apparently, her biological father—from whom she was estranged—did too. Not hearing back from him, she began emailing me and her mother without blinding our email addresses in a less than subtle attempt to connect us to each other. That led to her mother and I meeting for coffee. As we hashed over “the situation,” the mother said, “Sue’s been waiting all her life for a strong male figure like you.”
I had two reactions to hearing that: being drawn in and freezing in my tracks.
I dreamed Sue is living in the attic of my house. Within the house a tornado is brewing.
Sue refused to return to the mold-ridden apartment. Instead, as she tried to persuade her school district to find her another apartment, she couch-surfed in the apartments of other newly oriented English teachers. Eventually, her school district agreed to get her another apartment free of black mold or at least not visibly overridden by it. Sue had to eat the cost of the first month’s rent at the new apartment because the school district had already paid for the first month at the mold-ridden apartment. Her being granted a mold-free apartment that she was willing to live in came as a source of great relief for me and her mother.
Sue reported that nearly every Korean she met in her age bracket wanted to be her friend. Some, she speculated, mainly wanted practice speaking English. Right away she cut off one who wanted her to join a discussion group on religion and politics. She said that having so many people asking to be her friend was unfamiliar. “At home, I had only a couple of friends and we almost never did anything together.”
Accustomed as she was to having a succession of people to talk with for hours on end at the Y, Sue began going after school to either coffee or bubble tea shops and staying there in hopes that she could draw people to stop to talk with her. “I’m trying to recreate what I had at the Y.” Sometimes, as darkness approached, she ran all the way home.
Soon, it became evident Sue was highly anxious about her performance as a teacher, her physical appearance at school, and living alone. The anxiety resulted in her playing video games in her apartment obsessively for much of the night, most nights. Because she arrived at school unrested, people inquired about whether she was getting enough sleep. That ratcheted up her concerns about appearance and teaching competence, which kept her awake nights.
“They told me, my toy doll look was just perfect and I couldn’t jeopardize that.”
One day, another new English teacher from another school invited her to what was called an “Eye Contact Experiment.” From what I’ve read, this was part of a worldwide movement started by a group that calls itself “the Liberators.” Their objective is to remove barriers and promote connection among total strangers. The experiment was being simultaneously conducted in a variety of countries around the world.
The English teacher who recruited her said that Sue and several other newly-arrived English teachers would serve as “seeds,” meaning they would sit in a public park and “invite strangers with their eyes and arms” to sit with them and look into each other’s eyes. Sue didn’t feel she could say no to the teacher who invited her, although she wasn’t having any difficulty finding people who wanted to become friends. It was presented to her as a no-risk opportunity.
Again, from what I’ve read, the whole venture was risky for Koreans who culturally consider it forbidden to gaze into the eyes of another person for more than a moment. Koreans view direct eye contact as disrespectful and potentially a hostile violation of another’s emotional security. To complicate matters, all of the seeds in the experiment were newly-arrived teachers no older than 25, who had little life experience. The seeds were given no guidance by the organizer other than to invite passersby to sit with them and look into each other’s eyes. Signs in Korean posted by the organizer invited passersby to sit and gaze into another’s eyes for a minute; however, the organizer had instructed the seeds to try to hold people for ten full minutes. Neither the seeds nor those who accepted their invitation to sit and eye gaze had any idea what to expect.
One middle-aged man who sat with Sue said after they gazed into each other’s eyes for ten minutes, “I’m not accustomed to externalizing my emotions. I just externalized every emotion I knew I had and many I didn’t even know existed within me. I’m overwhelmed and don’t know what to do.” The only resource available to Sue was to spontaneously give the man a hug. So, he left in a state of being emotionally overwhelmed. I’m sure many of the other Koreans and seeds felt similarly overwhelmed.
Sue told me she sat with five people in four hours. Like the middle-aged man just mentioned, Sue normally doesn’t externalize her emotions. Being in a new culture was already making it difficult to sort out the rollercoaster she was experiencing from day to day. She told me that in the Eye Contact Experiment she experienced emotions rocking through her one after the other, changing unpredictably, and after the four hours she was emotionally exhausted.
It sounded to me as if the seeds underwent an emotional orgy with numerous stranger partners.
Sue said that at the end of the eye gazing encounters, in four out of five cases, she and the strangers who came out of the crowd took out their cell phones and linked via social media. This is ironic because in promoting the experiment globally, The Liberators stress the importance of getting people away from computers so they can experience others face to face.
I told Sue I wanted to experience what she had experienced and planned to find an Eye Contact Experiment that I could participate in.
She said, “No, no, don’t. You don’t want to. I don’t want you to. I think I wish I hadn’t.”
Then added, “How will I react to any of these people if we are in each other’s presence again now that we’ve experienced this? In fact, how will I react to any other human being now that I know this kind of intimacy is possible?”
I took to heart her saying, “You don’t want to. I don’t want you to.” I still looked to see if the worldwide experiment was occurring anywhere near home. A cursory review of the worldwide map of locations where the Eye Contact Experiment was taking place revealed there were two sites within a two to three hours’ drive from my home. However, the site listed as Berlin, Maryland was actually in Berlin, Germany, and the one listed as north of Philadelphia was actually north of Vienna, Austria. In other words, the map was being mismanaged, perhaps by people who were confused and overwhelmed.
I couldn’t get Sue to talk again about her experience with the Eye Contact Experiment. When I tried, she shut down.
Then in early October, at the full moon, Sue called. She said that at Chuseok, to celebrate the harvest, Koreans visit their hometowns for a feast. If those who matter live far away, Koreans are supposed to contemplate the full moon while thinking about them. Then, she said, Koreans are supposed to reach out to those who matter. She had just called her mother and now she was calling me. I was honored and somewhat taken aback to be told, albeit indirectly, that I mattered, but I couldn’t be surprised because I was not only acting toward Sue as if I were her father, I was also interacting with her mother as if I were her partner in rearing an adult child.
In the maelstrom of helping her sort things out, Sue had come to matter to me too.
In the same Chuseok conversation, Sue revealed that two days prior she met up with one of the men she exchanged sustained eye gazes with at the Eye Contact Experiment and they spent a long day together, arriving home hours after dark. That was possible because Chuseok was a nine-day countrywide holiday period. Then, the day after, Sue went to a coffee shop where a Korean man sat down with her, and she ran off and spent a long day with him too. She confided that she didn’t tell her mother about the second man because the mother responded with such concern to hearing about the first.
However, it concerned me as much as it had her mother. In fact, knowing that Korean men like the toy doll look Sue has, I might have been more concerned than her mother. Neither of us were sleeping well. I didn’t keep what Sue told me in confidence. The mother and I met again and talked about whether we thought this pattern was safe. It was complicated because we both knew that Sue’s growing up was long overdue. She deserved the chance to make mistakes without being second guessed. Sue’s mother arrived at our emergency meeting wearing what looked like a nightgown. She told me about the original abandonment by Sue’s biological father halfway through the pregnancy and his refusal to even meet Sue after she was born on the grounds, “She won’t remember anything before the age of four anyway.”
I’d never met him but I wanted to punch him. I felt in the thick of things.
Sue had told me and her mother the best time to reach her was while she walked to school in the morning. That worked until she began talking with another person in Korean. Still concerned that Sue didn’t appreciate the risks she was inviting, I tried to reach her by phone the morning after her mother and I held our emergency meeting. Instead, I got a busy signal. When my call finally went through, Sue declined. Her mother later told me Sue had just slammed the phone down on her, so she was probably not in the mood to accept my call.
The next night I dreamed I was trying to hitch a ride on a dark road. A car pulls over as if to pick me up. I walk over to the car as someone in the backseat rolls down the window. I bend down so we can talk. As we make eye contact, the passenger sprays something into my eyes, laughs, and says, “You’ve been declined.” The car takes off. I run away blindly, screaming.
Long ago, someone in the backseat of a car had maliciously sprayed oven cleaner into my eyes. It came as no surprise that that my dream revisited the experience, as the intensity of concern about Sue and my growing feelings toward Sue and her mom, clashed with Sue’s cutting herself off.
We stopped taking each other’s calls. Reluctantly, I withdrew from my role as both father and husband substitute. I’d gotten so embroiled in Sue’s situation, Mom’s situation, and their relationship to each other that I hadn’t been sleeping or eating normally in weeks. I had to restore my own balance. Still, I felt profoundly that I had failed them. I walked out on two people at once, thus re-enacting their original abandonment.
I still feel it.
I don’t know what became of Sue except that I believe she’s halfway through her fifth school year of teaching in Korea. I believe she’s made the one annual visit home that her contract with the school district reimburses. I doubt our paths will ever cross again.
Is the Eye Contact Experiment a good idea? The Liberators will tell you that you have nothing to lose and everything to gain. I decided to look into this more. I was surprised how little information was available. A research project conducted in Italy documented that the participants in a formal, controlled eye contact experiment saw hallucinations, experienced dissociative effects similar to what people have after taking LSD, and experienced unprecedented surges in rapidly changing emotions. Participants called it a compelling experience unlike anything they had ever experienced.
The aspect of greatest interest among advocates and critics is the emotional roller coaster that eye gazers experience, especially those who typically don’t externalize their emotions. The emotional ups, downs, and twists have been explained as resulting from the unconscious, mutual projection of one’s entire emotional life into the eyes of another, and then having it reflected through one’s own eyes. While this occurs in both directions, it can be difficult to distinguish whose emotions are whose. As a result, eye gazers are often left with a mutually profound sense of being emotionally shaken, overwhelmed, confused.
Others, commenting on the effects of sustained eye contact, have said it’s comparable to opening a pandora’s box: you have no idea what’s in the box, whether it’s safe or not, but once you let it out, it’s out for good. Another commented that lots of people have unidentified mental health problems and undergoing something like this could set them off in a bad way.
Eye gazing of this sort is an ancient practice used by the mystics of various religions, including Sufis. It is also a tantric practice. It has been clearly stated over the centuries that this practice should be used only between people who already have some type of connection. One said, “I would no sooner recommend that strangers engage in eye gazing than that they exchange their entire correspondence with each other.”
I asked a friend—a renowned psychotherapist and author of many books—for his opinion. He said that while engaging in an activity like the Eye Contact Experiment may break down barriers rapidly and foster a sense that two people are coming closer together, it is also loaded with risks for both the people who come in out of the crowd and for the seeds who do the inviting. He said, “Someone was doing lots of primal stuff like this ten or fifteen years ago. It got to the point where psychotherapists had to be on hand to deal with the emotional upheaval and dissociative symptoms that people were experiencing. Eventually, he was forced to stop because many people became psychotic.”
I think the Eye Contact Experiment is cheating by creating an artificial experience of intimacy between two people who haven’t really earned that intimacy through shared life experience with each other. I appreciate the desire to increase human connectivity, but I wonder whether the implications and risks of this practice have been adequately thought through.
About the experiment of my becoming a father to Sue—in her eyes and in her mother’s eyes—I don’t know whether the three of us shared a common set of expectations as to the purposes of the experiment or how to judge it a success. Perhaps nobody was clear about that to themselves, much less each other. Through exchanges with the mother, I came to feel the weight of unfulfilled history, both hers and Sue’s, with the biological father, and the burden of becoming their “strong male figure.” I exited the picture not out of disinterest but because I began to appreciate what I was getting myself involved in—an experiment I couldn’t risk.
As for Sue, I hope she’s lived beyond playing out the implications of the Eye Contact Experiment and found opportunities to develop strong connections with others through shared experience. I’m grateful she warned me to stay away from eye gazing; she protected me while I was being protective toward her. Has Sue grown up, held onto her “toy doll look,” and found a new home in a culture that can’t tolerate eye gazing? I doubt I’ll ever learn.
Jim Ross jumped into creative pursuits in 2015 after a rewarding career in public health research. With a graduate degree from Howard University, in the past seven years he’s published nonfiction, fiction, poetry, photography, and hybrid in 175 journals on five continents, including Barren, Columbia Journal, Hippocampus, Ilanot Review, Kestrel, The Atlantic, and Typehouse. Jim and his wife—parents of two health professionals and grandparents of five preschoolers—split their time between city and mountains.