The baby gaze. The best gaze ever.
Bennett’s strongest method of pre-verbal communication is through his eyes. The way he gazes at me (and others who take care of him daily) is more powerful than any Lacanian Gaze (the male gaze, the feminine gaze, the evil eye, the mirror gaze, etc.).
I believe the baby gaze is all consuming because what’s behind it is a love so rarified and pure, too innocent to have judgment or a calculated agenda, too uninhibited to withhold surges of feeling. The baby gaze is why we fall so completely for babies. I am sure it’s endorphin producing, too. (It’s been written about with respect to puppies but with babies, it’s is sooo more complex.)
Baby gazes revitalize those moments in our lives when that gaze, let’s call it the love gaze, happened to us—deep emotional attachment, desire, protectiveness, connectedness, self-discovery, and other strong wonderful feelings for another. Parents and children, men and women, women and women, men and men. The gaze happens (if we are lucky) throughout our lives with those persons in our intimate circle. And it is fierce in redefining our attachments.
I left Bennett yesterday (we won’t see each other until August), I’ll deeply miss him.