Erin Dorney's "Day 16"

Thoughts on seeing.

Day 16

Dear Adriene,

For sixteen days I watch you watch me, but you never see me in the basement, next to the dog puke stain, outside the laundry room, the attic. Sometimes there is no sun and I lie down on a bed of dirt. We're almost done. Where will you go when this is all over? To the next room for a sandwich? To stand barefoot in front of the fridge? This is where we're gonna end it today. I saw the reflection of studio lights in the window behind your body, warped like cardboard left out in the rain. They say I could pay money to be in the same room as you. I'd rather sink my forehead to the ground—breathe you into the soft coiled curve of each foot.


from Yes I Am Human I Know You Were Wondering (Autofocus, 2025)

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This collection by Erin Dorney, Yes I Am Human I Know You Were Wondering, consists of a series of prose poems written to Adriene — the host of the popular YouTube yoga videos known as “Yoga with Adriene.” I know these videos, as, during Covid — like many, I imagine — I’d throw one of them on upon waking, or between teaching virtual classes, my body twisting and standing and folding in the small space between the trunk that was my coffee table and the wall that was, well, my wall. I remember the light through her glass windows. I remember her dog. Sometimes a bundle of fur on the inside the frame. Sometimes a hint of fur peeking in from outside. I remember breathing, or trying to breathe, thinking that breathing would save me. I remember so much from that time. The tiny oven where I baked bread. The roof I sat on, which was above my apartment, which was above the Dominos. The funeral home a block down, with the refrigerated truck parked, for months, just outside.

It is this moment from Dorney’s poem today that sears itself into my brain:

you never see me in the basement, next to the dog puke stain, outside the laundry room, the attic. 

But this part right before matters so much, too:

I watch you watch me, but you never see me

Yes, this poem begins with a recognition of the distinction between watching and seeing, this idea that watching entails a kind of viewership, while seeing entails an attempt at understanding. In Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which I just talked about with one of my high school classes, James Agee writes — of Walker Evans’s photos:

…understanding, and action proceeding from understanding and guided by it, is the one weapon against the world's bombardment…

It’s a moment that shows how Agee perceives that distinction between watching and seeing, and how important he understands it to be. That, when we don’t see each other, we don’t understand each other. And understanding, for him, is everything.

John Berger builds on this idea in Ways of Seeing. In that book, he writes:

The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.

We live, always, in that space between what we see and what we know, in that “unsettled” relation, where we have to make sense of the in-between, trying for resolution with the knowledge that we might never find it. That trying, I think, is called understanding, because a word like understanding does not assume knowledge. Understanding fills the space between the curve that marks our lives and the intersection that comes with knowledge. As a word, understand does not mean, quite literally, “to stand under.” It means, or at least owes its etymology, by some accounts, to something more like “to stand between.” I love that. We live in that in-between. What we do with our position there is one of the great questions of our lives.

Dorney understands this, too, I think. It’s why her poem is peppered with questions:

Where will you go when this is all over? To the next room for a sandwich? To stand barefoot in front of the fridge?

These questions display an attempt to understand, to see someone for how they really are, as someone who exists beyond the screen where we watch them, and in the world where we might come to see and understand them. She asks these questions even though she knows, I imagine, that she is watched, and not seen, treated like a data point rather than a person. But notice, still, how generous she is with her questioning, how wildly ordinary and intimate these questions are — how they are about making sandwiches and standing barefoot.

I think of how, when I get up on weekday mornings in the morning dark, I shuffle from the bathroom to kitchen, and I often stand there, mindless and senseless, coming to reality. I make the coffee by habit, and I sometimes put my whole body — arms and all — back into the sleeves of my shirt or my sweater, cocooning myself even as I try to wake. If anyone saw me, they might think me a giant knitted thing, a flour sack of a man. Sometimes I stand there for five minutes without even thinking, just staring at one spot of the wall, or at the one streetlight I can see from my walkup’s window. We are a litany of these ordinary things, I think. We are these things that come before achievement or titles, in these spaces of our lives that hold onto whatever privacy still exists in this world. We are barefoot in the kitchen, curled up into ourselves. We are mumbled prayers before bed. We laying flat against the carpet. We are the stack of cups in the cabinet. We are the way we tie our shoes. We are a pile of t-shirts we are afraid to throw out. We are so ordinary that we forget ourselves, and each other, for all of this ordinariness. We watch for the extraordinary without seeing everything in between.

This act of seeing lives throughout Dorney’s poems. In another of her poems, she attests to how hard it is to even see oneself:

My body is a list of things I'm still figuring out. Energetically. Like white roots worming out of brown seeds on top of wet soil. On my stoop I gave away hundreds of plants but still had to throw some away. Was I born in one piece, or many that have come together over time?

And in another, she makes it clear how our world right now reduces us to these watched things, rather than people who might be seen:

What do the algorithms tell you about me?

When we are reduced in such a way, we are not seen. And when we don’t see each other, we don’t see how we really are, which is to say that we don’t see each other “in the basement, next to the dog puke stain.” We don’t see each other “lie down on a bed of dirt.” One of the fundamental truths of the world — of many, I imagine — is that how we really are is how we really are. Sometimes I think we think that how we really seem is how we really are. No. It’s simpler than that, and yes, far more complex. How we really are is how we really are. Which means we need to try to know how we are. Which means we need to try to understand how others are.

And though this kind of distinction plays itself out in how we interact with what we see online — with who we identify with, and who we obsess over — it also plays itself out, perhaps more importantly, in our politics. I think of how ICE will now be screening the online presence and activity of immigrants for pro-Palestinian content. This: a kind of watching. It’s not seeing, no. It makes no attempt at understanding. It keeps watch in the way a guard does, under the guise of protection, and in service of power. I’d rather we keep seeing. Not guarding. Not watching. Seeing. Trying. Attempting to understand. Justice lives in such actions. Kindness, too.

There is a remove that comes with watching. It is the remove of statistics, of data. Even here, for me, on this platform, just as Dorney suggests with Adriene, I am offered data about you — those who read this newsletter. You are a number, a subscriber, a point on a graph trending in one direction or another. I am sent emails about how to target more subscribers. That word, target, it presupposes a distance, and then offers up a violence.

The trouble with seeing — and it is no trouble at all — is that it comes with responsibility. To try to see someone for who they are means that you will, ostensibly, encounter some part of who they are. You will know if they stand barefoot in their kitchen. If they boop their dog on their nose. If they dip their big toe in the water first. If they wear socks to sleep. If they wipe down every surface. If they’ve lost someone. If they’ve lost someone recently. If they’ve lost someone suddenly. If they’re still trying to cope. If they sit in their car for five minutes before they go inside. If they lock every door. If they’ve had the same stuffed animal since they were eight. If they’ve saved every journal since they were seventeen. And the trouble with knowing these few things — and it is no trouble at all — is that you can’t forget them. They become little roads to understanding. They help us live in the in-between, when there is too much of life we don’t know, but where there are these few things we do know. We hold them, and hold each other.

People with power resist this kind of seeing because they resist the love that comes with it, and because they resist the justice that necessarily follows such love. We are left in the in-between, loving our way toward such justice.

As I did last week, before I close, I’d like to mention that I began teaching my second section of a class for the Adirondack Center for Writers this past week. If you’ve read this far before, and recall, it’s called You Do Not Have to Be Good, and it’s on reading and writing with generosity in mind, on moving away from a restrictive and prescriptive method of such things that can label things in ways that feel reductive rather than expansive.

I’ve asked my students to, in the week between classes, engage in reading and writing prompts that feel, at least to me, like some small way to try to read a poem and then look at the world and then try to approach any of it — however hard — with generosity. I did this with the first session, but I’d like to offer the prompts here again— in case you, reading this, are interested. I’ll be answering them again myself, which I’m excited to do, given how the prompts are the same, but my life — as yours is — is a little different. And so, here’s the third week’s prompt:

Read, as a guide, Leon Stokesbury's "Unsent Message to My Brother in His Pain" and Matthew Nienow's "Letter of Recommendation," both of which, despite their different titles, serve as reminders of the possible in this world — reminders of what is beautiful, or surprising, or lovely, or strange, or just simply enough, enough to make you want to live and look another day.

Then, in a little mini essay or a poem or whatever you want, write your own reminder of the possible. Whether a poem or an essay, a list or a note, or even a letter addressed to someone, tell us what you'd recommend about this world, or what you find yourself reminding yourself about this world.

And here’s Stokesbury’s poem:

And here’s Nienow’s:

Here’s a poem I wrote in response.

A LITTLE LETTER OF RECOMMENDATION

Just yesterday, we split my headphones
& walked between the avenues
with the same song playing in just one
of each of our ears. Consider me foolish,
but I never thought it possible to have
half our bodies tuned to the same music
& the other half tuned differently 
to the same world. I recommend anything
that requires listening—the sweat of garlic
in the pan before it burns, the window
of a train along the coast, my own thumb
along your own thumb, trying to find
the smallest soft place along our body’s 
hard & fragile bones. I think we hurt
in different ways. I think this is true.
Raindrop eyes caught staring at an ocean.
An open palm smashed against a forehead.
Sometimes I don’t even know how to hold
myself, let alone another. But on the avenue,
I think we hold sameness & difference
at our core, the same piano in one ear,
the same city rushing past the other, your 
different heart beating at a different
time than my different heart, & our
different feet walking at the same speed
down the same street. What is healing
if not forging a place to live in the space
between what was and what is? When you 
put your different hand in my different 
hand, it becomes the same hand we hold.

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Some notes:

1. Here is a website — put together by volunteers — that tracks the jobs lost and lives affected by the de-funding of USAID. It’s worth reading in order to fully understand the severity of what is happening, who it is affecting, and how to help.

2. You can find a list of the work that Writers Against the War on Gaza is doing to build solidarity among writers in support of Palestinian and against their consistent oppression here.

3. Workshops 4 Gaza is an organization of writers putting together donation-based writing workshops and readings in support of Palestine and in awareness of a more just, informed, thoughtful, considerate world. You can follow them here and get more information about them here.

4. If you’ve read any of the recent newsletters, you’ve perhaps noticed that I am offering a subscription option. This is functioning as a kind of “tip jar.” If you would like to offer your monetary support as a form of generosity, please consider becoming a paid subscriber below. There is no difference in what you receive as a free or paid subscriber; to choose the latter is simply an option to exercise your generosity if you feel willing. I am grateful for you either way. Thanks for your readership.