Standing in the doorway, looking like the Jack of Hearts

it’s a tricky business – this seeing, / being seen.

by Abigail Parry

31st October 2026

Photo: Missohio Studio

Text

Surveillance

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Standing in the doorway, looking like the Jack of Hearts
Abigail Parry

I

Meaning what?  Let’s assume it means
bordered by an architrave he may
or may not be aware of.  Which is to say, a simple, formal frame

within the bounds of which his shape recalls
the Jack of Hearts.
Poor beau.  You see?  Here’s lintel, jamb and sill

conspiring to pull a simple trick

and hem him in.  A looker, looking up to see him framed

and formalised like this, would say Oh, hey –

the Jack of Hearts. 
His head is turned.  Thus profiled – thus surveilled –

he does not see himself, but may perceive

the pose in which he’s stuck.  And how it looks.  He knows he is

the spitting image of that one-eyed knave,

the Jack of Hearts.
“I know I’ve seen that face before” – Big Jim

has hit the nail on the head.  As for him,

he’s fitted up, he’s framed.  This is a one-man line-up

and whichever way he turns he’s still the same,

the Jack of Hearts.
“It’s not so bad, my friend. At least one half

of all we do is vaudeville; the rest

is pointless exegesis.” Just the sort of comment you’d expect

from a rascal and a rogue. Ladies, Gents…

The Jack of Hearts.

II

“He had another particularity, of which none of his friends ever ventured to ask an explanation. […] This was his anxious care to go out or in at a door or passage, by a certain number of steps from a certain point, or at least so as that either his right or left foot (I am not certain which), should constantly make the first movement when he came close to the door or passage.”

James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson

III

Someone asks.  And Johnson, on the spot,

finds nothing in his Dictionary to name

his anxious care – the grimaces, the tics,

the awkward quickstep. He calls the jinx bad habit.

This isn’t strictly accurate, but it’s

a tricky business, bottling the wind,

and he should know.
He isn’t daft. He’s worked it out by now –

the best disguise is no disguise at all.

Boswell says peculiar, and who

is he to argue otherwise. The Drudge.

The Ugly Dog.  The Surly Sam.

A man in drag as what they think he is.

Bad Habit.  It will do.

IV

“While browsing through Horney’s The Neurotic Personality of Our Time, I heard peculiar noises, which initially sounded like ‘shi, pi, fu’, and then began to sound like obscenities. At first I thought I was projecting some of my evil thoughts, and I listened more carefully. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a woman in her early twenties, shaking and jerking spasmodically, and erupting with ‘shit, piss, fuck’. I dismissed the thought that it was a Greenwich Village prank as I continued to observe the young woman. She was well-dressed, wore a conventional seal fur coat, and was not otherwise bizarre. She was also browsing through a book; I strained my eyes: it was the collected poetry of Keats.”

Arthur K. Shapiro, Gilles de la Tourette Syndrome

V

Shapiro there. Like Keats, he can’t decide

just what it is he’s looking at.  What

mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?

Me, I have some questions.

                    I wonder, for example,

if this woman in the Village – conventional,

not otherwise bizarre –

could feel his eyes on her, or was aware

of how the mise-en-scène must look to him.
Perhaps she doesn’t care.

                   Perhaps she’d say Look, Doc,

I don’t know what to tell you.

I get that there’s a contradiction here,

but it’s a tricky business – this seeing,

being seen.

                        Take my sickly friend

with his cute but irresolvable equations

regarding truth and beauty.  In the end,

there’s what you said and what they think you said.

Best think of it

like standing in the door in silhouette

or flattened under laminate, a state

of incomplete control.

For the most part, that is all

we know on earth, and all we want to know.

                          Or something like it.