Looking as Discourse: On "That Summer That Year During the Heat Wave"

Image by Angelo Maneage

The theme of the 2022 Cleveland Humanities Festival is “Discourse.” Zach Savich, a Cleveland Review of Books board member and associate professor at the Cleveland Institute of Art, asked a group of artists, writers, and scholars from Cleveland and beyond to address the topic, “How is looking a form of discourse? Or: how does looking become discourse?” Their responses explore some of the ways in which private and shared experiences of vision contribute to culture, conversation, identity, and collective exchange.

Several years ago, I taught John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, and I read and reread it, and not long after, I also wrote “That Summer That Year During the Heat Wave.” At least in retrospect, I have no doubt that Berger’s ideas influenced both my thinking about the event in the poem and its writing. 

The opening chapter of Ways of Seeing makes the following claims:

A difference exists between what we see, on the one hand, and on the other the language used to describe what we see. 

Our beliefs, as well as the knowledge we possess, alters how we see things. 

In this way, the relationship between “seeing” and “knowing” is dynamic, constantly undergoing change and revision. 

Also in this way, the act of seeing becomes dynamic—how we see, and what we see, even if we’re looking at the same thing, can and does change.

Finally, at some point, through seeing others we realize that we can also be seen—that, for better or worse, others see us in the much of the same ways we see them. 

This final fact is game-changing. In the ideal, it leads us to the realization that we (you, me, everyone else) views the same world differently. 

Because the event depicted in “That Summer That Year During the Heat Wave” took place when I was very young, I attempt to describe it accurately. But if I take Berger seriously, and I do (which is to accept that “seeing” means “understanding”) then I could not tell you what what I saw that day means—not then and there, in the moment. What did it mean to watch a man chase another with a shotgun? Or to see the gun-wielding man turn to my sister and me and smile? I can’t say. 

I don’t remember if I tried to make sense of what I saw. Even if I had, the limited understanding I might have reached is nearly four decades in the past—long gone, lost for good. 

However, I could tell you what I think it all means to me, now. I could say something about the city’s many nicknames indicative of its citizenry’s supposed penchant for violence (“the murder capital of the world,” “American’s first Third World city,” “Beirut,” “Baghdad”). Or I could name the men running down the street, one of whom, I think was the brother of a classmate at my elementary school. I could say something about race, class, ethnicity, or the spectacle of poverty and economic inequity, or else I could get lofty and remark about the human condition, the loss of innocence, and so on. 

And there’s as good a chance of my being right as there is of being a little off or completely wrong. Does it matter? Maybe. 

I often get hung up about getting my memories right, especially because I often get them wrong. When writing “That Summer That Year During the Heat Wave,” instead of recollecting in tranquility what I had experienced, I opted simply to see again what I saw that summer day, in 1984, on the southwest side of Detroit and, more importantly, to note (explicitly, I think) that I really did not know then what to think or make of what I was seeing—that my “looking” then was only at best pregnant with discourse but not yet so. 

If there is something to see here (and there must be), I have chosen to leave it alone. The point of the poem (for me, and not necessarily for the reader) is the image. However, a question precedes the image. That is, the poem begins with uncertainty. And the image concludes (fittingly, I believe) with a smile equally as uncertain. 

It has taken me decades to get back to this place, to the disposition of that young kid who could easily allow for an occurrence to happen and not feel even remotely obligated to make sense of it. The poem then, I suppose, is both a figurative and literal return to that way of being. Of course, my reflections right now (on the poem, its meaning, on that day) are already pulling me away. So, I will just stop here. 

That Summer That Year During the Heat Wave

What did we think sitting there
on the front porch, without fear, none at all,
no surprise or shock,
barefoot, slow breathing, the sun

unyielding even under elm and maple,
thirty-five years ago,
I wasn’t yet twelve, my sister not ten, the city
months from the riots after the World Series?

Two men ran down the middle of the street,
the one in front yelling
(how far he made it—
the ice cream parlor, the diner, the liquor store, the bowling alley—

I can’t say), and the other one, 
chasing after him, aiming a shotgun, he looked at us,
smiled, and I saw
all his teeth.