The Teacher Who Gazed

When I was eight years old my constant game in the class was not to hear the teacher’s words but to watch her mouth and understand how the words spilled out, where the sound came from, how letters and words settled on the lips or stayed in the mouth and suddenly spread into the air. I remember the letters “b” and “p” confused me a lot on the lips. Now, looking at this picture, that same joy of not hearing the teacher’s lessons comes back to me—the feeling of not listening and staring at the grayboard, wondering which unread letter the fluorescent lights in the middle are illuminating; trying to understand the pleasure of being lost somewhere else. How to escape the classroom and settle somewhere else. How he can speak, and I hear nothing. And now I tell myself: what does the teacher of this photography class would say about seeing, or what has he said, that he himself has abandoned teaching and is staring at the blackboard or whiteboard, lost in those two nearly invisible words above and below the middle light? And strangely, the word that I hardly see or read is دوربین  [camera]. A word the teacher seems to have written earlier on the board, but now it has been erased so the photographer can take the picture and compel me to see, not to read.