Contemplating the horror from the comfortable distance of the screen

We live in an age where nothing remains out of sight. We photograph it, we record it, we broadcast it, we share it, we archive it. Reality has ceased to be just what happens to us: it is also what we look at. Lluís Calvo (Saragossa, 1963) starts from this omnipresent gaze in L’Ull que tot ho veu. Matèria i horror, an essay that overflows the conventional limits of the genre to explore the relationship between matter, body, violence, and fascination.

Horror has an uncomfortable characteristic: it attracts us. If that were not the case, it would not be so hard for us to look away. Calvo does not treat it as an extravagance reserved for monsters or criminals. It is found in bodies, objects, the spaces we inhabit, the technology that promises us control, and the violence that we prefer to imagine always far from home. Horror does not need to enter through the door because, in fact, it already lives there. The All-seeing Eye makes us dismantle the fantasy according to which civilization has protected us from our most brutal nature.

Matter is the other keyword. The body is matter, and the wound, and death. So are the traces we leave behind, the objects, the ruins, that which deteriorates and that which survives those who built it. We want to think that we are intelligent, rational, spiritual, creative beings. It is much harder for us to accept that we are also flesh that ages. The body reminds us that we are not invulnerable and that all human architecture will eventually be subjected to time. The horror begins where the fantasy of control ends.

Calvo does not construct a linear or academic essay. The book advances through connections between literature, philosophy, art, science, spirituality, or psychogeography, and turns every displacement into a new way of looking. It does not offer a closed map: it opens doors and makes the inorganic world dance. Thinking here does not mean accumulating knowledge, but rather letting ideas modify perception. Reading thus becomes an active experience that questions the habitual way of understanding the world, renews the idea of humanity, and invites one to step out of the anthropocentric perspective: plants and stones are also human.

Looking is not an innocent action

When pain appears before us every day, it runs the risk of becoming scenery. Tragedy enters the dining room between two commercials. War is consumed while we eat dinner. Death becomes an image that we can zoom in on with our fingers and abandon with a flick of the thumb. We have become accustomed to horror without having to endure it physically. Seeing without touching, knowing without getting involved, contemplating catastrophe from the comfortable distance of the screen. Calvo puts a finger on this wound: looking is not an innocent action. Whoever looks decides what they look at, from where they look at it, and, above all, what they do with what they have seen. The gaze can understand, but it can also dominate; it can draw closer, but it can also turn the other into an object; it can provide visibility or transform suffering into a spectacle.

The All-seeing Eye does not offer an easy way out of this discomfort. And it is better that way. Its strength lies in the capacity to make us distrust what we look at and, above all, the way we look at it. Because perhaps the problem is not that there is too much horror in the world. Perhaps it is that we have become too accustomed to seeing it without recognizing ourselves in it. And here appears the question that remains suspended when we close the book: what happens when the eye that observes discovers that it is also part of that which it observes? That the horror is no longer out there. That it is here. That it is also us. And that, no matter how much we look the other way, the matter will continue to watch us.