I live in the oddest of cities — a once-booming steel town of eighty thousand. Her industry failed her and now she nurtures just seventeen thousand souls. Great billboards still pose over her streets, but since there are no longer a great many eyes to take in what they advertise, merchants don’t make use of them.
Still, billboard companies make use of their empty billboards. They cloak their naked displays with public service announcements and the advertisements of public charities. Walking down main street, I am chided by enormous rectangles that urge me to take a stand against elephant poaching; to cease shooting tigers; to stop deforesting the rainforest; and so on.
The irrelevance of these Very Large Pictures is so striking, I can only imagine that they produce the opposite effect they intend. Most men scratching out a living from the dust of this post-industrial planet have never considered elephant-hunting as a real career possibility. In fact, the only really new information that a Rust Belt man gets, being told not to shoot an elephant by the World Wildlife Fund, is that shooting elephants must be an awfully lucrative venture to merit a finger-wagging in Ohio. If these billboards succeed, they succeed in resurrecting a long-dead, colonialist romance that once flitted about the Anglo-American psyche — Hemingway’s safari stories, the adventures of Tarzan, and the jungle tales of Rudyard Kipling. For the first time in a good while, the possibility of skipping town to be a big game hunter thrills in the unemployed chest.
But I am grateful to live in a place so poor that the usually seamless operations of money-making stutter and stall out into absurdity. Here, behemoths bigger than the idols of Mesopotamia and taller than the obelisks of Egypt inform me that it is an “epic fail” to practice unsustainable methods of trawl fishing. And in the shock of the silliness, the waste, and the inanity of preaching oceanic ethics to landlocked Ohioans, I realize that billboards are bad. They ruin our view.
Our eyes are usually servants. We work them, training them onto screens and keyboards and operating them for the sake of money. We use them, scanning them over road-signs and road-lines for the sake of survival. But when we long for a view, this everyday order is turned upside down. We become servants to our eyes. We climb mountains, that, at their peak, our eyes might feast. We pay a good deal more for a “room with a view.”
The view is a unique kind of seeing. It is not ordered towards some practical purpose. It is an act of rejoicing in vision for its own sake. We ache for a view in much the same way that a young man might feel an ache in his legs urging him to run; not to get anywhere, or go anywhere, but for the sheer joy of putting a capacity into action. “Why run?” we might ask. “Because I can!” he might yell back, before disappearing into a fine, cool morning. So too with the view. Why look? Not because we enjoy a strategic military position; not because we intend to purchase what we survey, but because we can. Because it is good, very good, to activate a potency.
As such, all view-taking is eucharistic; an enjoyment which gives thanks. What else is it to enjoy looking out at nothing in particular, and for no particular reason, except to say that looking itself is good; that vision itself is a delight. One motorist might say to another, at the off-ramp of a scenic route: “Nice view, huh?” This is English for, “It is good, isn’t it, that we are animals with eyes stuck in the front of our heads?” The other might respond: “Yeah, pretty.” This is an American way of responding, “Yes, and how marvelous that what we see and enjoy isn’t limited by this or that drive for hunger, or shelter, as it seems to be for the other animals. Rather, we can really take in the world, looking out without purpose.”
A billboard, then, is a prohibition of the festival of the eye. As a puritanical age banned the Catholic mystery plays, our commercial age bans the eucharistic feast present in every looking-out; it blocks our view. I have felt the slap of this ban while gazing out on a city street or staring out the window of a car, soaking in the world with all the luxury of a long, hot bath, only to have my eyes drawn to a great screen, temporarily pasted in the service of Cracker Barrel, lit up and towering above every green tree. A kind of enforced piety overtakes me. I enter into my usual mode of “market-consumer.” The billboard rescues from the gratuity and uselessness of the view. I begin to take in information, to evaluate, to consider myself as the possible masticater of whatever chicken is being peddled. I am no longer a participant in the feast of creation; I am a shopper.
Once booted out, re-entry into the eye’s festival becomes difficult. Rest becomes a strain when each minute is interrupted by a sales-pitch. The pre-commercial joy of the view is re-articulated as the time in-between — dead time, if you will — between the real-time of the market. Billboards begin to seem as if they relieve the monotony and boredom of the view, but we forget that they have declared the view boring in the first place, asserting the primacy of shopping over the feast.
The view is a commons. It cannot belong to any one person, because it is precisely that aspect of things given over to anyone who looks at it. American cities understand this in a perverse manner. Their building codes and historic district regulations argue, to the chagrin of the libertarians, that while you may own a piece of property, its exterior aspect is not given over to the whims of private ownership. Your building is a good that everyone can see. If it is wrecked, it is an evil that everyone must suffer. Bad architecture is not a private oddity -- it is a violence against a real community.
American law is perverse, however, because it doesn’t consider the exterior aspects of buildings as belonging to the community by common consent and tradition. It considers these exteriors as the property of the State. The government owns and regulates them as just one more private owner. It does not matter if the actual living, breathing community is edified by, or at peace with the legally prescribed historical color palette or the allowed facade. It simply enforces its code. Because of this lack of communal ownership, our legal and bureaucratic attempts to save the commons of the view from private carelessness still manages to build ugly buildings that actual communities hate — great glass phalluses, boring made-to-order boxes, all up-to-code but not any less violent to the view.
But at least American cities give an errant and begrudging nod to the idea that every owned thing includes an aspect which is, by nature, communal. And what is true of city and street is true of the field and forest in which our billboards are sown. Owned or not, there is always an aspect of the land which is undeniably common — its view. In England, if a right-of-way has been peaceably used for at least twenty years, then it cannot be blocked, no matter how profitable blocking such a walking path might be to Tesco’s commercial aspirations. I think something like this is owed by justice to our eyes. If a particular aspect of things has been a source of feasting and festival for the human eye, and if our eyes have enjoyed their powers peaceably for some time, then we should have a right that defends us against the enclosing of our commons, the banning of our festival, and the blocking of our view by billboard.
I realize that this would be abhorrent. We have enjoyed enclosing what is common since the founding of our nation. And it is precisely those places that people most like to look at which are, as a result, the most promising place to destroy the eucharistic gaze and encourage the commercial. While we can understand the enterprising landowner who adds to his income by hosting a fifty-foot idol on his cornfield, we can nevertheless oppose his actions as misguided -- he blocks for private gain that aspect of his property which belongs to the children of God by birthright. Still, more to blame are those who order the building of the high places across the nation; who by their banners ban the eucharistic gaze and order a new worship; this new church of the never-ending market which seizes for profit the property of the poorest — the view which every man has, even when he has nothing else.