by LJ Frank
What do you mean…evolving face?
Did you ever think back about your face over time?
My face over time?
Yeah. The face you imagined you revealed to your mother and father at birth or after the first time you were disappointed or happy for either a selfish and/or unselfish reason, the first face you revealed to a friend or lover in honesty or dishonesty, or the face after the first kiss or the first orgasm or the first tears shed when another fell and darkened the soil with red. The face that was not an act or a performance. Or did the acting and performing begin early on as a child? When did you first learn to hide your face? How many of the faces that you exposed to others was not the real face within?
And your eyes? Can we hide them? Or the voice?
How exactly are the eyes a mirror to the soul? Does a blind person have a soul? The word soul is rooted in the proto – Germanic word “saiwalo” meaning from the sea – a place of birth and death. Among ancient cultures the “soul” was rooted in blood and water and today that “soul” may be flushed from a funeral “home” into the sewer system. We can train our face and soul to be hidden in our eyes even when starring into them for a long period of time. The eyes perform like the smile or frown or grimace, or grin…they can be intense at will or blurred like a ship’s light entering a fog shrouded harbor and may betray something else other than what’s hidden in the heart. And the voice can be disciplined through training with patience and effort.
Do we have a different face for family, another for friends and another for colleagues and co-workers and neighbors?
And what does our face suggest about the roles we play? Who are we to judge when the face of affliction has carefully taught it to hide? What does the face on the edge of sanity look like…can a person of confidence or narcissism and in a position of power be given the latitude in facial meaning compared to those without the same standing? What about the face that expresses itself both as male and female?
How do you know what you would do if you were on the edge and no matter how hard you tried you were misled through exterior forces of disinformation or ignorance? Somewhere along the line the face must be accepted for what it may or not reveal.
Isn’t the nature of awareness a process of opening oneself to self-disclosure? I can transform my face for the mirror that I am starring into right now and in a moment of disclosure my face exhibits the symbiotic relationship between projection and reflection.
