Masks

Somewhat to my own surprise I chickened out of blipping this yesterday. The reasons were twofold, firstly because I am not sure how it will be received - it's an unattractive subject, and secondly I find that I am actually rather hesitant to "expose" this aspect of myself in such nakedness, it's well outside of my comfort zone. I've posted a couple of images previously that were about unmasking and nakedness and exploring the skin landscapes moulded by age, environment and experience. this image is in a similar vein.

This is a landscape of rolling Downs, swollen tumuli and deep channels. It is both divided and knitted together by a pale stream of ancient scar tissue that rises as a thin white spring in the chalky, large pored Down of my cheek and scores its channel deep into the surface of the plain of my face as it flows to a branching ragged estuary across the more fragile swollen dune of my ragged and misshapen upper lip. Along its twisting length it is crossed and bound at right angles to its flow by canal like tributaries , the ghosts of long plucked stitches that once secured a torn off flap of childish lip and flesh, pulling ragged incomplete edges into contact so they could stick together in an approximation of the original arrangement. Within the flexing, expressive, communicative layers of skin and fat and muscle it is a hard, inflexible rind of hardened glue.

My body has many more terrible scars than this trivial blemish, deep, long scars of surgery and blunt trauma and sharp violence. Weak misshapen imperfectly fused bone, discontinuities where once machine impaled knee and foot or wicked, slicing broken glass met neck and tendon and thumb. Most terrible of all is the hidden spider's web of scar and calcification woven around and deep within the tunnels of the spinal roots and spinal chord, squeezing and breaking the circuitry of sensation and movement, crushing transmission lines into a never ending oscillating howl of drug damped pain. A matrix infiltrating the fragile bony stack from the chunky doughnuts of lumbar vertebrae to the slender stacked boxes of the neck and up into the meninges that shroud the pinkly throbbing, dreaming, thinking, feeling brain. Compared to these the little cicatrise of the face hardly merits a listing in the catalogue....and yet...and yet....

The face is the theatre of encounter. It talks, it smiles, it frowns, it laughs, it cries, it threatens, it reassures, it spits and snarls, it kisses, it wrinkles, it creases, it grins and twinkles. It is the front that we show the world, where people appraise and examine our intentions, our concealments, our trustworthiness, our perfidy, our attractiveness or ugliness. It forms itself into the mask we display before them for their judgement and approval or relaxes to let them in to see us as we really are. It is central and definitive both to how others perceive and understand us and to how we value ourselves. It is my face. Across the centre of this pale puppet lies this scar. No matter how I smile and joke and praise, no matter how tender the expression I project with my unmarked features the scar pulls my lip and cheek up into a rigid and unchanging ugly sneer. So whatever my mood or opinion, no matter how amused or sympathetic, lustful or grieving .....through every encounter, every milestone of life I have sneered at the world. The scar places a mask upon my face, far more extensive and obscuring than its physical size implies, a mask not of my choosing or devising, a mask whether I wish to be concealed or not. Hidden behind it, seeing it reflected in every mirror or pane of glass or in the eyes of every woman I've ever smiled at, I have come to loathe this mask but much more damaging, I have come to see it as the truth, mistake it for the naked face. As soon as hormones allowed I hid it behind another mask, an unkempt all concealing birds nest of a mask, a mask I wore for decades even though the insignificant little scar still sat there underneath, bald and combed over like Donald Trump's clownish cranium, even though my mouth was still crooked and asymmetric and consequently so was my facial furniture, crooked and ugly camouflage built on subsiding foundations.

Sometimes with age comes a modicum of wisdom, or if not wisdom then at least some sense of proportion, a degree of peace with oneself rarely to be found in our younger more insecure and unforgiving selves, an acceptance of oneself for who we are rather than who we think we'd rather be. Perhaps in my case that's just another form of self delusion, perhaps its actually a submission, another defeat, perhaps time will tell. When, a couple of weeks ago I removed the hair behind which I've been hiding for most of my life I didn't recognise the stranger exposed underneath. I did not shave as part of a plan or as part of some conscious "make-over" or even out of simple curiosity. On a mundane level I was to some extent, I suspect, spurred on by embarrassment or even shame after a doctor complained about my appearance and my lack of personal "care" but even that I'm not sure about. It was not as far as I can remember a conscious decision of any kind. I was standing in front of the bathroom mirror; I took off my mask ...or at least this particular mask.