The Face
It is a terrible thing to know that people are terrified to look you in the face. And when they finally do, you can feel the axis of the earth, perhaps the entire universe, spinning in your eyes. And in that grief, you hold it. It is all that is.
Jean-Paul Sartre’s essay on “The Face” notes how
The face “creates its own time within universal time… Against [that] stagnant background, the time of living bodies stands out because it is oriented… In the midst of these stalactites hanging in the present, the face, alert and inquisitive, is always ahead of the look I direct upon it… A bit of future has now entered the room: a mist of futurity surrounds the face: its future.”
How can we expect everyone to be prepared for this sort of confrontation? Human connection itself is terrifying. I wonder how many times people have gotten a glipse of a face and put down their weapon (litteral and metaphorical)?
The face, Sartre goes on to insist, “is not merely the upper part of the body… It is corporeal still and yet different from a belly or a thigh: what it has in addition is voracity; it is pierced with greedy holes.” The greediest and most ravenous of those holes, of course, being the eyes. For “now the two spheres are turning in their orbits: now the eyes are becoming a look.”
Sometimes I am acutely aware of this greed, the look. I think it is the most fierce when given the permission to view the future of another world, an orbit, a face. But Perhaps our redemption, our saving grace is this thought:
“If we call transcendence that ability of the mind to pass beyond itself and all other things as well, to escape from itself that it may lose itself elsewhere; then to be visible transcendence is the meaning of a face.”
Isn’t that the heart of everything we are after? Is not why we continue to enter the pain of the face, the pure hope that it is possible to transcend? And perhaps in transcendence we are no longer separate, but joined.
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