Faces

A story in each

It was a cool breezy day when I stepped out in the late afternoon ... simply to get some air. The issue of faces has a long history of love lorn tales ... in many ways ... that eventually returns to the individual with that ... I heart me ... thing ... and before you know it ... the light emerges with its milky and grey demeanor ... and sends the stars to the skies of heaven ... to say ... there it is ... the picture of love and endearment ... and it can be yours.

The sky was light blue with intermittent clouds ... rising like limestone sculptures ... of iconic and famous people ... who have graced us with their lives. But at the cafe ... at the corner ... with the twisting bougainvillaeas ... and the pink topped tables ... the feature of faces ... took on a greater tenderness and feel. A bunch of young men ... sitting with their pals ... traded whispers of secrets ... in the privacy of their tables ... pausing on occasion to give me a look ... and then turn back ... to even more animated conversations.

The bougainvillaea ... started to resemble the face of a person ... with hair that was flowing naturally ... in the breeze. Before coming to the cafe for coffee ... I had wandered along the row of houses ... at the very foot of the hill nearby ... looking at lawns ... gardens ... and listening to the occasional sounds of the piano ... in a late afternoon practice. Across the road from the homes ... beyond the high wire fence ... the sports arena of the multi-media university ... was thumping to the sound of the basketball ... the thud on the basket panel ... and the occasional shout or yell.

The color schemes on the homes ... have taken a radical change from long ago. These days ... a person sees home colors in ... orange ... yellow ... purple ... and blue. Quite a change from the normal beige. The convenience store I walked into told me she doesn't stock the Domingo brand ... of hand rolled tobacco. I was wondering about ... how and when we stopped using the face as the object of everything we did. It told us about the person we were talking to ... it told us about the society we lived in ... the world ... and it told us about ourselves. That was all to it.

But that was before ... we learnt to view the world as ... that institution of society ... built on mortar and bricks ... and representing not a face that we relied on ... but an idea ... or a value expressed in significance to our lives. It was that point of crossing over from one to another ... in the way our perceptions ... moved from the sensual cognitive ... to the managed smile of casual familiarity. We began the experience of reserving ... the cognitive faculty ... for the contents of the world's experience ... and our visions ... lost the face. We had moved from the totems of native relations ... and like the stone faces on Easter Island ... had started to look far away ... in search of ... perhaps another face.

At the cafe ... the faces continued their animated semblances ... according to the speech they conveyed ... and a fair cherry faced young man ... at the next table ... was continuing to turn to look at me. A slight breeze picked up and blew into the cafe ... and I was thinking of King Duncan ... traveling to High Dunsinane ... to visit with Macbeth for a few days. As he experienced the breezes that day ... he had announced to Macbeth ... ' This castle hath a pleasant seat; the air nimbly and sweetly recommends itself unto our gentle senses.' It was the point at which ... the sensation of pleasure makes contact with the stoic nature of mind.

We have in these times ... all but left any vestibule of contact with the stoic mind. It has enmeshed itself with the impulse of pleasure ... fine to touch and to behold ... and has come to create a rationalization of the normal life as being in that way socially defined. It is even afraid to create its own independent view and opinion sometimes ... and senses the considerable learning it must subscribe to ... in order to do that. Instead it relies on ... the familiarity of friends ... to affirm the patently normal in our affairs ... and in that we begin to protect the mind ... from the whims and vagaries ... of the fashions of pleasure.

With the fall of the King in the mind ... we come into the company ... of the social circles ... promising sublime pleasures of experience ... of the physical and the enactment of our thoughts in physical reality. In that ... the common man came to experience the lordship of the realm ... where that realm ... is the individual's personality ... and his relation to the world. It is the age of exaltation of the layman ... to many things that are possible.

As we view life's journeys in these way ... we return into contact with the King and the Gods ... and are surprised to find their attitude of welcome ... bestowed on us ... for having made the effort ... to raise ourselves ... beyond the age of the anima ... that we have left behind. In our realization of our individual natures ... we see all men ... and we pass beyond the veil of faces ... that spoke of diversity ... and arrive at the unity of all. And in doing so ... we return to the experiences of profound regret ... that we incurred when recalling the first time we lost contact with faces.

In reflecting on it ... we realize that ... in the minutes preceding ... the injury to faces ... we were entirely unmindful ... not raising a finger to preserve or protect ourselves. Certainly we have made up for it ... in many different ways ... by the practice of acute anxiety ... we bring to such memories of the experiences. We think we had been naive ... innocent ... foolish ... idiotic. Not true. We were actually entirely unmindful ... and we know why. We wanted to rebuild that experience of the face again ... by our hand ... not any other. Not the King ... not God ... not even by love. We rebuild that today with friendship ... with the understanding of what friendship means.

Reviews

[anne]

Your stories are a learning experience...wow...:))