Face: Excerpt

Claustrophobia is failure of projection: my face collapses into its grave. They rolled me into the MRI, panic-bulb in hand, an IV of valium in my arm. My adrenalin swarmed the valium Ali-on-Liston; I hit the panic button in three seconds flat.

The rush-hour trains were worse: a hundred faceless people pressed against me—divorced from their faces, too focused, too dense: claustrophobia the only honest reaction in a crowd.

“…a hundred faceless people…” no, not faceless. Their faces were far ahead of them, high-beams on home, projected far from the train, or solar sails, dragging them beyond the density of flesh; whereas my face had gone back into its bud.

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All outward forms are the agony of what they mask; and one is always mocked by one’s own backside. If we are tragedy forward, we are farce from behind.

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John Cassavetes’ Faces: read the actors’ eyes, the director said, not the dialogue—which was a vectoring of faces, their persistence through the tunnel of the film, out toward daylight. There are no deep truths, but there are brighter spots, sunnier days, a return to color as staple, not spice. Identity shimmers like spit in the film; the lighting is uncosmetic, uncosmic; everything is an interior; rooms are “inside” squared – the imploded tesseract of “inside,” walls that look on their windows as Gabriels of expulsion, ceilings veined and sweaty, like foreheads.

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The Countess’ captive has learned to live for the theater of the key-hole. Optically, we might say, he’s become a woman and receives the nightly images as thrusts upon his visual cortex.

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Monsieur Robertson, turning out the lights, locking the doors, reveals the cambric screens he has painted with our own deliria, but the blood-drained faces of the audience were in fact the only spirits in the room.