Robert Lunday: Face

Face

Robert Lunday 120 Cutting Horse Trail Bastrop, TX 78602 (512) 718-9352 [email protected]

You seem to be standing alone there, nothing but white around you, as in magazine ads that make the floor blend into the wall. • How much is lived between words? Most of what we need to see is in the blind spots. • One eye is; two eyes ought.

A Virgin Mary grilled-cheese sandwich, on auction, in the cyberworld: her image unmistakably there, in the grill marks. Accepting the authenticity, can one access a miracle online? I stare and stare, but all I feel is hungry, not holy. As for the bread’s longevity: the meal was grilled a decade ago, and shows no mold or decay. But there’s no miracle in it: give your praise, rather, to the ethylated mono and triglycerides, magnesium carbonate, calcium sulfate, potassium bromate, calcium proprionate, tricalcium phosphate, benzoyl peroxide, ammonium chloride, and potassium iodide! – God knows it takes more than the saints to preserve us.

3 of 64

If brass goes to sleep and wakes up a trumpet, it is not to blame; if wood wakes a violin….

Arthur Rimbaud; trans. Paul Schmidt

Truth the daughter of time, growing younger every year: so she seems to disappear, so she seems never to have lived at all.

Sir Francis Bacon

5 of 64

Kouroi step forward and their smiles are votive candles. • The shark is also a cousin: golden mean between human and nothing. Its teeth and rough skin are fossils of an ancient passion.

We’re still on the ark, in a menagerie of gestures and moods, smiles and brow-birds, warm-blooded notions and basking, reptilian regrets. A mare shoulders us over to the fence, a crane ferries the eyes down to the bottom of the well. My daydreams are all ferrets and crows. • In Heart of Darkness, Marlow passes train cars and boilers discarded by the jungle wayside: their lives expended make them animal, almost human. Then he observes the men in chains: machines of a pure and distant thought, lines on an otherwise vacant map. Further in, a dying man with a bit of worsted around his neck: the heaviest bond of all is a thread of fashion. Somewhere in Paris, Brussels, or London, a tailor is making chains.

7 of 64

Faces in wood grain, in the walls, in the eddies of things. Exhalations combine, and someone’s laundry on the line forms a Nausicaa of shadows:

farewell, Stranger! and in your homeland kindly think of me and of my helping hand.

At approximately 4½ weeks, the stomodeum is surrounded by a series of several elevations formed by proliferation of ectomesenchyme derived from the neural crest. Above, there is the frontal prominence, laterally there are maxillary swellings, and caudally mandibular swellings can be distinguished. Just above the stomodeum on each side of the frontal prominence is a nasal placode, which is a thickening of the surface ectoderm. During the fifth week, ridges appear on each side of the nasal placode… • Life is of photographic origins. Millions of years ago the brain started out as a skin tumor. The first thought was a pigmentation: indelible, bacterial, a living scar.

Richard M. Goodman and Robert J. Gorlin

9 of 64

And the dark-whispering lips, a faint horizon drawing you in:

Through seven mountain frontiers barbed wire of rivers and executed forests and hanged bridges I kept coming – through waterfalls of stairways whirlings of sea wings and baroque heaven all bubbly with angels – to you Jerusalem in a frame. Jerusalem, like a dark circle under the eye. The smog is heavy today; but you can just see her, the slight hint of her mitochondrial smile.

Zbigniew Herbert, “Mona Lisa” trans. Peter Dale Scott

It was determined by experts that muggers have a sense of decorum. If you’re alone in the subway and see a suspicious fellow lurking, buy time by lighting a cigarette: create a ritual space, a common countenance.

11 of 64

Protogenes painted a mad dog, but never could get the froth of his rabid muzzle just right; until, rabid himself with frustration, he threw his sponge at the picture, and there it was: perfection. • Lavater said of Socrates, that the muscles of his face made a beauty beyond the wretchedness of his features: thought screened over his ugliness, that was the rocky outcrop of Athenian conscience.

Youth extended past its realm, projected as a dream or nightmare flickering from brow to brow. Wonder at the child’s power of selfabsorption: such is the force that allows her to form her nonexistent future. Children have such amazing energy that it’s exhausting, generally, to be in their presence: they’re so busy inventing realities, living one second in one world, another back where you are. And they oblige you to straddle their abysses with them, so if you’re going to stay, you must simply make yourself enjoy the colored lights below.

13 of 64

The two-headed baby: twins, one a partial effort, cropped out of the top of the other’s head. The secondary head, demoted to parasite, slept at a tangent to the chief head. The rest of us are only slightly less plastic, equally contingent on the completion of processes. One person, one head – but we have two, three, five or more faces; we think with our genitals, our backs, our hearts, our feet; we think with past-minds, future-minds, stomach-minds.

Some believed that women’s imaginations could alter the unborn child. All as a nut, a seed, fold in the embryo, gaps in the medulla oblongata. Every little mistake makes a microphysiognomics, as if an oyster cultivated not one but thousands of pearls. • The silhouette starts as an eyeless blink; the whole body blinks, cutting the shadow out of prior time.

15 of 64

The face takes form through a series of greatly interdependent steps, both genetic and environmental. After birth this slows down and stabilizes. But the chemistry still flows, as through canals with complex locks.

It is yourself walks down this street at five-year intervals, seeing yourself diminishing ahead, five years younger, and five years younger, and young, until the farthest infant has a face ready to grow into any child in the world. – like a nautilus shell, the classic slice-image: in and in, as if there were a face-atom at the smallest point.

Muriel Rukeyser, “4th Elegy”

“Joy makes us hurry from the house; pain makes us enter it. Joy makes us open the window; pain makes us close it.” On the operating table, in the immediate aftermath of a C-section, joy and pain meet on the threshold. Yukiko grimaces at me, a smile like a laceration, palindrome of pain and joy. She shivers from the recent schism. Our son in the nursery is a nutmeat; his face has not yet arrived. A hafu, as they call them: in the street, on train platforms, Japanese mothers abandon their own babies to ogle ours: his face a fusion of hemispheres, “race” confused with ratio.

Paulo Mantegazza

17 of 64

Kaspar Hauser was squeezed out of society like a tear drop. “He was born as an adult into the world, as before that time he was hardly born…” having been denied space enough to make his own world. What was behind such a face? Rather, what lay before such a face – that it could not take form evenly from the pressures of the world, but had instead to absorb everything as a violence or a noise?

Carlo Pietzner

Concentric faces, faces that reach to halo and rescind to pigment; faces that put all into one profile, then jostle back into the jaw or brow, or even a mole placed with astronomical precision.

19 of 64

Am I eagle, lion, bear, goat, sheep, pig? Mixtures, medleys of animals; melees, stews and watering-holes. • Mercurial, seething, the mirror composes. A pool waiting for its ripple, your face. Everything far, red-shifted.

“Our moods do not know one another.” So we’re many moods, therefore many people; conversely, there can be one mood, many people – a mob.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

21 of 64

In a mirror the face is a held breath. The framed space makes an aquarium for the glancing eyes. Sometimes in the mirror you glimpse another face besides your own: the bite of conscience, or the profile just slightly prying from its hinge, then slamming shut again.

Having lost the lower part of her face, she avoided mirrors, but her face sprang up everywhere. Everything’s a mirror, or a surveillance monitor. It’s best not to be too exact in resembling oneself.

Lucy Grealy

23 of 64

The grin, as opposed to the smile: more of the moment, somewhat curled within the moment. In Gombrowicz’ Ferdydurke the hero loses his face in a grimace of disgust; the effect of our hero’s duel with his opponent is that he can no longer escape from his terrible grimaces. What’s a grimace? A hand wrenching the face; poor grammar of expression.

Walk around with your best mirror-face, time flowing backward from reconsiderations into spontaneities. • Kaspar Hauser looked for the first time in a mirror as he had looked at other people, until he put the puzzle together. Imagine looking at a flat, non-ironic reversal of yourself, and you had to assemble the information as if it were delayed in time, as if you needed a map, a sextant and God’s grace just to comb your hair. • Elaine de Kooning, having painted Frank O’Hara, remarked that during the work, she wiped out his face – and it was more Frank than when the face was there.

25 of 64

I knew a woman who had been a model, then married and became a mother with a large red-headed boy who came out unnaturally big – nearly twelve pounds – and when I met her she was pregnant again. In their hallway I saw the headshot, simply framed, from her career days: a diploma into motherhood and out of fashion. Her face in the image, its architectural light and shadow: trademark beauty. But seven months along, standing grand before the picture frame, she seemed betrayed by neither past nor future: not out of fashion, but beyond it.

When she woke, she seemed already made up: cheeks rouged with morning, eyes inside eclipse-marks where the night was still passing through her; and her chthonic beauty, the bottom teeth gleaming above the level lip, the top teeth hidden behind the backlit clouds of her eyes. • Cosmetic gestures, sun and blush. Most of the cosmos is eye shadow: dark matter, the gravity of bedroom eyes, dark rounding the light.

27 of 64

“Leave an incomplete image of oneself.” Character in the Roman sense, or profile; but all expression is in some ways the incompleteness of the face: something indicated, but always a something-else: something under, as in “understood,” something behind the viewer, something just past. • Stature is the only beauty of a man: a gyroscopic balance for those who stand their ground.

Emile Cioran Michel de Montaigne

Her greeting was her beauty, a sense that all was possible; saving them, laying down the sacred in warm tones. Absolute; and everything else bent toward it, as lines toward infinity. The “I” begins in horror at itself.

29 of 64

Iris descends from heaven to urge Helen out to the walls; from there, a view of the assembled familiar faces of the Greeks. In her mind it supplants the tapestry of recent events she’d been weaving in her palace rooms. But then she goes to the king, and it is only in her recital from memory that the soldiers come alive: naming each glorious figure in her exposition to Priam, as the armies stood there on the plain. • She enters her own veils, that sheer her exile into the air; veil on veil, so that she seems to walk out of and into herself. Though some are tempted to deny she’s there at all. Past and present overlap, like the veils.

On the ramparts, there – walls that are not yet in flames: she stands, a small figure, though some have placed her in Egypt. (Consider how beyond adds beauty; though Santayana called it the Immediate.) Her eyes swam in her face and her lips were their own speaking. She was any room’s complexion; every truth began at the apex of her smile. Why does Homer put her grief-song last? She was the fate’s face of distance, full on the horizon, framed by the bluest skies, the calmest seas. …was given the honor or shame of singing last among the four magnificent women – the only one among them who would live. Only a bit bland, despite her beauty, her too-muchness; so that you’d feel, after she had glided out of sight, that you were still looking at her.

31 of 64

Consider the profile of her sparkling nakedness after a bath, the profile just that instant entered, as you glanced; and the shadow of the alcove has barely asserted itself, and still tricks your eyes with the glitter of what you think you might have seen. The shining surfaces of things: what you might try to save if the house caught fire, even if she were gone.

One can be “so evil that his ear is terrified of his tongue,” losing complexion to the scatter of darkness that invades the face. • The outer boundary, purpling of consciousness with fatigue. We can’t exist without our peripheries weaving capillaries of sleep and id through our shadow-skin; my dream is the pith of the morning.

Elias Canetti

33 of 64

Browsing the Atlas of the Face in Genetic Disorders: it loosened my psyche from its fragile stalk, just slightly. “Cloverleaf syndrome”: babies born with trilobed skulls. Thirty cases reported since 1975. Few live past one year; though one child reportedly survived to fourteen. Looking at “normal” faces afterward, I found everyone’s aura slightly askew for several days. Nostrils were obscene; mouths were nests of phlegm; eyes bulged, ears wore their lobes like smashed genitalia. Every face seemed calculated from its genetic malformations and to deserve them. Beauty was a lichen on the rocks. Every asymmetry spoke of an incomplete tragedy; every face was a scar on the air. Until I recovered, time sped up and people melted in their own flames as they passed behind me.

Goodman and Gorlin

The body is a slow, viscous cocktail of fluids. People take on weight, skin wrinkles, sags, changes color; complexions are burned by disease, despair. Hair grows thin, straight, falls out, loses its shine. Eyeballs lose their sparkle, sharpness…sloughed skin, temperature rising and falling over years, a slow burn of the cells. Where is the person we know? Where are you? • The first image of an old friend re-met slides over the last snapshotmemory of the long-ago face. The two faces, young and old, slide over and under one another, and somewhere in between is the recognition – lost forever once it occurs. The same face in photographs will be a different, fictional character in the fable of one’s retellings. This renegotiated presence is someone you might have known, but didn’t: something that was written there from the beginning, not “genetic,” though the genes communicate it: frescoes of golden hours vivid as the day they were painted. Is it people we seek, or events?

35 of 64

On the photograph of Mr. Bennett by Paul Strand, John Berger observes:

His jacket, his shirt, the stubble on his chin, the timber of the house behind, the air around him become in this image the face of his life, of which his actual facial expression is the concentrated spirit. It is the whole photograph, frowning, which surveys us. The brain waits like a bucket for something to come out of the sky, and from between the sun and fields, to fill it up and submerge every conscious thought. Or like Ahab, you seek out the Atlantic of your being, and never return. Would we recognize you if you did?

What amplifies is a mask, what diffuses is a veil. Veils work the face back into the environment; masks make their own environment. • Some faces mask themselves: Cyrano’s, with its eclipsing nose. • A true mask chooses its own face.

37 of 64

Masks are micro-theater; theater was born from them, unfolded from them. The open air of the amphitheater fanned out from the mouthpiece inside the mask. It might make the face larger, amplified; and at the same time simpler, reduced to an expression. • The tacit, the verge of silence, lends to the Noh mask its unlimited expression. Raw expression is denied, and so everything is qualified; everything is a refinement. It is a cinema of the slightest angles: barely a tilt up or down brightens or clouds the mask, and the actor has silently spoken, or been spoken by, the light’s own phrases. • The Benda mask, angled slightly Oriental toward “The American Girl”: beauty at night, of a strength down the hip, held in reserve; top-hatted gentleman outside the stage door, bouquet in hand, waiting. Does he know he’s in love with the mask?

Grandest of all is the Death Mask: for centuries, our final expression – with no expression, spirit having just left the face-muscles, its last effort a pressure back on the skin, to shine. • In the death mask the whole face blinked; and the mask was no longer a confinement. A clock, ready to chime the hour. The death mask fits the face of the observer, the dead soul set sail into brilliant light, and yet we find ourselves in a rounded darkness; and the closed eyes look from behind us. Artwork of mysterious artistry: who made it? The mask-maker was a skilled assistant, to what master? The dead one, “freed at last from the passing grimace.” In his mask he is seen, as it were, with his mask off. Not a mask at all, but a photograph by an inner, fading light. • And the mask is a bare light-bulb dangling from the Hadean ceiling.

Ernst Benkard Laurence Hutton

39 of 64

In the death mask a face comes as close to facelessness as possible: personhood intact but the universal flaring through like a corrosion, extreme rust or rot, fractal breakage creeping in from the other side of the face. • Max Picard calls the face the last boundary stone on the way from eternity to time. The route is reversed in the death mask: “a face on the threshold of the immediate, the faceless.” Something is arriving here; we see that we have not been travelers at all, but that we have been the goal toward which something has journeyed.

The Human Face Arnulf Rainer

What time is it? Early, late, before humanity, long after we’ve gone (you are there, as “you” – the audience, who watch everything, even their own demise). • A mask is first of all the smallest of stages. The smaller frame, the brow, sometimes comes down over the face like its own deity, lifts and rises, writes messages to the eyes. We make theaters with every entrance: walk down the hall in your office building, and you’ll see what psychologists call “the corridor smile”: a tunnel, or perhaps a valve, within the tunnel of passing glances; how the wearer of the smile creates the psychic version of the corridor, where nothing else need transpire but the passing. Our most priceless relationships are nothing more than seconds of someone passing by.

41 of 64

Whoever wants to get to know a man should leave him as quickly as possible. He is in the last place to be found there where he stands. All the time he silently moves away from himself by expressing himself in the world of things. So one can learn to know another best by traveling with him through a country or by looking at a town with him…. …the wending through the streets, adding props to the self. Devils and mimes, models waiting for taxis. Some part of you is always over the horizon; knowledge to feeling, phenomenon to enigma.

J. H. Van Den Berg

The life of the stage is a flow underground, meldings with other stages, roots of trees, worms, the dead; or actors who’ll do anything for work. The movies, however, are in a world without plumbing. Suggestion, quotation, pun, and ample faith: these carry the life of the cinema. And yet we tend to think it’s real. But the theater of old is more real, more like Plato’s cave and the dazed climb back out to Broadway.

43 of 64

To see the face in the Shroud of Turin, stand seven meters back, creating for yourself a small chapel or private screening room. • The faces of madmen were micro-theater, thought Guillaume Duchenne. He believed that any face was beautiful through the accurate rendering of emotions, and called the passions forth with a shock-puppetry of batteries and wire.

At the morgue, a grey old man lay still in a dark corner; freshly dead, and now many times as old as when he died. It was raining, and the window was cracked slightly to let out the smoke from the burning lamps. A line of water crept along the ceiling; drops fell slowly onto the old man’s face, forming new lines that trailed around his mouth, making him smile at his fate – or possibly at ours.

Adapted from Charles Dickens’ The Uncommercial Traveller; with thanks to Angus Trumble

45 of 64

Is immediacy what we experience, or memory? We think of time as tick-tock because moments accordion-fold from one another; we go backward almost as much as forward. • “The idea presents itself that the body-image boundary corresponds in some ways to a screen on which is projected the individual’s basic feelings about his safety in the world.” • You were a beautiful palimpsest; I was immanence dreaming of transcendence. • Terror and hope like profiles left and right. Unfathomably of seas and shipwrecks, but they are of “my” seas, where projection threatens to become perception, a delta.

Seymour Fisher and Sidney Cleveland

Everything a tesseractic cinema as it reaches us. At the same time, an aspect in each of us that always stares the same way like a statue: a line out of the profile, a ray, not the movement forward in time, not destiny, but merely personality vectoring out of the continuous heartbeat. A tesseract attempting to maintain its meta-anatomy and so turning around itself, every word a corner: a shape with 10,000 sides to a side, long and short and occasionally of below-zero extension.

47 of 64

The face is most often a retrospect: someone new reminds us of someone we knew before, a former friend, a “type” we have discovered in our various travels and meetings; familiarity gradually unfolds, and the new and old faces form intersections of doubt and trust. • A face like a leap, personality a miraculous defiance of gravity –

Whenever I faintly imagined the face Of my truest love (at last!) suspended In this the middle distance of my Mind’s dark…. The Holograph waited in the wings; though resemblance of everything made it always essentially so: bodies holographs of souls. Divination made one part of the universe the cousin of every other. Casanova’s acumen told him that a mole on a lady’s face foretold the existence of another, in more hidden parts.

Allen Grossman, “To S –“ In Mantegazza

Claustrophobia is a failure of projection: my face collapses into its grave. They rolled me into the MRI, panic-bulb in my 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 is 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. • 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.

49 of 64

In John Cassavetes’ Faces: read the actors’ eyes, he 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 upon their windows as Gabriels of expulsion, ceilings veined and sweaty, like foreheads.

The Countess’ captive has learned to live for the theater of the keyhole. Optically, we might say, he’s become a woman, and receives the nightly images as pelvic thrusts upon his visual cortex. • Monsieur Robertson, turning out the lights, locking the doors, reveals the cambric screens he has painted with our own deliria; but the blooddrained faces of the audience were in fact the only spirits in the room.

51 of 64

There was a house, “Pierre,” in Hudson Falls: late in the day, if you came upon it from the north side of the street, its roof drooped like a beret, bearded by shadows; and an awning over the door was a moustache. For a moment it was Montmartre in the Adirondacks, a boulevard café; the late afternoon would give you a haughty stare, or a leer, or pay you no mind at all.

Melville saw in Mt. Greylock the boding of his whale. It was not of the author, nor the mountain, nor only the whale, nor even the novel; it was the Last Reader, long yet to be born – buried, in fact, below the mountain.

53 of 64

Astronauts have found that in space we suffer bloodshot eyes, swollen veins; flesh moves upwards, distorting the frame of the face, which loses expressiveness. After how many years aloft would we evolve into clouds? •

One is not a duchess A hundred yards from a carriage.

Wallace Stevens, “Theory”

Max Picard said of Caesar, that his life was like his face: he went no further into the outer world than the world had already gone into him. Should we give to the Caesars such commensurability? Better to say: “I am the edge of an important shadow.” • Our feet become herding creatures, never moving very far in a day, but gods of the grass; our eyelashes settling flies, our hands, lilies; a slight breeze cuts through, polishing the ear bones. Centuries pass.

Theodore Roethke

55 of 64

Stooping to pick something up, a resemblance: a “cameo”: whatever is just large enough to see as we walk, just valuable enough to worry with retrieving. • The removal of nature’s effects: not a darker nature, not the harshness of nature that we wear clothes and build cities against, that we aircondition, so the brain can float around the room like a moth. No, it’s something in the landscape, somewhere in the wake we leave behind us as we travel swiftly through: we make it by forcing it into our blind spots. Think, again, of the painter from life, who must either trust to his hand (as a well-trained apprentice or better still, a rival) or turn to his hand on the canvas and go, for a second or so, on mere faith that the model is there, hasn’t changed, isn’t sticking her tongue out. That instant of blindness is where everything comes from.

For painting young faces, Cennini recommended egg yolk from town hens. For old faces, country hens were best. Tempera is a vivid fleshdream, a congealing film flashing eternal daylight in the villas and chapels. Lizards sunbathe on the stones, moths and small children flit in the windows: so many paintings of the instant, lost for lack of an egg.

57 of 64

Stand in the field and try to look at yourself from several yards away. Your profile, in suppressing its other side, holds the want for depth in thrall. On and on you’ll journey, never leaving your own flatness.

I’m looking at the Yde girl, mummified but still slightly impatient; still a mood there, her face reduced to a single, closed eyelid of waiting; still the map on skin delicately balanced between earth-work and leather, the flicker of a thought slowed down to the speed of loam and season.

59 of 64

Camper’s linea facialis, or “ideal angle” of the jaw, is not a facial virtue but a mirage: something of the thin, warped myths of race. But DNA, the anti-myth, shows us that black and white have more in common than black and black, white and white.

On the wall above my desk I keep a portrait of a man who walked around the globe. Why did he attempt it? To join countenance to circumference; to trace every path to its source; to tie birth and death by a slip knot. Or to escape why altogether, surrendering so heroically to where.

61 of 64

Daylight has its own masks, Greek sparkle and white, chalk and salt. On a sunny day, and when the sun comes out of you equally to the absorption of the outer warmth, everywhere beautiful is Greece; and you feel yourself at the outset of something great.

Not patience, or faith, or paralysis, or anomie; no spirit without flesh; your knuckling little space, your deepest reach, your farthest point of safety, broadest embrace; a lowering of the eyelids that circles the globe.

63 of 64

See the helical dance, a dance of leaves and faces and their mirrors, swirling around until the voice has repeated enough to leave the faintest echo inside the head. True, an echo is reverberation when it enters the body; but let it stay. The poem is neither outside nor inside. • Air numbers the falling leaves, the water-drops, starting over again when it loses count: the starting-over is the point.