Launcher

While we were working together, I looked up: my friend had his camera trained on me. The photographs he generally takes are hauntingly, evocative  and hang in the mind's eye, but that of me is very precise, very clear: extended forehead, black brows, wire-rimmed glasses, one eye showing open, a cryptic expression around the mouth, a smile?, mostly white beard, red striped shirt.

The picture is definitely of me seen at a particular moment from a particular angle.  I recognize you. I've seen  those features in the various mirrors use: the one in the bathroom at home where I examine you closely for overgrown patches, swellings and discolorations, hairs in wrong places, and the one in the men's room at work where I inspect you for presentability, and sometimes mug to shake off professional seriousness for a moment.

I don't see in the mirror, however, who I see in the photo. You in the photo are maybe smiling, maybe not, arch or perhaps sly, somber or possibly puckish. You're lifting your head, or letting it down. You're about to say something or you're deep in your own thoughts. You've made contact with the camera lens or are looking past it. All this ambiguity.

When I look in the mirror, I know what I'm doing and why. I'm confronting myself forthrightly. I understand my motives, my next move. I perform for myself.

At the other extreme, in class there are moments when, observing the faces of students, I realize that a suite of intriguing (to them) micro-expressions has swept across my face. What they are and how to reproduce them, I don't care to know, though this is part of the self-knowledge of professional actors.

Between the self-conscious and the unself-conscious is you in the photo, not one who responds or is responded to, but an image of someone caught in the act. I confess I didn't like you at first but, looking at you longer, you grow on me. You're up to something. What is it?

Perhaps there's a lesson here on how to look at portraits generally: seeing those visages as the meeting places of myriad sets of options. Perhaps this is what I love about people watching generally: the sense that what I see in a glance has an ambiguity that suggests life behind.

The most expressive square inches in the world? Able to put topless towers to the torch? Maybe faces are all this. Your face, my hearty, gets its power from being on the verge, rather like a particle confronted with the physicist's double slits. Which will it choose? My workaday persona resolves these questions over and over, but, hopefully, not too definitively.