Mask

The face she shows me is like a mask, frozen, heavy eyes and mouth. She takes pictures when I'm reading or drawing to send to our grandson. It looks inert, not at all alive, though I'm happily busy behind.  What role does this mask represent?  Or are all ny other expressions the roles? When I'm with people, am I just hoisting my features out of their easy chair and into motion? Is there life in the warping and twisting of the mask?

Yet the mask itself is freedom. I saw this recently when I handed out scripts for us to perform in class. Set situations playing out and roles to perform in them sometimes liberate my students. I remember one person whose voice register changed, and began investing her words with expression, and gestured even to touching the arm of the other student in the class playing a different role. She hurdled smoothly those complex sequences of consonants that so bedevil English learners. The words she said were the responsibility of someone else. She was able to go beyond them to what she knows from her life: how people react in different circumstances. She was able to speak from the inside.

At a bar or a dinner party, I don my 'jollyiness', and feel free to quip, laugh, play-act, make dance moves, and enjoy myself in ways I don't when alone or at home. Out, I'm Mr Bon Vivant; at home, Mr Bruin. Which one is the mask? Both?

Part of my reticence when meeting or finding myself in groups with new people is perhaps due to this: I find myself with no clear sense of what mask I should put on to cue that set of ready-made responses that allow me the mind space to deploy the things I do confidently know. For me, a social barrierf; or my students, a linguistic one. We want to get over it to what we know we know that's under the surface.

The mask allows us to unrecognizable to ourselves. Would my student have ever known herself as a stick-in-the-mud teacher of Greek and Latin in rural 19C Russia coping with unexpected romance? It's a role worth exploring. The script allowed her to go beyond the technical challenge of the words to what was interesting, even profound, in the character and plot.

As I encounter you, God-in-love, I wear masks that are sometimes comfortable, and sometimes a challenge. The reader at the kitchen table is easy for me to play. The role of the generous is something I find more difficult. I wear that mask to explore what it feels like, while for others, it's like the feel of water for the fish.

What about you, my lover yet other? Which masks do you easily wear, lapse into without thinking, and which ones arouse you, draw you out, teach you what you wouldn't otherwise learn? Like my housemate photographer, I''m on the watch.