Djelloul Marbrook

My barber says we have lopsided faces. One ear droops longer than the other; one eyebrow arches while the other flat-lines; one corner of the mouth turns down—one marvels at the asymmetry of life. To say nothing of the fact that quite a few of us (some would say all of us) are cock-eyed.

I’ve always had a keen appreciation of the lopsidedness of things. I love heresies. They’re so much more interesting than orthodoxies. Doris Lessing once wrote a book, Briefing for a Descent Into Hell, about a man who hears people think. It’s such a dangerous idea we put people in asylums for indulging it. It certainly is a kind of hell. But I think some of us can live with one foot in my reality and another in yours: one foot in the magical lopsidedness of things, and the other in that no-man’s land between the faces we wear and the thoughts we think.

My fate in life has been to spend a lot of time in that country. It’s full of sinkholes and vipers. You have to watch your step. But if you live there long enough you’ll have no fear of hell.

Micro-expressions flash across our faces continuously. And we’re not as good at reading them as we think we are. A contemptuous half-smile, for example, may be read as approval, and it doesn’t take much imagination to see where that can lead. Cops like to think they’re good at reading micro-expressions, but who knows if the statistics bear them out? We all know what it feels like to be misread. The notion persists that people who look you straight in the eye are telling you the truth, but I can’t begin to tell you how many liars I’ve known who looked me straight in the eye, or, for that matter, how many truthsayers sent their gazes crawling up walls while telling me the truth.

We may find out truth has a certain odor, like pheromones. I don’t know if I’ve ever smelled the truth, but I sure as hell have smelled some lies in my time. Maybe I can’t describe their odor. It’s not exactly mouldy. It’s certainly not rank. But I wouldn’t want to sleep with it, and I’m sure it doesn’t wash out as easily as blood, and we all know, don’t we, that you have to wash out blood fast? If you let lies set, anything can happen. They can even get you into a war.

Oscar Wilde remarked that by the time we’re forty we pretty much have the faces we deserve. I love the observation, but my experience suggests it’s a half-truth. I’ve known many people who’ve sneaked into their middle and old ages without deserving their faces. I think we like to think we’re good at reading faces because we dread a world where we can’t. We have skills we can’t cop to without being marked down as loonies or pretenders. Children struggle with these hidden skills, and adults try to talk them into believing they don’t have them, which I’ve never thought a particularly adult thing to do. But what do I know? I’m still trying to grow up. I think it’s a task at which most of us fail, otherwise why would we be borrowing money from China to make war in Iraq? Can this be cast in an adult light?

My mother tried to inhabit that no-man’s land back in 1953 when she made a painting called She Had Many Faces. A big faceless tattooed lady sits on a stool holding a clutch of masks on strings. She can wear any one of these faces, but underneath will always be the enigma of the faceless
lady wearing a black heart around her neck and sitting under an eclipsed moon. I knew the women who posed for those faces. Some of them rest with my mother in Artists’ Cemetery, Woodstock, New York. I think only one of them would have approved of her own mask. But an artist has prerogatives, as do we all when we look each other in the face and strain to hear each other’s thoughts and don’t always see the face we’re supposed to see.

What I’m contending here is that some of us don’t have to strain too much, because some of us know we were born in the loony bin.