Frankly Speaking

Frank Crocitto

What’s in a Face?

I resolved not to say a word about this turning of the year and the century and the millennium. There’s been so much hoopla about it, and when there’s a lot of hoopla you suspect there’s not much significance in it. So why bother? No one’s going to pay much attention.
But now that it is mid-January and most of the wind has died down, I’ve reconsidered my resolution. I’m beginning to think better of it. Something in me is changing my mind. There are one or two words to say. And who’s going to say them if I don’t? So I will.
On top of all this I’ve just been told—by our soon-to-be-cannonaded editor, the blessed Brian Mahoney, may his soul fluster in peace—that though the Chronogram purports to be a magazine of “arts, culture and spirit” it is woefully lacking in spirit and that I, and I alone, represent and, on my two-winged shoulders, uphold the spirit side of things. An immense responsibility, which I do not take darkly. I shall do my part.
So now, I gather all my mixed and contradictory ideas, feelings, urges and what-not, I garner all my opposing inspirations, and bind them and bundle them into one forceful thrust. I summon all I have, with a hope to be aided from above, to speak with significance and spirit of this turning that we have willy-nilly made into the new millennium and what it might portend.
January, with its saber-toothed winds and heart-slaughtering frosts, hardly seems the time for turning. But those who plan our fate create a calendar to trace it by, and they say that January is when the turn of the year comes. So be it. And so in this time stirs the urge for another kind of turning, the turning of a new leaf. We want to make a fresh start. Perhaps the dead of winter is the perfect time, rather than waiting for the spring. This may well be the time that each leaf makes its decision in the soul of the tree that will manifest in green flags and flowers in springtime and ultimately plump fruit in the fall. Perhaps the ancients weren’t so wrong in making this chilly time the turning point of the year.
They named this time January, in deference or honor to the two-faced god, Janus, guardian of gates and doorways. He is the god who faces two ways at once. He faces opposite ways. He looks to what has been and what can be.
Even among gods, I’ll have you know, out-and-out two-facedness was not standard operating procedure. The gods were one-faced, for the most part. For them there was only one thing to look at—the bright effulgence of divinity. For that they needed but a single face. Oh, yes, some of them had façades and some like Zeus and his goose had disguises and some dissemblances. But those Olympian masks were due to excess of high spirits and the divine predilection for hi-jinks. Such mischief can be pardoned in a god. Anyway, a mask is one thing and a face is another.
Like most of the inhabitants of the heavens, and unlike Janus, we humans are one-faced creatures, however hard we may strive to be otherwise. We are constitutionally unable to face in more than one direction at any given moment of time. To face another direction we must turn; and in our turning, we give what we had previously been facing our back. Front or back, one way or the other, like it or not—that’s the way it is with us.
There’s power in a face. Medusa’s face could turn a man to stone. And Helen’s face, they say, launched a thousand ships and burnt some topless towers. And once a woman burned her face so definitely on my retina that I could see nothing but her anyplace I looked, and when I looked on other women they seemed to become her, and often when I looked on mere empty air she seemed to materialize. For that face I would have flung myself into the jaws of hell.
But the power in a face is evidenced not merely in the effect it has on the hearts of men and ships at sea. This is what a face can do upon things external to it. But a face, more importantly, can affect the very being who possesses it. It can determine a person’s fate.
A face epitomizes the whole being. Every part of the body has a corresponding spot on the face. All our inclinations and desires are reflected on it. Our whole life history is written in the lines and hollows of it. Portrait-painters and sculptors know this well.
Since our face sums up who we are, it matters what we point it towards. We are always facing something. Whatever we face becomes the goal, and as long as we persist in facing it to that extent do we become it. Our life, our destiny, depends upon what we turn our face toward.
In the old days men turned their faces toward the king. They gazed upon him, attended to him and in the process became like him. Each in his own right became kinglike: noble and free. They became what they worshipped. When some turned their backs to the king and faced other lesser things they became those lesser things. If they preferred to adore beasts, real or carved, they came bestial. Ah, an astounding power resides in one-faced creatures.
Only humans have faces; animals have fronts to their heads. Though some animals, like dogs, seem to be aspiring toward facehood: They look at humanity with such longing…So here we are, in the vestibule of the millennium, in what may be the dawning of a new age: What are we looking at, what are our faces turned toward, what are we worshipping?
All this is not metaphor. There are real examples. Haven’t you seen a man and wife who have been looking at one another over the kitchen table for so long they look like brother and sister? Remember Frank Perdue, that indomitable worshipper of poultry: with each new commercial he began to look and sound more and more fowl. And Narcissus, that drowsy boy, gazing at his ephemeral reflection in a pool: lo, he becameth naught but a dream.
Narcissus is emblematic of the worst that is in us. Poor boy, whatever he was looking at he thought was himself. Deluded, he gave all his attention to that shimmering reflection. What that reflection looked like and, in his benighted fantasy, what that reflection thought and felt and wanted was his all in all. The ease, the peace and satisfaction of that reflection, to the exclusion of all the world of real things, was all that mattered. He had turned his face to the face floating on the dark pool and become its devotee. He fell in love with it. And as we all know, he drowned in the attempt to become it. Alas, it was nothing but a pale reflection. Poor boy.
It’s January. And it’s bitter cold. And it’s about time somebody says something about how crucial it is to turn our faces to something higher than we are. What we turn our face to is what we countenance. What we turn our face to is what we will become. We’ve tried everything else; why not turn toward truth?
Someone, a wiser man than I, put it in a nutshell long ago. He spoke another language and he suffers a bit in translation, but what he essentially said was:
Unless you change your ways and turn your face toward Truth you shall become less than nothing. But if you turn toward Truth you shall become who you really are.