Art, said Coomaraswamy, is nothing tangible. The thing made is a work of art but the art remains in the artist. Sometimes we are lucky and we see something of the artist in the art. These faces all live in the British Museum, torn from their own time and place, but when you look into their gently empty eyes for one moment you can share their lives. Each one of these faces had a model, a muse, each one of these faces was a person with hopes, dreams, a future. Did they wonder about an aferlife, did they know they would be remembered after they were gone?
Have I said it before? I am learning to see. Yes, I am beginning. It's still
going badly. But I intend to make the most of my time.
For example, it never occurred to me before how many faces there are. There
are multitudes of people, but there are so many more faces, because each person
has several of them.
There are people who wear the same face for years;
naturally it wears out, gets dirty, splits at the seams, stretches like gloves
worn during a long journey. They are thrifty, uncomplicated people; they never
change it, never even have it cleaned. It's good enough, they say, and who can
convince them of the contrary? Of course, since they have several faces, you
might wonder what they do with the other ones. They keep them in storage. Their
children wear them. But sometimes it also happens that their dogs go out wearing
them. And why not? A face is a face.
Other people change faces incredibly fast, put on one after another, and wear
them out. At first, they think they have an unlimited supply; but when they are
barely forty years old they come to their last one.
There is, to be sure,
something tragic about this. They are not accustomed to taking care of faces;
their last one is worn through in a week, has holes in it, is in many places as
thin as paper, and then, little by little, the lining shows through, the
non-face, and they walk around with that on.
But the woman, the woman: she had completely fallen into herself, forward
into her hands. It was on the corner of rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. I began to
walk quietly as soon as I saw her. When poor people are thinking, they shouldn't
be disturbed. Perhaps their idea will still occur to them.
The street was too empty; its emptiness had gotten bored and pulled my steps
out from under my feet and clattered around in them, all over the street, as if
they were wooden clogs. The woman sat up, frightened, she pulled out of herself,
too quickly, to violently, so that her face was left in her two hands.
I could
see it lying there: its hollow form. It cost me an indescribable effort to stay
with those two hands, not to look at what had been torn out of them. I shuddered
to see a face from the inside, but I was much more afraid of that bare flayed
head waiting there, faceless.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Faces
Life goes on, the world turns. Most of today's non-entity celebrities will be forgotten by the time the chips are cold.
