Masks

1200 words, 6 minute read

Imagine I am one of those modern men who love to bake; I’m not. But if I were, I’d bake to relieve stress, to satisfy my own sweet tooth, to create gifts for friends and donations to local bake sales; but I would not call myself a ‘baker’.

Baking is something I’d do by choice, not something I’d be. I am not a baker, I am not even someone who bakes, I just bake. To do is a verb, not a noun, nor an adjective.

I could bake every day of my life and still not ‘be a baker’. On the other hand, when I was in my 20’s I had a job one night a week making donuts for the Sunday AM after church crowd. Then I was a baker!

There is a differance (Jacques Derrida) between baking and being a baker. The differance is infinitesimal, imperceptible to the world, and yet it makes all the difference to me (є → ∞, the smallest possible perturbation may trigger the largest possible consequence).

Baking is the free act of an intentional agent; ‘being a baker’ is a reduction of one’s identity, at least in part, to a series of repetitive motions and a static social role. So what? What’s the big deal? Well, baking, I confirm my identity as one made in the image and likeness of God, a co-creator, being a baker reduces me to the status of a cog in a machine, along with a butcher and a candlestick maker.

***

Dressed for Halloween, my three year old grandson objected to my use of the word ‘costume’; he insisted that he wasCaptain America. Pretending was not in his arsenal yet. To his credit, he was never other than himself, no matter what form that self might take. Doing and being had not yet decohered for him. Although he was wearing a mask, he hadn’t learned to mask-up; he had not learned to prepare a face for the faces that he meets. (Eliot)

I am not like him at all, quelle domage. I am a veritable museum of masks. I don’t remember a life that did not consist of playing roles, beginning with the role of ‘well behaved, precocious little boy’. (I must say I played that one with aplomb.)

But even through the mists of early childhood, I sensed that I was not who I was pretending to be. Not that I was someone or something else; rather, I was no-thing (without the negative connotation that has for adults).  

Sidebar: When someone says to an adult, “You’re nothing,” it’s heard as a cruel insult. The implication is that you’ve tried a number of roles and failed at all of them. But to a toddler, the sense of ‘being nothing’ is strangely comforting: I get to watch myself! Adults spend years with gurus and fortunes on self-help hucksters just to relearn the art of mindfulness that is natural to under 6’s. 

Mindful, I don’t have to be any of the roles I assume (thank God) but neither do I have to hide behind a mask. I am free to be ‘me’, which is nothing being anything I choose to be.

***

Although masks are one-ply, the obverse image (objective, world-facing) is almost always different, sometimes massively so, from the reverse image (subjective, self-facing).

Extreme example: Subjectively, I am the 2^nd coming of Christ; objectively, I am a lunatic.

More Typical: Subjectively, I was a high school athlete; objectively… well, you get the picture.

Here folks will object: “How can the reverse image (smooth athlete) be so different from the obverse (awkward nerd)? Don’t they have to form a perfect template? Isn’t that what ‘inside/outside’ means?”

Yes, that is what ‘inside/outside’ means…to Archimedeans!  But have you ever seen an episode of Dr. Who, the long-running BBC Syfy series? The co-star of this show is an ordinary public phone box (exterior) that happens to house a gigantic, hexagonal, command center (interior). (Parrot’s Beak,1970?) The phone booth is a mask.

We are deeply indebted to Archimedes and his predecessor, Euclid, for insights that made modern science possible; but now we have to crawl out from under their shadow. The world is only sometimes, and then only approximately, Euclidean. Non-Euclidean and non-Archimedean geometries open the door to profoundly different models which can help explain many of life’s perceived paradoxes.

In a non-Archimedean framework, there is no fixed connection between the interior and exterior volumes of a space. For example, there is no algorithm that would allow you to deduce interior dimensions by measuring exterior ones. Two-faced masks pose no problem, as long as you’re not an Archimedean.

So I am essentially neant (Sartre), accidentally identifying with various well defined roles. Each role is a mask, of course, but my private subjective image of that role (who I am for me), the inside contour of my mask, is very different from the public objective image (who I am for you), the outside surface. And contrary to Bobby Burns, I say, “Thanks be to God/ That he has hidden/ My outer visage from my inner.” I have no desire to see myself as others see me!

Analogy: the intricate observe pattern of an oriental rug with its multiple axes of symmetry cannot be intuited by examining the chaotic jumble of knots that constitute its underside.

***

I will not bore you with a list of the masks I’ve worn. Nor will I belabor the obvious differences between the reverse and obverse images of each. But I will throw just a few at you to give you a hint of the breadth of things I’ve pretended to be:

Educator, community organizer, politician, revolutionary, hippie, monk, retail clerk, salesman, entrepreneur, homme d’affairs, retiree, arm chair philosopher and on-line publisher. And this is not even to mention my roles as lover, spouse, parent (grand), friend -  in addition to my previously confessed roles of child, nerd, and donut maker.

Typically, a living organism is separated from its environment by a permeable membrane, like skin. Molecules, ions, energy and information flow back and forth as mediated and regulated by the membrane. This is not that!

A mask is not a permeable membrane. It is a Markov Blanket (MB). Nothing interior to the mask can communicate with anything exterior and vice versa. We would appear to have created a solipsistic self…but that fails to take full account of MB’s unusual properties.

To repeat, my mask is a Markov Blanket. My ‘interior self’ communicates with MB and MB communicates with ‘exterior world’ on my behalf. Unlike my grandson, I prepare a face for every face I meet.

It is said that in Boston, Lowels talk only to Cabots and Cabots talk only to God. True to my home town heritage, I talk only to my masks and only my masks talk to you. Sorry.