Shorthand disclosure of our souls?

Has it never struck you how odd it is, our obsession with that we which we call your face?

An arbitrary assortment of exposed organs – enveloped by a high concentration of precise, minuscule muscles – lie scattered throughout this patch of skin we use to comprehend the world, and for the world to comprehend us. One can intuitively understand what the face is, but a significantly more peculiar matter to concern oneself with is what the face is not, yet we treat it as it were. Aside from its material constituents, we attribute an infinitude of immaterial worth to the face in this primitive fixation of ours.

When you stare into the mirror, what stares back?

After all, our face is one of our most regularly deployed, albeit occasionally mishandled, assets. In interactions, it functions as our instant introduction and, if there is any, as our lasting impression. We, too, modulate our professional and personal lives with it, decorate our virtual footprints with it, and construct photographic monuments to worship – or agonize over – its structural makeup. Further, we communicate with its subtle movements, exchanging wordless whispers and betraying our inexpressible emotions. 

Above all else, with a glance at it, we brand our friends and foes. By a face’s constitution, we judge where in society its bearer belongs, defining how to treat the person underneath. We derive conclusions of the kind of man one encounters before he could ever make a case for himself: never do words part his lips before we have concluded who he is. Reflexively, many of us then draw conclusions about what we are from our faces. For if our faces define how others and thus we are treated, as they modify our experience of the universe so, certainly they must be an inherent part of us. At times, we even forget that there is anything beyond our faces. For, indeed, we treat our faces as shorthand disclosure of our souls, as the core component to which we ascribe our identity. Because if we are not our face, what else could we possibly be?

Strange then, how our faces melt and bend and tear without touching who we really are. We age, continuing to be, as our face shifts and turns, shaping itself by natural laws independent of our psychological wills. Through our lives, we remain, even though it changes in its entirety, at times even by our own making. We disguise it, paint over it, restructure it, administrate it, drug it, expand it, and crusade many more rebellions against our biology, but ultimately we are not the ones in control of this underlying soulless subject. These reincarnating tissues are living surfaces which we stumbled upon, the cosmic dice determined they were for us to obtain, not manifestations of what is truly beneath, nor any intentional selection. 

Strangely, we permit so much of our self worth to be tied to said extension of flesh, despite not one part of it being, truly, us. You can continue to be without an eye or a cheek, no? 

We peer into the mirrors, the reflection staring back hauntingly, as we gaze intently into something alien to what we are, yet functions as if it were us. We can touch it and caress it with our other appendages, sensing its influences and affects into the recess of our minds; as we can equally exert our will, spontaneously push its organic buttons and pull its carnal levers, into its motions. Different from machine indubitably, but inarguably different from personhood. What remains? Is such a question intelligible?

And yet we have no choice but to proceed as if it were us. In such a superficial, interconnected society such as the one we inhabit, empires rise and fall on the composition of a face. Politically, economically, or otherwise we have the capacity to attribute power across vast distances on the basis of appearance alone. We witness it in our institutions, in our blind beliefs, in our relationships. Our instincts compel us to select our partners, in love and crime alike, and bind them to our bodily attractions. This assigning of worth from dust which, in a given moment in spacetime assembles your face, is inculcated and reinforced since before our very birth. The chemical interaction that underlies our psychology rewards us when determining beneficial behavior. But what greater offense to our reason, our capability to be more than the hand which physics has dealt us, than to not exercise our intellect? To succumb without contest to the wirings of our brain, at the cost of what we could hope to be – no sadder fate.

Therefore, the challenge reveals itself: rebel against our materialistic tendencies and societal falsities by reducing our faces to what they have always been, something that is in fact neither determinant nor constituent of who you are or could be. 

Perhaps, it is due time to come face-to-face with the reality of our infatuations. We may continue to engage with them, naturally, we need not adjust our conduct. Nevertheless, we must do so with great cognition, whilst aware of our limitations and evident faults, such that we may never be controlled by them. For we must always pursue that which we desire, that which we aspire: the uncompelled exertion of our will against the materialization of physical executions, which compound into giving form to that which we call a face. That which is us, but is not us at all. So how could it ever possess our will?