Arthaus: Masks

 Arthaus: Day Eleven



Once upon a time, a little girl lived on the edge of a dark forest.

Thomas Prentke laid out 10 masks on the floor in their bags in front of us before the space. He wants the mask virgins to start first, probably not wanting to color their experience. Up went 5, and then another 6. I was struck again by how telling everybody's bodies were without their faces. How one kept backing away from everyone. How 5 females checked in with each other before checking out the male. How one had her hands in her pockets. How - slowly - through trial and error, 5 found themselves in a circle. Negotiating the personal space between them.

You are not the first person to have worn it. Nor the second. Nor even the third.

The neutral masks lay in a straight line on their bags, and I knew, without knowing, which one I was going to pick up as I did it. As I picked it up and felt its texture again, for a moment I felt intensely the immensity of the number of bodies that had been in it prior. How the leather has been biten. There were a few dents in the once-new mask, a couple of blemishes, but otherwise still faithfully serving its purpose. The mask had bigger eyes than I remember, and I could not bring myself to push my fingers through its eyes. I toyed with placing my cheeks on its cheeks, and then closing my fingers over its nostrils. I removed my fingers quickly, as though fearing it couldn't breathe. Flipping it over, I appreciated for the first time how the insides looked pained, angry even. Even though the outside looks so open. The mask knows we suffer, and rushes to meet that on the inside, and molds that away into a sacredly neutral face, in order to present our beautiful bodies to the world.

You may feel like YES! You've suddenly achieved nirvana, or that you're channeling the gods, or indeed, that you've reached the pinnacle of enlightenment. Or perhaps you may just find it hard to breathe.

I slipped the mask over my face and stayed connected to the ground. A curious mask. I had two points of curiosity: Myself and other people. A little limiting, but what can you do? I was born to be curious about humans. Noticing that the others were deeply in thrall of themselves (did I say that loud? I mean, their masks), I turned my attention back inwards and rose to a vertical. Pulling myself to the vertical, I must strike a tragic figure, with my arms akimbo and mask raised to the heavens. Isn't that what vertical means?

Now I want you to open your jaws a little. Allow a soft focus to come into your eyes. Widen your peripherals so that you can see all 360 degrees around you.

Imagining that I had insectoid eyes, I opened my jaws wide, and my eyes even wider. And then I started playing with the space. I moved a little to the left, a little to the right, forward and back, trying to map out the space with my 360 degree eyesight. For the most part, I could feel a void when someone left a position behind me, but their destination was a little unclear. I need to work on my heat tracking skills. And then I walked almost in a circle around the group, probably in a comical manner with my hands swing-dangling in front. Konstantsa would later say that this was around the time she noted that my neo-cortex was barely functioning, and that I was allowing myself to be in there. And I did feel pretty present. Almost like I had a game I was playing by myself, whether or not the other people or the audience was involved. I was curiously present, because I had given myself the pointless task of mapping the space, nothing more, and nothing less.

We have many layers of the brain, from the neo-cortex all the way to the reptilian brain. The mask allows us access to different layers in between. Some may find themselves flying around the space, others crawling. Note also that the mask is made of animal leather. So whether or not you find yourself in your primal state, you might notice that you are wearing animal hide on your face.

I might have gained an access, through soft focus, into being more present. Time to find a way to train myself into accessing that layer of consciousness more. Like a fucking asian.

And then we had a rhythm class, taught by the delightful Philip. Passed some percussion fruits, and sang some songs with a drum. Writing about this may feel a little pedantic, because his exercises were brilliantly focused on getting us to feel 1,2,3,4 or 1,2,3,rest/holiday/space. I want to go to Africa and drum dance at some point in my life.


Tomorrow I have to bring a myth. I shall do the one about Baldur. Something about an overly protective mom.

Published on
7/30/19 12:07 AM

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