Auerbach's Faces

Wandering tribes have such looks, the bones of one tribe, the skin of another.
---Bellow, 'Seize the Day'.

Too many lives go into the making of one

Stone face, frozen spirit; yet there is no hint of melancholy here. For that one needs two moments, one needs the past: here there is only the unbearable weight of the present; the final instant, with all of its gravity, its earth boundedness, holds our gaze in a quiet rapture.

The subdued flickering of a grey flame: a soul that grimly but determinedly looks out and upwards to a heaven it doesn't believe in. Other faces look inwards, calmly, half-resigned to their fate, wondering if in these late days self-reflection isn't anything but a futile gesture. A face that is closed in on itself: a muddy icon to the sunken realities of the south, to a vision that is unable to see north of the future..

The lines of the face, the patterns of being, are incoherent close up. We must be at just the right distance to see the true self. A step in either direction....Only at a distance, at the edge of possible perceptions, does each face express its unique death-thought. It is as if only at the frontiers of existence do we see reality for what it really is. And this thought is something that a human being carries with him all along but only now, and only with great effort, does it come to the surface. So now, when we look again, we see an oblique line and think that the essential style of soul of this person was quiet despair; another, whose lips are at an angle, was cunning but there is an element of sadness, bitterness, even, at him being so. It is as if knowledge increaseth our sorrow.

What stands out in these pictures is the violence, the force of the paint brush. The fantastic desire to build layer upon layer of complexity on to the human face. It is this dedication and concentration, perhaps, that is the only thing that stands against the dissolution of time, the slow depletion to to other places. And in this there is a wonderful poetic lyricism of the finite.

Two nights ago I saw my father, my Jew, in a dream. His hair was fully grown, thick like I remember it from the old black and white photographs but, more than that, it had the shape that one sees in certain icons. This impression was reinforced by a face that was narrower than usual, a face with a stubble and significantly darkened...as a Kashmiri he'd be horrified by that!. But there was a deep and sound peace to this face, one of utter tranquility. Is it that we see the true face of other people-and ourselves-only in dreams now?

{since lines and dreams seem to want to come together today}