Vis-à-Vis

Face to Face

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Listen Here- Author Read

Time doesn’t change people.
Time reveals the real face of people.
Unknown

Photo © by J.Millard

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My eyes always seem to return - empty handed.
Do I see presence or see into it?
I don’t need eyes to experience presence. I don’t have to see presence to sense that it is there. An encounter with the other. Something beyond the self. Beyond the I. A we. A living presence. An invitation. Does the other give me a face? Maybe envisaging flows both ways? Do we create eachother?
Face-to-Face. Vis-à-Vis.

Face to Face

Do we see it or see into it?
The face given or the face made.
It’s the way she returns our gaze.
A delicate rosy cheeked sheen of opacity 
born from eyes that spring
from the flesh of curving lips
blending into a bend of expressions.
Blurred in the brushstrokes of feelings,
just out of focus.
Leaving me homesick
for a place I’ve never been.

The little old man at the end of the road
Sags tattered on stick.
Lines exposed.
Bevelled bones.
Six palms to a cubit.
Body curving mortally
towards the spirit of the depths.
Wisdom grows down into the world.
Rooted in another gravity.
Age has found its face.
Do we see it or see into it?

Stories come for us.
Does the visible face ever fit
the imagined image?
Does a shadow hide the face
we had before the world was made?
Mystery - She smiles.
We come apart. To live. To leave.
To come together. Twisted.
Into pieces. As a whole.
Speaking silence. Singing sonorously.
Seeing. Into another light.
Awakened to the night.
The imagination sings loudly.
An intellectual humility.
Knowing into the what we don’t know.
Giving up control.
Adjusting the wisp of the tiller in a torment.
The new in the old.
The old in the new.
The body knows when it touches soul.
Wind song drenched in wine.
Oxygen and blood.
Hercules could never age.
Only go mad and lose his strength.
Do we see it or see into it?

Life paints.
Many different perspectives read a story.
To see a face. Do we read all the lines.
There are many views of the same scene.
Many ways to be seen without eyes.
To see into the skin.
To scent a taste in the wise silence
of spaciousness.
The world has a face.
Emerging as expanding lines.
The amygdala of ambiguity
gazes back at us. As the mystery.
Watching us from every angle.
With subtle smile. A blend of feelings
blurred by our interpretation of the visible. 
We frame things and then we see
everybody and everything through that lens.
Clapping with one hand.
The song doesn’t belong to time;
time gathers around the song.
Lilith roams in the dark. Entered into.
She rouses sleep from dream.
Dream from sleep.
In our way out of the skin of a self.
We shrivel into the salt of soul.
Do we see it or see into it?

Does soul have a face?
Smooth? Cracked? Creased?
Facing in? Facing out?
Do we become our faces?
The lines. The illusion.
Does the mirror lie?
Do we see it or see into it?

What is our naked face?
The ancestral weaves its lines
into what the personal paints.
Genetics. Passion. Geography. 
Scars. Fate. 
Visible and invisible. People. Place.
We stare into utter vulnerability.
The blade. The colours. The ink. 
The bling. A call for change sings. 
Into a covering. A disguise.
A mask is a sum of lines.
Concealing. Revealing.
Maybe we don’t have a face. 
We are a face. 
The whole image can never fully show.
It smiles through. A glimpse.
An expression.
In moments. It curves. It bends.
A face is a blending of all those lines.
Into essence. A presence.
Do we see it or see into it?

The face given or the face made?
Aging is a metaphor of biology.
Biology blends into art.
Breathing into all of the lines.
Reading between the lines.
Smile.
Something is smiling back.
Looking into us.
Do we see it or see into it?

© Jamie Millard

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Suggested Readings

1. James Hillman. The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life. 2000

2. Don McKay. “The Bushtits’ Nest”- Thinking and Singing, Poetry and the Practice of Philosophy. 2002

3. Emmanuel Levinas. Totality and Infinity. Alphonso Lingis translation. 1969

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Thanks for Being- Here.
For reading the blending of lines. For stepping into the spaces between the lines. For living the questions. Into Cuoreosity.
Face-to-Face.
Vis-à-Vis.

Lots of Love,

Jamie

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