.: It is approaching year 0, or at least our celebration thereof; and I can feel ol’ D&G’s �faciality� emerging in profile. Here, as the temperature drops below 0, I find myself bemused at our conventions of the cold: we wrap ourselves in such insulations, our torso and legs and hands all bundled, but we leave our face– arguably one of our most expressive and essential aspects– naked to the elements. Mine is just weathered enough to feel the cold less painfully than my hands– taking pictures today has been excruciating. But it only took a few turtle-like retreats to keep my face from the frozen ache of cold-blistered nerve endings. Why is that? Is the skin stretched so tight? Do the nerves work for a grimace, but not to sense? Why then is the slap so painful– is it only the shame, or perhaps not shame but the dangerous affront to the sacred anatomical landscape of the face, our unique self in compressed visual form?

I cannot say. I know that I would rather put on garish mittens than cover my face with a scarf. Perhaps this goes down that psychological road where masks cover our identities and permit us license, but our faces we conceive as our actual selves, but then again, that sounds a little too Lord of the Flies for our present meditation.

All I really know is, I seek out the face. I remember the 1st time I went to New York City and I fell in love with so many faces; such a wide range of bones, of eyes, of lips and noses, I never knew that there could be so much differentiation so close to my own world; I certainly thought I had to go at least to Europe. My young and inexperienced heart was pierced with amorous arrows every subway stop. I know I have been accused– by myself, most of all– with an overindulgent preoccupation on other anatomical phenomena; but when I get down to the core of it, it is the face that arrests, captivates, and beguiles me. It is the only real clue I have to the possibility that others share a subjectivity– and I– similar to my own, and in that, it is an epiphany.