All of my masks
Jiufen was an hour-or-so trip from my hotel via Taiwan’s convenient train system. While the metro could get you to the bottom of Jiufen’s mountain, heading up the winding roads to the tourist-filled alleyways took wild twists and turns in an old, stuffed bus.
That day it was raining in Jiufen, making for soggy mountaintops and umbrella-clad shop owners. I was heading up various open stairwells to find a famous rice cake shop in some crevice of the area, when around one corner I found the red wall of masks. It was what is called the “house of ghost masks” by its owner; horrifying, body-horror, trypophobic, and right up my alley.
Masks have always been an area of devotion to certain friends of mine. Artists and performers I know love them for their transformative quality–something about swapping in another face literally changes you into someone else, revealing something about the nature of humanity. Makes sense to me.
Some find masks as a tool to hide, but others use it as a gateway to discover new characters, new attitudes you hope to adopt, your “true self”.
If I had to pick a mask I thought I wore everyday, it would probably be one vacillating between the two masks in the center of the photo; stoic and jolly, humorous and content. Perhaps on other risky days I’m the strawberry mask, or the one full of holes in the bottom right.
I don’t believe one ever is without a mask, though. Even as the glow of the TV hits your face at midnight while you’re on the couch or hiking through the forest alone or meditating underneath swirls of incense — are you ever truly without a mask?
Walter J. Ong writes in “The Writer’s Audience Is Always Fiction” that masks are needed for all human communication — written, oral, sign, body.
“We address others orally as our superiors, inferiors, equals, which is built into existential actuality more directly than written communication can ever be, has within it a drive making for the removal of masks,” writes Ong, “Lovers try to strip off all masks. And in all communication, insofar as it is related to actual experience, there must be a movement of love. Those who have loved over many years may reach a point where almost all mask is gone, but never all.”
Interactions between you and any other person is always obscured by masks, the masks of status, gender, experience — the layers are full and wired on from years of reinforcement. An effort to love others authentically is an attempt to look behind all masks, but what about the veils you adorn for yourself? Can someone else strip that off, maybe even with their own mask still on?
How is one supposed to remove the masks you’re not even conscious of having?
Imagining the multitude of attitudes and feelings and aspirations I dress myself with everyday, it’s difficult to know if I am really strawberry-man or hole-man or gold-face on the inside. When all of the masks are gone, perhaps there is still one fused to the core. I wonder what she looks like.