The Doors of Perception: Introspective Face Analysis

I've been sitting around all day writing something that I plan on submitting to this Oregon-based literary journal/magazine thing, hoping that my labors will earn me a quick $700 and publication in addition to the experience that the labors provide in the first place. In the midst of writing however, I thought of something that I did a few days ago and I figured I'd share it with... you.

The environment around you rapes your perceptions: and justly so! Why? Because you are a part of it. You are an inseparable part of it. You are essentially made from the same universal dust that it is made of. You are, in part, your environment. And your environment is, in part, you. I was spinning around in my computer chair the other day, holding a mirror in front of my face, watching the light from the ceiling lamp directly above me crawl across it, embracing the shadows in various ways. I noticed how this dramatically changed the way my face looked as I spun. No shit? Right? But listen:

The angle I was facing in relation to my ceiling lamp made me shift between subjective quantities of beauty like "ugly" and "handsome", or subjective emotional quantities like "angry", "tired", "curious", "melancholy", and "bored". All the while I held my face, within reason, in the same "blank" expression, save for maybe little nuances like dilation and contraction of my pupils, the flaring of my nostrils, and the swaying of my hair.

I also, very briefly, turned off all the lights and stuck a half-smoked joint in my mouth and observed how the light at the end of it affected my face. This was a lot less interesting since I realized (a little late) that the light at the end of the joint would move with my face anyway.

This was just a study of light. A big-ass equation of different values of hue, saturation, and brightness dancing around the area above my neck. I wasn't even, to a noticeable degree, taking into account how the music I was playing affected my perceptions, or the texture of my walls, carpet, ceiling, and clothes, the size of my room or anything else.

Now the point of all this is: my face expressed different emotions based on how the light was hitting it. I wasn't actually "feeling" these emotions to any recognizable degree, except perhaps on a introspective level as I saw them in the mirror. If something as simple as the lighting of a setting can drastically change how other people perceive you at any given moment, then imagine how their image of you can be distorted by your surroundings over a long period of time. The fact of the matter is: everything is interconnected. You're not some predictable static character with an outline drawn by some cosmic cartoonist. The outside edges of your skin forms no border with your surroundings. Rather, they very subtly melt into each other.

Shit, thousands of tiny pieces of "you" are ripped off every day and are blown around by your air conditioning until they become part of your carpet or form an opaque layer on the surface of your TV screen that will stand between you and Spongebob until, out of frustration maybe, you finally take a paper towel that was forged from some tree (the skin of another living thing) and wipe it away. But it doesn't just disappear, it goes somewhere else, the trashcan or the toilet serving as the portal into the next chapter of its never-ending journey.

There's a bigger picture. You're a small bead of consciousness in the universe, part of some collective. I'm not implying Gods or Angels or Demons, but something a fuck of a lot more interesting that transcends any explanation: rational or irrational. And even though you'll never be able to take it all in at once because it's too much (a part can never contain the whole, after all): it's always fun to try. More often than not, you'll learn something new or at least look at something old in a new way. More intellectual growth on your part.

Start looking at things in as many different ways as possible, even if it means you've gotta stop being human for a few seconds. Whatever the fuck that means...