"Listen you must tell the officer the truth. That is all he wants to hear from you -- the truth."
The mask, crown, glasses, hat, hair-do, and plastic surgery are all visual, hierarchical mediators from the observer to the speaker. The thing that separates them from you. Coetzee's Colonel's sunglasses in Waiting for the Barbarians. He has them, disabling his output and keeping his input. The face is such an important feature in human communication and relations making it an easily exploitable platform. The perfect place for an effective sign to alter our prime source of data input and output. While important, verbal communication is only one aspect among others communicated from the face. And in fact, the face is only a gateway into a broader non-verbal communication that encompasses the whole body.
Most people assume a lot just based on interpretations of visual information. For example, at a café&restaurant I went to a lot and since moved so now I only go there periodically, from a server, Carmello who knows me, knows I'm not vegan, thought I was vegan. I guess I look like a guy who might be vegan, I've got a fledgling beard, I wear things in the typical fashion vein, and I have a whip-tail. It didn't upset me at all, it just made me realize that the brain definitely creates a space around persons based on its past interactions with these visual symbols, which perhaps is a function of our intense pattern recognition adaptation. The scavenger's eyes we adapted to estimate a situation in which it may be safe to eat the meat of that mostly consumed deer back around 100 KY in Africa.
It's really important to me to be aware of these aspects of human interaction. Personal space is one of these. And one that is particularly interesting because awareness and ownership seems to vary from person to person. Personal space can be increased by symbols that connote or relay OTHER-attributes - homelessness, craziness, or illness. These symbols can range from erratic or strange speech, body odor, unpredictable physical behavior, a weapon, and so on. This all of course depends on the person receiving these attributes. Perfume will increase the space one person gives to another even though perfume is supposed to relieve the problem people have will smells.
"Language is a system of signs that express ideas, and is therefore comparable to a system of writing, the alphabet of deaf-mutes, symbolic rites, polite formula, military signals, etc. But it is the most important of all these systems." Ferdinand de Saussure from Course in General Linguistics
I was on the corner of a park waiting to meet a friend when I noticed a drunk(?) man meandering and mumbling. He was wearing new Khaki pants, a puffy jacket, and a camouflage cap (which in fact if he had not been wearing I may have not noticed this). He approached me, slow to speak his mouth was open for more time than usual without any words. I reached my hand out to shake and said "Hello." He nodded. Loose air went from his mouth and he began to motion with his hand from his face. It was a really ambiguous hand motion, at first I didn't understand what moving his relaxed hand with his first two fingers from his ear to his mouth area meant. I thought about it, the context of watching him move slowly and carefully around other people that he may be drunk or/and homeless. Then, what would this man possibly want that involved his mouth? I asked, "Cigarette?" and he nodded, yes. I don't smoke, so I said "Sorry, I don't smoke."
I think he was trying very hard to conceal his drunkenness, which at around 7:10 on a Monday is an element of displacement. The man noticed a woman and her daughter crossing the street toward him and began to pretend to tend or fix the parking meter he was standing next to. It seemed like he wanted to become invisible, when he left the woman and her daughter's sight he moved away from the parking meter and crossed the street. And honestly, it seemed to work.
So here I am again, reading the world like a book. I believe they thought they were reading nature like an allegorical book back in the European Middle Ages.
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