Masks appear in our lives in many ways.
For some, the mask is associated with the Carnival. By putting on a mask, the carnival-goer sheds his inhibitions and comes into greater unity with his tribal or animal side. For example in Walcott's 'Mass Man', a clerk becomes a great lion; within a "gold-wired peacock", a man; Boysie with mangoes on his chest is Cleopatra! The mask thus serves to transform and reveal an alternative side of our being. Halloween, with its emphasis on witchery and supernatural beings, is perhaps the most recognised white/Western version of this.
For others of a more saturnine character, a mask is a means of social control, of displaying authority in new forms. The fun playful side is the Venetian style masked-ball, which is contiguous with the previous version of masks. But the darker side is the mask of authority, of officialdom: - the teacher who disciplines his students; the policeman who kettles the protestor; the lawyer who stops illegal downloading; the neighbour who, needing a good night's sleep, asks for the party to be shut down. Maybe each of these figures has some empathy with the forces of revelry and freedom; none wants to attract resentment; but each recognises the greater loss that comes with encroachments on civility and order in the public domain. Suppressing their fun-loving side, they impose restraint.
I've recently become fascinated by the theme of masks. I am currently acting with a drama club - something new to me. Unlike my fellow English students at Catz, many of whom were somehow involved in drama, I was never drawn to the stage at Oxford - it didn't chime with my sense of self. This self always sought authenticity in people. It is this same reverence for truth and accuracy that has drawn me to the profession of the law. But in my role as tutor I have come to see that professionalism entails wearing a mask. Sometimes to act in the best interests of my tutees I cannot show them my honest feelings - of anger and disappointment - or must do so only by flashes of lightning that wake them up - and then control those emotions so as to steer them towards a successful course of action. And in applying to become a solicitor, promoting myself as a solicitor, I always found it difficult walking that line between being myself and selling myself as an accomplished professional with whom clients will want to work. I have found participating in the club useful for welding together these sides of my persona.
In the process I have come to realise that any person of ambitions must try on numerous masks before they succeed in life. It is part of growing up. Infants play at fort-da - will mummy pick up my bottle if I push it off? In doing so they take authority of their needs over their carers, and initiate that great process of command-control that ripples throughout our lives in a range of situations where the hierarchy or horizontal relationship between two people is being established. The teenager muses on their future - and plays at being a lover, a public-speaker, a writer, a party animal, a sportsman - each with their own narratives and rules of command-control. The profit-motive instantiates a relationship of procurer and provider: the procurer says I want this and the provider says - of course your wish is my command; the provider must forbear and suppress any rebellious feelings they may have to satisfy the needs of the procurer and obtain their money. In an ideal employment environment, people would move into those jobs which cause them most pleasure and least suppression into a mask; but numerous discussions with friends and familiars shows that this is not always possible, and many end up in jobs they despise and careers they hate. I have made the utmost endeavours to avoid this situation for myself but it has come at some cost to other aspects of my life.
Indeed throughout my life I have tried on masks. My oldest brother made it a habit of his in my pre-teens to make up a seemingly infinite and inescapable variety of names for me (he mellowed as he got older, and I later saw that this obsession of his was a strange sort of brotherly love). Each corresponded with a different aspect of my being; the moment I transcended one flawed vision of myself, he would make up an account for another. It was carnival for him, but somewhere between a strange dream and a nightmare for me. It drove me to excel intellectually, to outmanoeuver others with the quickness and variety of my thoughts, to escape entrapment in a narrow form of thinking. But it came at some cost to my self esteem in other areas of my life. With such bewildering belittlement it could be hard to see myself as having a singular authority. Rather the forms of authority within me existed on a contingent basis in conversations with friends, family, and other familiars, and in my academic achievement.
In my literary, musical and cinematic tastes, I have always had a taste for personae. My brother also introduced me to the joys of underground hiphop. Having been hooked on Eminem, I came to see that there was a whole tradition of adopting personae within hiphop that led to an extraordinary imaginative richness. In film I loved Bergman's Persona, and never fully understood those who dismissed the film with - it's so obvious the nurse and the actress are becoming the same; that's not the point; it's about how relationships change and mould us so that we form new rigidities of character with new people, and form identities shaped within that relationship such that two people can almost become symmetrical. And in teen years in poetry, I loved Browning's dramatic personae and Donne's satirical and romantic masks as urbane parasite or meta-physician to a dawning relationship - their musings on desire and being desired.
I also have a strong taste for satire - this year I have been reading and re-reading the major works of Swift, some poems of Gay and the Musil's The Man without Qualities ('TMWQ'). Each takes it as given that the singular authority of the self does not exist in a fixed state, but rather various drives towards power and greatness, or love and desire, shape the outward forms of ourselves.
In TMWQ, there is Moosbrugger, the serial killer who may lack the neccessary mens rea to have murdered so often; he in turn raises questions about the persistence of intentionality in man; for instance about the philosopher-businessman Arnheim who is by turns lover, industrialist, intellectual, hidden oil-man, military propagandist and peacemaker. The incompleteness of these personalities raises larger questions about history - about how the first world war could have come about when noone anticipated it, and noone intended destruction on that scale.
Thus the masked dimension of our personality calls into question the very stability of society and civilisation; that the humanist mask of authority we all present is not just a fashion and a phase that will eventually go the way of the Roman empire. After all, post-Renaissance European-style civilisation has only been around for what 600-700 years, and the Romans managed a similar slice of time.
For now I am content to develop my long-held dream of being a solicitor. An ancient profession - acting to structure people's relationships and dealings in a way that will ensure long term stability - in a way it is the craft of making acceptable terms on which people of different wants can continue, hopefully maintaining peaceful masks all the way through their relationship.
