I stood in the doorway. Behind me, light. Before me, a path in darkness between two doors. Mine, open. The other, closed. The glass pane in the upper part of the distant door reflected the scene at my position. I saw then, in the glass, the lit room behind me, and my hooded silhouette. I have seen this effect many times in the evening, and subconsciously noticed that none of my features were present in the reflection.
Tonight, something changed. I realized that the instance of myself in the reflection had no face. A blackness there and nothing more. No identity. Where I am stasis, he is pure mystery. And yet we are the same one?
When I exhaled, his head disappeared into a puff of vapor. It ‘just went away behind a cloud’ like some kind of voodoo peek-a-boo ceremony. When I actually realized this, I was staggered. And then, slowly, the intelligences that underly my capacity for insight began, ever so slowly, to awaken in my consciousness. I understood that, in darkness, ‘with the light behind me’ there is no face before me. I translated this understanding into my inward experience and world, and considered the astonishing implications. Place the light before me, and my face emerges as in a mirror. Place the light behind me, and we become polarities of identity; known and unknowable.
I knew then that I was in a moment of incredible opportunity, yet feared my capacity to enter it fully. I wanted to trade places, within myself, with what I now recognized as ‘the other polarity’ of my highly-identified self-image. My ‘face’, public and private. I wanted to have none. I wanted possibility, not stasis. I wanted intelligence, not rules. I wanted the ever-transforming mystery of my origins, birth, mind and death to be right with and as me each moment, instead of a stable, highly organized structure of fictions each requiring their peculiar regimens of defense, re-enactment, evaluation, and other generally prisonesque abuses. My original, faceless self. My me of pure potential was facing me.
And I wanted to trade places.
Maybe forever. I was unfacing myself. The faceless me of my purest potentials had no identity, but was turned toward my face. Black against light. Possibility and creativity without end. Living mystery incarnate. No history. No burden. Free. Unnamed. Impossible. Ancient. New. Self in which no pattern had been stored, yet from which any might be drawn. A being without any of the burdens or concerns of something that has to retain and defend its ‘identity’.
Not mere anonymity — active, presently-emerging non-identity. Pure undifferentiated human potential without private or public face. No face whatsoever.
And as I watched this “other me” my entire head disappeared into a cloud of vapor every time I exhaled....
§
If I could just leap across... the intervening space in light and time... and land in the faceless self of my dreaming mind... I would accomplish the dream of a lifetime at once; a goal too urgent to ordinarily imagine was now alive before me. I began to work the between of us, testing it for an opening, a crack... an interface I could leverage... No face. If I could just leap across... but the gap was strange and my seekings found no entrance to it... I approached the reflection. Only as I grew near to the window did the proportions in the reflection change, and even then only modestly. I realized that I had seen this a thousand times, but never understood. I had found it ‘visually novel’ but was not thinking about light, time, birth, death... and how our minds are formed and reformed moment-to-moment. I had not seen the faceless face of myself in all its invitations, but rather saw an entertaining novelty as easily dismissed as noticed. No face. Imagine what I could learn and become if I could simply... suddenly enter the strange between that must be understood to unify what it appears to fiercely distinguish... ... and extinguish the fictions that have bound me to this inner face I think of as myself, which is, instead, primarily a collection of things that are peculiarly lifeless. Descriptions. Names. Explanations. Defenses. Assertions. Fantasies and paranoias. Surely these are not myself. And yet, by day, when the light is all around me... I think of myself as a seen face. The same one. The face that gains age and shows fear. The one I see when the space between me and the mirror is well-lit. I imagine I am my face. I am the story-identity I sustain.
One day, however. One day and maybe soon.
I am going across. And if I should succeed? Expect a signal