The Mask of Determination

Attributing human characteristics or emotions to inanimate and natural objects is an old rhetorical and poetic device. Since the Romantics overused it, it has been somehwat deprecated (in the coding sense of being abandoned as obsolete). Still, the temptation is hard to resist considering how good our brain is at recognizing patterns, especially when it comes to faces.

I came across The Mask of Determination in a park, somewhere in Rome. All it is, is the trunk of a palm tree that has been cut down to size - to the size of a small coffee table. The two incisions that create the effect are most likely chainsaw bites left by a worker who must have changed his mind about exactly where to cut.

My first take on this photograph was to imagine a helmet - not a modern motorcycle helmet, obviously, but the kettle type worn by medieval knights with a slit for the eyes and one for the mouth. But I quickly decided that calling it a mask opens up more possibilities.

At first, the face in the tree stump suggested "determination" - an unambiguously commendable trait, perhaps. It (the mask) rests there, facing the uncertainties of life and the vagaries of history - the manifold consequences of past life - armored with a stoic, stiff resolve, reflected in the machine-metallic pallor of a thin-lipped squint.

But if we call it a mask (and not a face) there comes, with the name, a suggestion of discrepancy between surface and depth. The commendably stoic may then transfigure as immovable in spirit, in history forward-bent, fanatical in ideology, lost to a rushing forth so rapid that all nuance melts into a blur and every call to moderation and reflection is reduced to a streak in peripheral vision that conveniently curtains off the evitable, dreadful cost of sundry a human venture.

Perhaps there is no depth here, no quiet turmoil of the soul; only a hard surface that would crack and crumble if it looked inward and saw the nullity that supports it. Do not trust The Mask of Determination, for its sight is narrow and its mind flat.