Behind the Mask

Well, here I am again. Once you start a blog you have to keep going, don't you? Here is one of several colored pencil collages I've done, with a bit of Photoshop yellow in the checkerboard.
As a writer, a poet who used to give public readings all over the Bay Area, and an artist, I know about masks (writers call it "persona").

In our day to day lives, we almost never see the real person we are talking to right in front of us, much less the performer on stage, the personality, the living legends that populate our cultural imagination.

In fact, we almost never see the reality of the person that gazes back at us in the mirror. We see a construction, created by our own mind, and that depends on a long list of hidden prejudices, beliefs, peer pressures, moods and experiences. It's impossible to untangle!

So we see a mask, and are content.

And that shouldn't bother us. The real thing we assume is behind the mask is a complicated mess, a time consuming distraction, an endless pit of complexes and untoward secrets. We don't want to deal with that in the moment, or ever. We choose to believe that the mask we are seeing is the real thing, and leave it at that.