Malinda Words: Faces dripping with time

Line drawing by Gamini Abeykoon

All ages are written upon the face. Of this I am convinced. And I think that conviction, before it surfaced like a lotus, had gestated for years (yes, time again) in the mud-bed of the mind’s reservoir as a seed planted with the first shock of seeing Salvador Dali’s ‘La persistència de la memòria.’

The painting, which features several melting pocket watches, is considered one of the most recognisable works of surrealism. There have been, naturally, all kinds of interpretations, but Dali insisted that it was inspired by the surrealist perception of a camembert melting in the sun. Yes, I had to look that up (camembert: a mouse, soft, creamy, surface-ripened cow’s milk cheese).

The melting watches obviously speak of and to time’s relativity, that it is in a sense a construct. Bendable. Wreckable. ‘Puttogetherable.’ Imagination and memory allow this, and the latter is the Dali’s focus, going strictly by the title, ‘The persistence of memory.’

A melting clock, whether inspired by melted cheese or used to note the work of memory, says something about movement other than the mechanics of the hour, minute and second hands. It is a face but a ‘disfigured’ or, let us say, ‘re-figured’ one. And that’s what made me think of faces. Human ones. They are in constant movement, but the inscriptions of time and life go unnoticed simply because the daily engraving is minute. We see ourselves in the mirror everyday and we see the faces of our diurnal routes too often to notice.

If we didn’t look in the mirror and think about people we don’t meet often, if we look at photographs taken in different years, we will certainly see how we’ve changed, how they’ve changed. We do know that change is inevitable but we don’t think about it too often.

Flip through an album of family photographs. There’s a baby who became a child and then a teenager. The baby is later captured as a young person. There may be a wedding photograph featuring this same person at the centre. There will be a middle-aged person, someone carrying a child, a grandparent and someone who is very old.

The same person marked by the passing of time, marked by the signatures of encounter, choices, tragedies, accidents, serendipity, dejection, knowing, resignation, acceptance of the verities and wisdom. All of it written on the face. Time, I feel, drips down each face even as it courses through veins and inks our memories with punctuation, exclamation points, question marks, colons, fullstops and ellipses,

The face of an infant could be extrapolated to obtain a rough picture of what it would look like 15 years later, 25, 50 or 70 years later. There are apps that generate such images and I’m sure there are apps that can work backwards too. It’s one of those fun things some people check out. We don’t or can’t force others to submit themselves to such extrapolation or interpolation using apps. We can but read faces we encounter. At the very least we become aware that there are histories behind every line.

Gamini Abeykoon’s line drawing of an old man is probably a near-perfect replication of a photograph. There’s time dripping all over this face. Histories have left their mark. Arrivals and departures, inevitable or arranged, happy and sad. All in the lines. Theoretical the years can be removed, layer by layer. Facial hair can be imagined away. Worry lines can be erased. Sunken cheeks can be made full once again. A smile can be manufactured. You have a baby boy right there.

The reverse, again theoretically, is possible.

An idle exercise, did someone say? Perhaps it is. It could also become a regular habit that sobers us in our engagement with people and of course in tempering our egos.

We walk through temporal valleys and time-rivulets running through our hearts can be swelled or made to run dry by the vagaries of life’s relentless give and take. There’s time dripping down faces. There’s nothing we can do about it. We can, however, acknowledge Time the Chiseller and treat with a bit more respect the skin that has been and is being chiselled. All we need to do is to pick an age, a number or an age category (like childhood, adolescence, youth, middle-age and old age) and the carve or un-carve as we wish.

All ages are written on faces. Not all the ‘numbers’ are visible. That’s how time drips, stays, removes and eventually leaves without a trace.

It’s a human landscape:

Landscape immemorial
where mountains and valleys
trees and caverns
depressions and signature peaks
are born to decay
in the rise and fall
of civilization and illusion
the erosion of dream
and the reincarnation of hope
these are lines that await us
with soft-time patience.

malindadocs@gmail.com

['The Morning Inspection' is the title of a column I wrote for the Daily News from 2009 to 2011, one article a day, Monday through Saturday. This is a new series. Links to previous articles in this new series are given below]

14 July 2023

Faces dripping with time

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