DEFACING HUMANITY

Human bodies are a process, not an entity, though bounded by a skin -- taking in air and food, throwing off waste through the skin and so on.  Malfunction on one end of a spectrum of emotion complex that runs through everything is mild malaise, a shadow.  Like a moving cloud under the surface of the waterline of existence (the one between conscious and unconscious) as though a manta ray were swimming past, harmlessly.  People attribute a shadowed mood to a disappointment, a change in the weather, or maybe catching a cold.  Just a flicker in the glow of personality.  Not a big deal.

But a dear friend, a psychiatric nurse in Europe, emailed me in the night about a disturbing story at the other end of extremely threatened identity.  Don’t look at vids of this before you go to sleep.  http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/05/29/2822971/new-video-shows-more-grisly-detail.html   The story at this link will not show any photos.  It's a couple of years old.  There are "disturbing" photos below, so you might want to stop reading.

Briefly, a man in “party mode” driving with his girl friend to an event location began to act strangely.  He put her out of the car, left, messaged to say his car had broken down, left the car, discarded all clothing, walked to a Miami Causeway overpass where a homeless man was sleeping and attacked him, popping out his eyes and chewing pieces off his face.  During the fifteen minute assault cars and bicyclists passed by, calling the police, and a squad car arrived.  The officer immediately shot the attacker dead.  The incident was attributed to drugs, unspecified, possibly even undefined or named -- something “creative.”  The media called it a “zombie drug.”  Dehumanizing.  Un-alive.

This doesn’t approach the evil of Bar Jonah (I DO believe in evil, but I also think it is always human) who killed neighborhood boys, chopped them up, cooked them and served them to their families.  The element of plotting and executing such a plan has always seemed far more evil than an eruption like the man in Miami, who seems clearly to have taken his brain “off line” through his own deliberate ingestion of drugs.  Bar Jonah had a corrupted operating system.  He probably didn't know it had happened -- wasn't aware of how abnormal he was though he complained of symptoms.  “Cool” computer language is one way of stepping away from our animal nature.  It does not capture emotion, which is better served by images than words.  Once detected, Bar Jonah's actions were hard to believe.  One victim’s mother still swears her son is somewhere alive.  

The zombie man was seen and dispatched at once.  No question, no trial, direct action, reflex.  The homeless man now has a home -- he just can’t see it.  But among us are other brain dysfunctions that aren't noticed by anyone until the person guided by that brain begins to shut down.  I’m thinking about my own father who basically began to sit life out after he retired.  If you said anything to him, his response was a mocking “duuuuuh.”  He finally had a major stroke and took a month to die. In the Sixties we weren’t conscious of gradual dementias.  His sister also drifted into dreamland for the last decades.  She was younger and was in a nursing home.

It’s possible that we will look back on the 2010’s as a time when we didn’t realize that our powerful old men leaders were going crazy, as individuals and as a group.  An artist friend said he went to a meeting with some promoters and was horrified that they looked like cartoon stereotypes of hog capitalists: red faces, big bellies, snorting laughs.  Too much fat beef, too many martinis, too little exercise, a little cocaine and the worst drug of all, POWER.  Predator drones are killer zombies.  Except that they are rationally sent, with preplanning and mixed motives, making the neighbors of our enemies “eat” their children.

Makeup for a zombie festival in Venice

My psychiatric nurse friend did a bit of research on the phenomena of faces being torn off, how it is meant to remove identity.  I had previously been interested in the case of the woman whose face (and hands) were torn off by a chimpanzee belonging to her friend, partly because of my past with animal control and partly because of theatrical theories about masks.  In fact, I think most of us are fascinated or why would the Guy Fawkes mask have become such a powerful and pervasive symbol?  The victim of the chimp attack was given one of the early face transplants.  http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/charla-nash-chimp-attack-victim-3091674  Now she must learn how to make it expressive as the nerves and muscles grow back.

A real face being transplanted.

I’ve been interested in what I call the Star Trek phenomenon:  that we can become so used to the latex distortions and creations meant to indicate creatures on other planets that they become normal, even attractive, sympathetic.  Our media-driven world pushes in the other direction: they present an ideal (which requires buying their products) and stigmatize everyone who doesn’t conform:  too fat, too hairy, too lumpy, too dark, etc.  I’d like to know what happens in the brain for us to begin seeing a Wookie or Whorf as a sympathetic person.  

Early research on baby ability to recognize faces used paper plates with a smiley face drawn on -- no more than an emoticon  :-)  and the youngest infants would stare.  As their ability to discriminate grew more detailed, they began to relate to their caregivers with obvious enthusiastic recognition.  It’s very useful.  Even the little gray feral cat I call “Smudge” runs eagerly to see me because I feed her.  Her enthusiasm makes me WANT to feed her.  These phenomena have been studied for a long time as “psychological,” both the need to “have” a face, and the need to cause others to respond warmly to that face.  We want God to have a face.

This woman's face was torn off by a pet dog.

To tear off someone’s face, gouging out their eyes, is to try to destroy all interaction, to reduce the person to the level of food, of meat.  (I’m uncomfortable eating a fried fish that’s looking at me.)  One of the things taught to animal control officers is not to stare into a dog’s eyes if he’s aroused and bristling -- a stare is interpreted as a challenge and might trigger an attack.  It’s as though actual beams come out from our eyeballs -- one can feel them when stared at.  (And I’m really bad about staring -- I think because I feel invisible and impalpable, an unseen see-er.  Of course, in theatre or the pulpit one WANTS everyone looking.)  They used to tell teachers of Indian kids not to look them in the eye because it is invasive and their culture considers it rude.  No more.  These days your eye is likely to meet a critical returning glare!  Which is easier to deal with than someone who won’t open their eyes.

Voluntary defacialization by wearing masks that are all the same is the opposite of the control-by-image-identification strategies of video-taping protests, using facial identification software to defeat even plastic surgery by analyzing bone structures and the whorls of ears. Pushing back in the other direction are selfies and video-Skype.  I have to say that sometimes relatives send me group selfies that are flat-out scary.  I think about small animals or surgical patients surrounded by pressing-close faces, showing their teeth or masked like bandits.

Voluntary surgery -- she wants to look like a cat.

Except for statues, we haven't been able to see faces thirty feet tall until this century.  Every tiny flinch or pulse conveys the interaction of the neurons in the skull.  We see those faces change over the years, change under the knife.  We fall in love with them, shrink in terror from them, laugh and cry with them.  And yet when we see them in real life they are often smaller, grayer than we thought.  I think what I’m saying is that though we like to judge phenomena by appearance and label, that’s NOT enough.  Whether “inappropriate” becomes Evil depends upon things like intensity, intention, context, meaning -- the ability of one’s brain software to empathize.  My nurse friend says that a shared symptom of his ward's population is the inability to "read" people's faces.

The woman whose face was torn off had to be moved to a different nursing home -- not because she was unhappy or upset, but because the other patients couldn't bear to look at her.  The moral judgment, the stigma, is not in the objective fact of flesh that isn't what we expect, but in the subjective reaction of people with limited imaginations.  Didn't they realize that the nursing home was a different planet in an inner space?

California Wookie

FACE IT !

Carmen Tarleton, whose angry husband destroyed her face

To know someone deeply is to love them.  Our culture’s insistence on surface, on conformity to a prescribed appearance -- always appealing -- is not true to the way people attach to each other.  Consider that to a lot of us, Worf on “Star Trek” has come to seem familiar, friendly and lovable.  In fact, he gets paired off on the show and NOT to another fierce Klingon, but to Counselor Deanna Troi, gorgeous and compassionate.

Michael Dorn who played Worf

Most people haven’t really known people who needed face transplants.  My hostess during my ministerial fellowship in Hartford had had a husband who lost a quarter of his face to cancer, but he had died by then.  When he was alive, he never left the house.  Now that we actually CAN transplant faces, we see them as half of the before/after pics, optimistically, redeemed.  The media normally censors the most “disturbing” (their euphemism) images of human damage.  The trouble with the truth is that a lot of people can’t handle it.  But if it’s not available to our map of the world, we never come to either accept or provide the resources for change.  

Tough as it is to realize how damaged one can be and still live, it’s even worse when we find out how often the faces were smashed and melted by someone trying to destroy the identity of the person, hoping to make them suffer terribly without dying, to be repulsive to everyone else out of a twisted desire to own them.  Hate is the obverse of love; the opposite is to walk off whistling and find someone else.

Carmen before the lye attack

So I love the story of Carmen Tarleton.  After her estranged husband poured industrial lye on her and she endured fifty surgeries to get a face back, she decided to learn to play the piano.  And she and the piano teacher (an older guy) fell in love.  I think he sees her the way she is just above and she does, too.  THAT’s how people attach: sharing something.  http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/01/health/tarleton-face-transplant/   So now she’s looking forward to having enough muscle and nerve grow back in her face to be able to pucker up for a kiss.  She still has her voice.

After all, a responsive voice (if it belongs to Scarlett Johanson) is enough for a man to fall in love with, according to Hollywood.  But there are plenty of stories about people who imagine a face for a voice they know and get a shock when they meet it.

It’s even a shock to meet one’s own face in the mirror after sort of forgetting about one’s age, esp. if one doesn’t use makeup or shave regularly.  If I go through the day with computer glasses, which are set for 18 inches, my wrinkles disappear, my Scots ruddiness seems natural, and I don’t see the rampant eyebrows.  The first selfies I made were on a hot day after I’d been in the yard working.  I deleted them but was startled when Google Images resurrected them.  Maybe people won’t realize that’s me.  

As an alternative I sent someone a photo of my face taken when I was still a teen and, sure enough, that shows up on Google Images, too.  Of course, the images I get are not the ones you get.  The computer algorithm thinks every old woman with short hair and glasses is me.  We’re a tribe.

These are not me.  My mom's mastectomy was on the other side and more radical.

We are used to rarely or never seeing genitalia or female breasts until the Aquarian Revolution began addressing the question of “why not?”  There were two contexts that had custody of the images:  one was medical, which kept photos of the result of breast surgery from sight; one was pornographic, which omitted any examples “substandard.”   (At least the newer “fab” actors, like other Hollywood performers, are remarkably attractive.) 

Today transgender folks go where few have ever gone before.

Of course the reaction is obsession among the young and otherwise insecure about whether they are “normal.”  They never really develop the inner understanding of how multiple, surprising, and unique human bodies (like any other mammal bodies) can be.  Radical differences used to be assigned to freak shows -- the fat man, the giant, the bearded woman -- and even mild divergences could be stigmatized.  At least in junior high.

These days in the paradoxical way the society often works, women of extreme emaciation and men with steroid-produced muscles have become the most admired.  Plastic surgery offers a nice living to surgeons, though the examples of bad practice abound on the Internet, the shocking reverse of face-transplants in which known and loved faces become masses of scar tissue.

We stigmatize people who are different and yet one of the figures who has recently entered many hearts is a dwarf -- not a cartoon character but a real-life dwarf actor of major acting chops and a gift for making us look at his heart instead of his height.  Our present fascination with sci-fi and fantasy creates a context that welcomes him.  Here’s a clip that’s not “Game of Thrones.”  It’s “X-Men.”  The pretty girl is blue -- literally. No one was looking at her face anyway.    http://www.panarmenian.net/eng/news/178525/

Mammals don’t like difference.  White crows are commonly killed by black crows.  Humans create their own markers with paint and headdresses in hopes of looking impressive instead of edible.  We look for faces and if they can’t be seen, they can’t be “read,” which interferes with our empathy.  On the other hand humans sometimes prefer the unusual (albino buffaloes and tigers), attributing magic to them, trying to “own” them.

Babies at first react to anything that’s vaguely like a face: researchers can hold up a paper plate with two eyes and a smiley mouth drawn on with a felt-tip and the baby will “see” a face, pay close attention, and perhaps smile.  But then later comes a phase when babies are afraid of unfamiliar faces and kick up a fuss when their usual caretaker isn’t there.  These changes in reaction seem to be created in the process of brain maturation: perhaps from learning or perhaps from new brain parts coming on-line -- or, wait now, the interaction of the two because it is the learning that brings the new brain parts into existence.

A person with Marfan syndrome

I have trouble managing my desire to stare, which is fine if I’m looking at photographs, but not so much for the beautiful young woman with Marfan syndrome who used to ride the same bus.  Or the young man who composed music on the bus, using a special laptop sort of instrument.  He was more direct, challenging me,  “What are YOU lookin’ at?”  I was abashed and scolded myself, but just wanted to know about them, not to hurt them.  Why were they hurt?

Because of The Stigma.  We stare at “the different” as though we were creating repelling beams that will keep them away from us.  Or tractor beams that might trap them.  It’s as though the traffic streams of photons were magic rays.  One of the abilities of those rays is to activate in the victim of the staring a visceral reaction of self-criticism, feeling exposed, unhuman.

The fourth level of the brain and therefore the identity is the community, esp. the one usually within eyeshot or most familiarly known.  We are nervous about them changing -- losing or gaining weight, dressing some new way, creating a new hairstyle -- and even challenge them.  But that works in reverse: if people react to us, ask us if we’ve lost weight, even remark,  “Hey, lookin’ good!” we say to ourselves, "What?"  Community view, world view, affect our identity and therefore the way our brains function.

Al Pacino played Dr. Kevorkian in a movie.

So if we look at these face transplant photos -- which we can do at our leisure -- and see the redemption, esp. on a video where they speak and move, we begin to understand human appearance in a different way.  I just watched two movies about “Death with Dignity.”  One of them was “How to Die in Oregon,” about an upscale beautiful wife and mother, and the other was “Kevorkian,” bony and hollow-eyed, surrounded by red-faced and hugely obese ordinary guys.  I’d love to see a psych student set up an experiment to see how these contrasting presentations affect the way people see the issue.  Appearance is one of the ways we weight decisions.  

Would you trust this woman?