 The word Gesicht has its base in 'sehen'; the face is that which is 'seen'. Masks from European carnivals were often caricatures of the faces of old people ··· 'witches' and so forth ··· with exaggerated facial lines. These facial lines are the origin of the myth of the labyrinth. From the labyrinth of the face came the more dark labyrinth of entrails. Europeans 'read' the entrails of animals and birds to discover the correct paths into the future. People still 'read' the lines in the palm of the hand.
But I have called your attention to this point in our map mostly to mention a brilliant new book by Michael Taussig. It is titled Defacement and is published by Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 1999.
One of Taussig themes in the book is the »public secret«; the theater of ritual in which state power moves.
In another part of the book (which also considers Subcomandante Marcos and Mexico's war against Native Indians) Taussig writes: »This coexistence in faciality of both mask and window to the soul is more than contradiction. Crossing back and forth across the face as border between mask and window to the soul is our necessary task... Either of these functions - mask or window - is a wonder; together they make an orgy of disproportion compounded by the fact that the face never exists alone: fated in its very being to be only when faced by another face.«
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