Word After Word

Magazines. Television. Movies.

It all looks like the same model, posing in the ads.  It’s as though there’s one guy and one woman. Beauty is the perfect average person. It’s impossible, because I am face blind, to tell the beautiful people apart. This is, in my book, a privilege: if you are beautiful, you have to work harder to distinguish yourself! You can’t count on your looks. I can’t count on your looks. Literally.

The New Yorker was on my table, and RP said, “Tony Soprano,” and he started singing the moon song that opens each episode. I said, “Huh?” I looked down at the cover, more closely. I still didn’t see it.

“That’s Tony,” RP said. “See? You don’t see that?”

Nope. Nothing. Nada. Just a generic man in generic pants exiting a brown room. I could not see how you could ever get Tony Soprano out of that. RP felt sad for me because he knows I like the show. I pored over that image. “How do you get Tony? How do you know that?”

Cartoons and caricatures and drawings and paintings are harder, I think, for face blind, because they are extracting the parts of the face that stand out. But we aren’t very aware of the original features to begin with, so exaggerating them does not help. A reformulated face is just another face we’ve never seen before.

Same with Wired. RP said “Al Gore,” and shook his pointed head judgmentally and ruefully. I looked at the magazine’s cover, which had been sitting on my couch for a week. I saw the words AL GORE printed across the front of the magazine, large block letters. I had assumed inside there was text on Al. It never once occurred to me the giant face, ears and hair cropped mostly away, on Wired’s cover was Al. I’d just thought it was some random face. It never occurred to me that others would see this face as a recognizable person, a famous person.

It’s like a language. RP and everyone else I know all speak Face-ian. I do not speak Face-ian and I can’t learn it—I have a learning disability that blocks me from ever speaking a word of Face-ian.

In a way, it’s like being a kid, and your parents are talking adultlanguage at the dinner table after you’ve drifted away; you’re playing nearby. You hear words like “mortgage” and “quagmire” and “taxes” and “watering restrictions” but they just pop up, whatever. You aren’t really listening. You are playing. There is so much interesting stuff to look at down on the floor, such great pursuits. You don’t really see a need to learn the language—it never occurs to you that you are really missing out on anything. There’s so much more to see from where you’re positioned. You would never think of trading places. 

I wonder how I can find out more about the languages face blind people are fluent in. If there’s a way to discover and measure our secret codes, our subtle ways of  knowing, the microperceptions, Gait-ian, Voice-ian. 

Caricatures, it occurs to me now, are Face-ian spoken in a funny accent, deliberately put-on.