Mask

The mask holds a special place in the communities of indigenous peoples. It confers both identity and disguise. It opens up and encloses...

The transformation mask is a particular mask within the canon of tribal masks, particularly of the Pacific Northwest. It has special powers, naturally. And holds an important place in the life of the community.

The title could also come to represent the masquerade that modern society has become, each person covering their selves up with conventions and fashions, and conditions. The mask could then be the closed in-ness that modern man has come to embrace, his exile from nature at large and from his animal brethren, and from the elements.

The car is the great displacer of our age. It displaces us, disembodies us, dislocates us. It creates the 'global' by destroying the local.

It also has the added accolade of destructor, destructuring our landscapes with its concrete motor-ways, inflicting whip-marks on the Great Body of our Mother Earth. No land it seems is free from these concrete floggings, nor of vampiric siphonings and fracturings, and yet we would idolise the motor car for its speed, its convenience, and its comfort.

It is because of ease and convenience and comfort that we have become demented as a people, removed from the greater Mind that is the planet herself. Turning away from Nature at large we hide our selves within boxes and coded constructs, behind screens and media, and speed. As Telly Savalas' character states in the wonderful film Capricorn One (about masks being pulled over the eyes of the people), we have become a nation of perverts, having per-verted our own Nature through these banal concepts. In Nature, comfort only appears on the back of hardship, convenience on the back of inconvenience, and speed on the back of slowness. Yet, our modern society appears to be ALL ease, ALL comfort, ALL convenience, ignoring and even dismissing as 'negative' their supposed 'opposites'. When you have this lack of balance and equilibrium, this top-heaviness, where the 'positive' takes precedence over the 'negative' to such an extent that it anihilates it, then you are clearly off-balance, and out of kilter with the whole. This is modern society to a T, modern to be sure, but unstable with it, unbalanced and unhealthy (the latter word 'health' derives from the Old Norse hale from where we get 'whole')

We humans however, are animals, and animals are defined by their own locomotive powers, their ability to sense things, and their awareness (anima means 'Mind' in Latin). In abandoning our locomotion to a machine that not only dislocates us from the very fabric of the universe, space, but pollutes the air we need to survive, we have abandoned our animality and the very thing that makes us human, our contact with the earth (the word human comes from the Latin humus, meaning soil).

In order to become whole again, and healthy in the fullest sense, we have to understand the reciprocity of things (the coincidence of opposites) and the circular nature of Nature. When we understand this, we will baulk at the idea of being carried by a 'car'  - a machine that usurps our own auto-mobility and pollutes the air we breathe, and destroys the land we are part of. The only real engines are the natural ones inside us and inside all living forms. We need to tune our engines to hear these other quieter engines, lubricate them by walking and waking. We are listening beings after all. And you can't hear anything when you're stuck behind the wheel of a car.