Me and faces, just ask Robin. I don’t have it quite as bad as Dr Carl, but like him, I do have problems with faces. Apparently Dr Carl has trouble recognising members of his own family and has developed cues so he can remember who is actually related to him.Maybe it’s just my philosophy of life, to think in terms of the big picture, generic, but I constantly have people come up to me who seem to know me really well and I don’t even remember meeting them, let alone their names. Robin does, even the ones who are enamoured of me for some reason, the ones I must have spent some time talking with because I have obviously made a big enough impact for them to remember me so well. I don’t mean to be disrespectful but people are somewhat generic to me, there are ‘types’ and then just variations on a theme. Maybe I have been hanging around with archetypes too long.
But every so often something else even stranger happens to me. I see a face, someone I know I don’t know, but they are so familiar that I have to stop myself from saying something to them. They look so much like someone I do know that I just don’t accept that they are look-alikes and have developed (another) theory.
It happened again just yesterday. I was out at the point surfing and I saw the face of a man who looked so uncannily like my own father that I almost asked him what his family lineage was so I could establish whether he was actually related somehow, maybe his illegitimate brother from somewhere. I know I was staring at this poor man. I couldn’t help it, I was weighing up my theory, and this is how it went.
This man was my father, but because time is not linear, matter not solid and existence non-sensical, he was in a parallel reality, behind some kind of two-way mirror where I could see him but he couldn’t see me. Although I was staring at him he didn’t seem to notice. But although he was my father he was an alternative version of him. Of course the time slippage meant that he was not as old as my ‘real’ father. So my theory is that this man appeared to me to offer an opportunity to understand one of three things, or maybe all of them:
1. that this man was and still is the other version of my father, the one that maintains the balance within the binary system on which this planet is, according to the majority of our philosophers and religious institutions, firmly based, in which case unless he is as crazy as me, he knows nothing of this, or
2. that this man appeared to restore my hope, perhaps lessen my sorrow, because somewhere in the universe there was another man, a replica, who had not taken the same road as my father - a man who had been able to make better choices, had a different upbringing and circumstances and lead a full and happy life.
3. that this man was a visual projection, a defence mechanism I created to alleviate my own distress and that only I could see him.
Weirdly enough, I remember now that my father had been a twin, the other of whom had died at birth - now that is just too strange, and no doubt tasty fodder for any transpersonal psychologist.
The image is Ariadne, one of my older paintings.
