Me, My Mask, and My other Masks

In masks outrageous and austere,

The years go by in single file;

But none has merited my fear,

And none has quite escaped my smile.
Elinor Wylie

For about 10 years, I was a high school drama teacher. You can’t study drama without encountering the ancient Greek plays. One of the more dominate traits of Greek theater is its use of masks.

Most of us think of masks as something used to conceal. In western movies the bad guys wore black hats and covered their nose and mouth with a bandanna . They were concealing their identities. The Lone Ranger wore a mask making the phrase forever famous, “Who was that masked man?”

In Greek theater the mask was used NOT to conceal, but to reveal. There is a small but interesting mask vocabulary: Guise, disguise, persona, person, impersonate, personification, mask, masquerade, mummer, mime, pantomime, costume, pretend, prevaricate, even pretext .

It is a career of make-believe, of masks. We all
have masks in life.
Judd Nelson

The word persona is especially interesting to me. Persona is derived from two Latin words. The first Latin words "per" meant "through" and the second Latin word "sonare" meant "to sound." Put them all together and you have PER-SONARE and that combination meant “something through which one speaks.”

Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and
know we cannot live within.
James A. Baldwin

Carl Jung wrote some about masks, and persona. The problem I have is that I have fitted masks on my face to tell the world who I am, and what I am like. I have created various personas and they often do reveal some aspect of myself, but it is always a selective revelation. Humans are complex. People have facets, but we show only a few sides of ourselves. I communicate ME through my created or selected persona, but I have not revealed all of me. In some ways our personas are like selective memory. The “me” the world sees is part of me, but not all of me. My life masks have served to protect me from historical harms. My mask protections have had limited success, but the shortfall is that I have forgotten myself. I lost sight of the real me, the complete me, the total me.

The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks
are dropped.
Cesare Pavese