Chapters (15)
If you walk with your face up, you’ll come face to face, eye to eye, with so many faces, you’ll unknowingly be registered in the street archives. A small space will open up for your eyes in the city’s “History of Blank Faces.” You’ll leave an instant of your eyes to people you don’t know, and collect unexpected instants from people you don’t know. In your face. You’ll collect them in your face. That is why city dwellers start to look alike as they look at each other; together, they transform into a single, common face. Every city has a single, common face; any person who moves to the city eventually acquires that face. This is how a stranger who comes to the city is recognized. Even if the locals don’t know each other’s names, they immediately recognize a stranger’s face.
Those who don’t want to transform into a common face with the vast crowds—who even fear entering the city’s ambiguous history, scattered across people’s memories—will, of course, memorize their feet, expose their warm napes to the wind, and like persistent fugitives, take the shortcut to their shelters. Whatever fabric they wrap around their necks, they can never teach their napes not to feel cold. Still, rather than be recorded in a slippery history, they shall choose to look at their shoes.
This is the city’s first play:
You can raise your forehead if you like
Your eyes will enter circulation
Your nape will retract, won’t feel cold
No one will see how frail it is
After walking the length of a street, if you stop and look in the archives of your retina, you’ll see many faces. And since you’ll get exhausted if you think about each one, you’ll keep walking, just like everyone else. The city’s retinas are experts at this. When faces come eye to eye, they make up stories unknowingly. Without your even realizing it, a thousand stories will be conjured up because of you. Of your face. Whereas you know, every face is different than its contents.
How many retinas in this city hold your face? Think about it: how many voiceless faces are registered in your retina! So as not to hand over your frail nape, you’ve filled the back of your eye with unnecessary faces. So they wouldn’t tear your gossamer nape to shreds, you’ve raised your forehead, to be registered in the city’s retinas.
This is the city’s first play
It will leave your neck somewhere between loneliness and the crowds
Give them your face, don’t let them see the white of your nape
Hide
Let go,
Let them discuss you in the history of imagined faces !
