Camouflage or 'Vestis Virum Redit'

I started taking a Latin workshop today - sort of a refresher. I feel out of my depth already as I look at the texts we're reading and see only bits of things I can kind of understand. As someone else said today, it's not so much the vocabulary it's the grammar - putting it all together. It's not even at the stage where we're 'keeping things whole'. I'm questioning my motivation but I'll go along for the ride...

I can remember a few aphorisms from Latin and the one I'm thinking of now is 'vestis virum redit' (clothes make the man). Hold that thought while I digress…

I had a productive weekend with D&G not in the sense that I read a lot or that I read on Saturday. I got as far as Pam's in Jackson Square - a very good reading location for me. I got the book out onto the table beside my coffee cup and then my friend ML came along and I talked to him. He was supposed to be shopping at the market and I was supposed to be reading but we did talk briefly about D&G and I said that I was feeling very good about them recently. They are helping me out and getting more and more intertwined with things like yoga and dance and reflective writing. I like the chapter I’m reading now called “1914: One or several wolves?” They talk about multiplicities, masses, packs, assemblages: “Keep everything in sight at the same time,” they encourage. The writing is exciting, energetic, full of potential. My wounded identity draws nearer. I’m listening.

I photographed some boys-I-just-met last week. This is one of the ways that they chose to be photographed:





Are they hiding or revealing?

In Ivanhoe, all of the characters seem to be defined by their clothes and there are detailed descriptions of what they are wearing as they gather for that initial dinner at Cedric the Saxon's place. Rowena has just entered the room...

I also went (this past weekend after I shot the photo of the boys) to see an art exhibition by Amy Creighton called “Camouflage”. AM (another person with the same initials as mine) asked me if I noticed that all of the models in the photos had their faces averted from the camera and we decided after consulting briefly with the artist that the shots constituted a kind of anti-portraiture where the viewer loses the privilege of staring into the face of the portrayed. Is this a rebellion, an attempt to frustrate habit? Or simply what the review of the show says - that we gather material from the media and construct our identity from that. For various reasons, the portraits remind me of my visits to the dermatologist. They have a completely different character to them. There's medicalized content, the desire to change but not the loneliness and longing of that real wait in the closed-door room before the doctor comes in. I can't avert my face. Is not showing your face a form of revelation or is it a form of self-betrayal? And what does it mean to show your face?