Masks With Positive Quotes

To be inspired is great, but to inspire is an honor.

Vulnerability really means to be strong and secure enough within yourself that you are able to walk outside without your armor on. You are able to show up in life as just you. That is genuine strength and courage. Armor may look tough, but all it does is mask insecurity and fear.

Dear Child, Sometimes on your travel through hell, you meet people that think they are in heaven because of their cleverness and ability to get away with things. Travel past them because they don't understand who they have become and never will. These type of people feel justified in revenge and will never learn mercy or forgiveness because they live by comparison. They are the people that don't care about anyone, other than who is making them feel confident. They don’t understand that their deity is not rejoicing with them because of their actions, rather he is trying to free them from their insecurities, by softening their heart. They rather put out your light than find their own. They don't have the ability to see beyond the false sense of happiness they get from destroying others. You know what happiness is and it isn’t this. Don’t see their success as their deliverance. It is a mask of vindication which has no audience, other than their own kind. They have joined countless others that call themselves “survivors”. They believe that they are entitled to win because life didn’t go as planned for them. You are not like them. You were not meant to stay in hell and follow their belief system. You were bound for greatness. You were born to help them by leading. Rise up and be the light home. You were given the gift to see the truth. They will have an army of people that are like them and you are going to feel alone. However, your family in heaven stands beside you now. They are your strength and as countless as the stars. It is time to let go! Love, Your Guardian Angel

Humility has nothing to do with depreciating ourselves and our gifts in ways we know to be untrue. Even "humble" attitudes can be masks of pride. Humility is that freedom from our self which enables us to be in positions in which we have neither recognition nor importance, neither power nor visibility, and even experience deprivation, and yet have joy and delight. It is the freedom of knowing that we are not in the center of the universe, not even in the center of our own private universe.

Your Shadow is all of the things, 'positive' and 'negative', that you’ve denied about yourself and hidden beneath the surface of the mask you forgot that you’re wearing.

You may plainly perceive the traitor through his mask; he is well known every-where in his true colors; his rolling eyes and his honeyed tones impose only on those who do not know him. People are aware that this low-bred fellow, who deserves to be pilloried, has, by the dirtiest jobs, made his way in the world; and that the splendid position he has acquired makes merit repine and virtue blush. Yet whatever dishonourable epithets may be launched against him everywhere, nobody defends his wretched honour. Call him a rogue, an infamous wretch, a confounded scoundrel if you like, all the world will say “yea, ” and no one contradicts you. But for all that, his bowing and scraping are welcome everywhere; he is received, smiled upon, and wriggles himself into all kinds of society; and, if any appointment is to be secured by intriguing, he will carry the day over a man of the greatest worth. Zounds! these are mortal stabs to me, to see vice parleyed with; and sometimes times I feel suddenly inclined to fly into a wilderness far from the approach of men.

Too much twee emotional expression--too many claims like, "Everything is awesome," or "I just never really feel angry or upset," or "If you're just positive, you can turn that frown upside down,"--often masks real pain and hurt. These behaviors are as much red flags as brooding and anger are....Being all light is as dangerous as being all dark, simply because denial of emotion is what feeds the dark.

Larry sat with his arm stretched out along the top of the front seat. His shirt cuff was pulled back by his position and displayed his slim, strong wrist and the lower part of his brown arm lightly covered with fine hairs. The sun shone goldly upon them. Something in Isabel's immobility attracted my attention, and I glanced at her. She was so still that you might have thought her hypnotized. Her breath was hurried. Her eyes were fixed on the sinewy wrist with its little golden hairs and on that long, delicate, but powerful hand, and I have never seen on a human countenance such a hungry concupiscence as I saw then on hers. It was a mask of lust. I would never have believed that her beautiful features could assume an expression of such unbridled sensuality. It was animal rather than human. The beauty was stripped from her face; the look upon it made her hideous and frightening. It horribly suggested the bitch in heat and I felt rather sick.

Know that...there's plenty of food and of course popcorn on the dining-room table. Just...help yourself. If that runs out just let me know. Don't panic. And there's coffee, both caff and decaf, and soft drinks and juice in the kitchen, and plenty of ice in the freezer so...let me know if you have any questions with that.' And lastly, since I have you all here in one place, I have something to share with you. Along the garden ways just now...I too heard the flowers speak. They told me that our family garden has all but turned to sand. I want you to know I've watered and nurtured this square of earth for nearly twenty years, and waited on my knees each spring for these gentle bulbs to rise, reborn. But want does not bring such breath to life. Only love does. The plain, old-fashioned kind. In our family garden my husband is of the genus Narcissus , which includes daffodils and jonquils and a host of other ornamental flowers. There is, in such a genus of man, a pervasive and well-known pattern of grandiosity and egocentrism that feeds off this very kind of evening, this type of glitzy generosity. People of this ilk are very exciting to be around. I have never met anyone with as many friends as my husband. He made two last night at Carvel. I'm not kidding. Where are you two? Hi. Hi, again. Welcome. My husband is a good man, isn't he? He is. But in keeping with his genus, he is also absurdly preoccupied with his own importance, and in staying loyal to this, he can be boastful and unkind and condescending and has an insatiable hunger to be seen as infallible. Underlying all of the constant campaigning needed to uphold this position is a profound vulnerability that lies at the very core of his psyche. Such is the narcissist who must mask his fears of inadequacy by ensuring that he is perceived to be a unique and brilliant stone. In his offspring he finds the grave limits he cannot admit in himself. And he will stop at nothing to make certain that his child continually tries to correct these flaws. In actuality, the child may be exceedingly intelligent, but has so fully developed feelings of ineptitude that he is incapable of believing in his own possibilities. The child's innate sense of self is in great jeopardy when this level of false labeling is accepted. In the end the narcissist must compensate for this core vulnerability he carries and as a result an overestimation of his own importance arises. So it feeds itself, cyclically. And, when in the course of life they realize that their views are not shared or thier expectations are not met, the most common reaction is to become enraged. The rage covers the fear associated with the vulnerable self, but it is nearly impossible for others to see this, and as a result, the very recognition they so crave is most often out of reach. It's been eighteen years that I've lived in service to this mindset. And it's been devastating for me to realize that my efforts to rise to these standards and demands and preposterous requests for perfection have ultimately done nothing but disappoint my husband. Put a person like this with four developing children and you're gonna need more than love poems and ice sculpture to stay afloat. Trust me. So. So, we're done here.

The night we met, I had thought he was the most beautiful and terrible thing I had ever laid eyes on. There was nothing terrible before me now. Sleep had stripped him of his Rephaite armour. He was in the same position, features soft and unburdened, one hand on the sheets between us. In silence, I turned my hand so it lay palm up, and the shadows of my fingers fell across his knuckles. Then I drifted back to sleep.

And you, heretic! Where is she? Where is the queen?” “Have you checked your ass? I heard it's pretty roomy in there.” I spat blood, moving to hands and knees. I still had the Spear of Nine Spheres wrapped in one tight-knuckled fist, for all the good it was doing me. “You are in no position to sling insults.” The masked Mata Argis Agent had a cold voice, dark with anger. “Where is she!? What have you done to her?!” “The same thing I do to your mom every night.

Engaging in a debate implies that the opposite side has legitimacy; debating with Richard Spencer implies that his ethnonationalism is a substantive position worth sharing with your audience. It’s a pernicious influence masked in “reasonableness.

Somehow the disorder hooks into all kinds of fears and insecurities in many clinicians. The flamboyance of the multiple, her intelligence and ability to conceptualize the disorder, coupled with suicidal impulses of various orders of seriousness, all seem to mask for many therapists the underlying pain, dependency, and need that are very much part of the process. In many ways, a professional dealing with a multiple in crisis is in the same position as a parent dealing with a two-year-old or with an adolescent's acting-out behavior. (236)

Kafka calls it the Indestructible—the thing at the bottom of each individual that keeps going whether they feel like going or not. The Indestructible is a place that has nothing to do with optimism—instead, it’s something far deeper and far less self-conscious than optimism—the Indestructible is the thing we mask with all sorts of other symbols, hopes, and ambitions—that don’t force you to acknowledge what is underneath. Well…if you do (or are forced to) remove all those excesses, you get the Indestructible, and once you acknowledge it, Kafka goes deeper—he doesn’t let you think the Indestructible is optimistic or positive—instead it is the thing that could actually rip us apart and destroy us…

Angel, I have no idea how you can stand this stench,” he said. “Derrel’s been doing this for long enough that I think he doesn’t have any smell receptors left, but you . . . ?” He grimaced as he snapped pictures of the skull and the injury while I held the body in position for him. “You are one tough chick.” Then his eyes crinkled, and even though he had the mask on, I could tell he was grinning at me. “Or maybe you’re seriously sick and twisted, in which case you are so in the right line of work.” I laughed. “Gotta be the second one,” I said. “I’m not tough!

The only reunion that is not a chimera or a simple fig-leaf can only occur through the common rediscovery of a living fullness, unencumbered by anything negative, with the mutual acknowledgement of complementarity or quite simply harmony (this latter point applying especially to the rapprochement between Catholic and Orthodox) of the positive that is held on either side, and which seems to be in opposition only because the rest, unfortunately tacked on, masks or chokes its authentic reality. But

Craving a physical connection, I slide my finger along the back of Rachel’s hand. She’s asleep. Has been for a while. Curled in the fetal position in the middle of my bed, Rachel wears the mask of a ravaged person. Somehow, I missed the signs: dark circles under her eyes, the clothes that once fit perfectly now hang, her skin so pale it’s translucent.

There is unmistakable proof that abusers do get together in order to share children, abuse more children, and even learn from each other. As more cases have come into the public eye in recent years, this has become increasingly obvious. More and more of this type of abuse is coming to light. I definitely think it is the word ritual which causes people to question, to feel uncomfortable, or even just disbelieve. It seems almost incredible that such things would happen, but too many of us know exactly how bad the lives of many children are. A great deal of child pornography shows children being abused in a ritualised setting, and many have now come forward to share their experiences, but there is a still tendency to say it just couldn't happen. Why not? Why, given what we now know about paedophiles and about what they do to children? Would they have limits? It was all done to me and I have enough experiences to write many more books than this one, but this will have to do for now. I've tried to make sense of it and I've tried to tell you my story in a way that will, hopefully, let you understand how it was done, and how they managed to get away with it, but I haven't told you a big part of it yet. I haven't told you what happened that finally ended it all for me. There was something else. When I was eight, someone else came into my life and made a huge difference to what was happening and how things would turn out. I didn't know it then, but I see the whole picture now. Something I have often wondered is whether Andrew was there while I was being abused. Lots of people hide their faces, and there were often masks worn, so he certainly could have been. I have no evidence one way or another though, so I will leave it to the reader to decide whether it would seem in a paedophile's character to watch abuse continue when it has been masterminded by him. But I do know that it wasn't just me who he abused - I know that because I saw it. Andrew was away a lot with the Army until I was at high school, then he left that position. He was instrumental both in my abuse and in setting the scene, but when I was eight, something happened which would distract him and which would, at times, take his attention from me. My mother very kindly provided him with a new victim - my little sister.

Do not hide behind any mask

He no longer saw the face of his friend Siddhartha, instead he saw other faces, many, a long sequence, a flowing river of faces, of hundreds, of thousands, which all came and disappeared, and yet all seemed to be there simultaneously, which all constantly changed and renewed themselves, and which were still all Siddhartha. He saw the face of a fish, a carp, with an infinitely painfully opened mouth, the face of a dying fish, with fading eyes—he saw the face of a new-born child, red and full of wrinkles, distorted from crying—he saw the face of a murderer, he saw him plunging a knife into the body of another person—he saw, in the same second, this criminal in bondage, kneeling and his head being chopped off by the executioner with one blow of his sword—he saw the bodies of men and women, naked in positions and cramps of frenzied love—he saw corpses stretched out, motionless, cold, void— he saw the heads of animals, of boars, of crocodiles, of elephants, of bulls, of birds—he saw gods, saw Krishna, saw Agni—he saw all of these figures and faces in a thousand relationships with one another, each one helping the other, loving it, hating it, destroying it, giving re-birth to it, each one was a will to die, a passionately painful confession of transitoriness, and yet none of them died, each one only transformed, was always re-born, received evermore a new face, without any time having passed between the one and the other face—and all of these figures and faces rested, flowed, generated themselves, floated along and merged with each other, and they were all constantly covered by something thin, without individuality of its own, but yet existing, like a thin glass or ice, like a transparent skin, a shell or mold or mask of water, and this mask was smiling, and this mask was Siddhartha's smiling face, which he, Govinda, in this very same moment touched with his lips. And, Govinda saw it like this, this smile of the mask, this smile of oneness above the flowing forms, this smile of simultaneousness above the thousand births and deaths, this smile of Siddhartha was precisely the same, was precisely of the same kind as the quiet, delicate, impenetrable, perhaps benevolent, perhaps mocking, wise, thousand-fold smile of Gotama, the Buddha, as he had seen it himself with great respect a hundred times. Like this, Govinda knew, the perfected ones are smiling.

If it is plausible that ideology will in general serve as a mask for self-interest, then it is a natural presumption that intellectuals, in interpreting history or formulating policy, will tend to adopt an elitist position, condemning popular movements and mass participation in decision making, and emphasizing rather the necessity for supervision by those who possess the knowledge and understanding that is required (so they claim) to manage society and control social change.

Positive thinking is a coping mechanism, an automatic coping mechanism. It is void of life. Feeling and experiencing the realness of what is actually happening are the essences of being alive. Feeling, connecting, reacting to the flow-- this is all living. Positive thinking happens in the head, meanwhile, it denies the heart its authentic, genuine feelings. Not only does it have the potential to rob you of real and deeper connection which is ultimately necessary to living a passionate and compassionate life; but it even has the potential to cut you off from reality itself. A mask that you put on your face, other people's faces, and throw over everything around you. We do not become positive by refusing to be real. We become positive people by really living, really feeling, and really rising above anything that would threaten to sink us. You can't even see what threatens to sink you if you refuse to acknowledge that it's even there. Why did Titanic sink? Someone refused to see the icebergs.

KYAG?” He pulls the folder (which does indeed have the Republic logo on the front) out of the pocket. It shows where the emergency exits are, where the flotation devices are, how to use the oxygen masks, how to assume the crash-landing position. “The kiss-your-ass-goodbye folder,

Elias speeds his gait, and Keenan drops back, taking a position far enough behind me that I think it best to leave him be. I catch up with Izzi, and she leans toward me. “They’ve avoided ripping each other’s faces off,” she says. “That’s a start, right?” I choke back a laugh. “How long until they kill each other, d’you think? And who strikes first?” “Two days before all-out war,” Izzi says. “My money’s on Keenan striking first. He’s got a temper, that one. But Elias will win, being a Mask and all. Though”—she tilts her head—“he doesn’t look so good, Laia.” Izzi

Self-care can also just be another thing you procrastinate on and feel shitty about not doing. It can be another bullet on our to-do list, or a mask—Think positive thoughts! Document your gratitude!—that hides our messiness from ourselves and others. It is also some shamey, disingenuous bullshit to be told that if we practice deep breathing or detox from sugar, we’ll find some ease when the pain and exhaustion we’re feeling is mostly perpetuated by our culture. Your getting in your steps doesn’t make the hardship of experiencing systemic oppression or the energy suck of capitalism go away.

An important difference between overt and covert incest is that, while the overt victim feels abused, the covert victim feels idealized and privileged. Yet underneath the thin mask of feeling special and privileged rests the same trauma of the overt victim: rage, anger, shame and guilt. The sense of exploitation resulting from being a parent's surrogate partner or spouse is buried behind a wall of illusion and denial. The adult covert incest victim remains stuck in a pattern of living aimed at keeping the special relationship going with the opposite-sex parent. It is a pattern of always trying to please Mommy and Daddy. In this way the adult continues to be idealized. A privileged and special position is maintained; the pain and suffering of a lost childhood denied. Separation never occurs and feelings of being trapped in the psychological marriage deepen. This interferes with the victim's capacity for healthy intimacy and sexuality.

It was Jaenelle's voice, but... She was medium height, slender, and fair-skinned. Her gold mane--not quite hair and not quite fur--was brushed up and back from her exotic face and didn't hide the delicately pointed ears. In the center of her forehead was a tiny, spiral horn. A narrow strip of gold fur traced her spine, ending in a small gold and white fawn tail that flicked over her bare buttocks. The legs were human and shapely, but changed below the calf. Instead of feet, she had dainty horse's hooves. Her human hands had sheathed claws like a cat's. As she shifted position to slip another shard into place, he saw the small, round breasts, the feminine curve of waist and hips, the dark-gold triangle of hair between her legs. Who...? But he knew. Even before she walked over and looked at him, even before he saw the feral intelligence in those ancient, haunted sapphire eyes, he knew. Terrifying and beautiful. Human and Other. Gentle and violent. Innocent and wise. *I am Witch,* she said, a small, defiant quiver in her voice. *I know.* His voice had a seductive throb in it, a hunger he couldn't control or mask.

Fitz slid his mask into position and pulled his bandana up to cover it. He breathed in, and picked up a distinct sour smell of sweat. It took his mind a moment to grasp that it was from the bandana's previous owner. A piece of Riley was going back out there after all. And so was a piece of Meg. Glancing down, Fitz admired the axe hanging from his belt. He’d sawed the handle down so it would fit over his armor, but that didn’t change the fact it had been Meg’s. She’d held onto it all the way from New York to the GW. When Garcia had given it to him, Fitz had thought he might display it as a memento of her. Then he decided that a better way to honor her memory would be to split some Variant heads with it. He wasn’t much of a religious man, but he did believe the deceased lived on in the hearts and minds of those they left behind. Today, Riley and Meg would join them in battle.

The Negro is comparison. There is the first truth. He is comparison: that is, he is constantly preoccupied with self-evaluation and with the ego-ideal. Whenever he comes into contact with someone else, the question of value, of merit, arises. The Antilleans have no inherent values of their own, they are always contingent on the presence of The Other. The question is always whether he is less intelligent than I, blacker than I, less respect- - able than I. Every position of one's own, every effort at security, is based on relations of dependence, with the ~ diminution of the other

they had to do it anyway. They had to try. They had taken an oath, and they would be faithful to the end. On the bank of surveillance monitors in front of her, she saw a dozen of her best agents—guns drawn—suddenly rush the convention stage, surround the president, grab him by the arms, and literally carry him away, his feet barely touching the ground. Sanchez then bolted out of the command post and met the president’s protective detail backstage and ordered them downstairs, into the makeshift bunker. “Go, go, go,” she yelled as they raced the president down one corridor after another, into a heavily guarded stairwell, and down five flights, eventually bursting into the basement, where all the convention center’s HVAC systems were housed. They turned one corner and then another, ducking pipes and ducts along the way. A moment later, they raced the president into a large storage freezer, slammed the door shut behind them, and worked feverishly to put him in a protective suit, gloves, and mask, pre-positioned there by the army’s nuclear, biological, and chemical fast-reaction team. That done, Sanchez and her agents began to suit up themselves. But just then, Sanchez felt the

As you leave the Grand Canyon and me, I want to [teach] you about success. Success is not attainment of status nor wealth, power or position. These are easy things to obtain. Success is living in harmony with nature, enthusiasm for life, fulfilled relationships, and energy for living. To achieve it you must let go of the ego. Ego is a mask people wear—it is a role we play, like an actor in a play. Ego is always looking to others for approval. It thinks little of itself and is rooted in fear. We need to discover true self to achieve real success and happiness. True self is our spirit, our soul. We have no fear. We look within our self for approval. We understand everyone is the same self, just wearing different costumes.” Corey

JAPANESE PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL BEHAVIOR are often explained in terms of tatemae and honne. Tatemae, meaning “front” or “facade,” refers to the face one shows the world, the opinions one expresses in public, or the role one is obligated to play based on one’s rank or position. Honne describes “the truth” or “honest feelings,” shared only within a trusted circle of family and friends. To let slip the mask, revealing honne to another, is a signal of intimacy or trust; it is tantamount to an offer of friendship. These ideas are hardly unique to Japan, and versions of tatemae and honne are alive and well in the West. But in the Japanese way of thinking, it is perfectly natural that tatemae and honne should be at odds, and no one need agonize over the discrepancy, or go out of his way to put them to rights.

Neoliberal victim theory is characterized first and foremost by a victim-blaming conception of victimization as subjective and psychological rather than social and political. According to this conception, victimization does not so much happen ‘to’ someone as arise from the self – through the having of a ‘victim personality’, through the making of bad choices, through inadequate practice of personal vigilance and risk management, through the failure to practise the rigorous discipline of positive thinking. This way of knowing victimization transforms social vulnerability into personal responsibility, erasing the social foundations of suffering in order to mask rising inequality, and making it seem logical to regard victims of poverty, inequality, discrimination and violence as the authors of their own suffering.

A disguise is a spiteful game where the convention of the face is turned upside down; I suppose one might well think of it as a kind of art of concealment, by which one ultimately suppresses the heart by wiping out the face. In the case of executioners, strolling flute players, religious judges, primitive medicine men, priests of secret societies, and sneak thieves, a disguising mask was indispensable. It had not only the negative aim of concealing the man’s face, but also the positive objective of cutting off the connection between face and heart by concealing the expression, thus liberating him from ordinary, earthly ties. Take a more common example: disguise is part of the psychology of the dandy, who wants to wear his sunglasses even though there is no glare. Being released from any mental restraint, he can be utterly free and accordingly infinitely cruel.

Put your glasses on mate ….. Come down from there, you’re gonna kill yourself …. Well, what does your Method Statement say? …. Right, let’s get you re-inducted. You need a reminder of site rules ….. Where are your outriggers, mate? ….. Put your glasses on ….. Put your glasses on …. Put your glasses on …. Oh, they steam up, do they? I’ve never heard that one before …. Where’s your mask? If you breathe this shit in you’re going to kill yourself. Silicosis is incurable ….. Right STOP! Do not reverse another inch without a banksman ….. Don’t put your glasses on just because you see me walk around the corner. They won’t protect MY eyes …. Hook yourself on, what’s the matter with you? Are all you scaffolders superhuman or something? ….. Put your glasses on ….. Oi! What stops me walking right in there? Where’s your barriers and signage? ….. Oi! I’m getting showered in fucking sparks here. And so is that can of petrol ….. Put your glasses on …. Where’s the flashback arrestor on this bottle of propane? ….. Hey, pal, stop welding until you’ve sheeted up ….. What are you doing climbing up there? Where’s your supervisor? What did he say about access in this morning’s Safe Start briefing? Nothing? Right, he can sit through another induction tomorrow ….. Where are the retaining pins to the joint clamps in this concrete pump line? SEAMUS! Fucking deal with this, will you? ….Put your glasses on …. Hey! Hey! Come here! Why have you got a nail instead of an ‘R’ clip to the quick-hitch system on your excavator bucket? NO! IT WON’T DO! WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU? If that bucket falls on someone they’re not going to get up again. And you trust a fucking nail to hold it in position! Take this machine out of service immediately until you’ve got the proper ‘R’ clip! ….. Put your glasses on …. Where’s the edge protection. Who removed the edge protection? Right, let me phone for a scaffolder ….. Put your glasses on ….. Oi! Get out from under there! Never, ever stand underneath a suspended load. Even if all the equipment’s been inspected, which it obviously has, you can never trust the crane driver. He can be taken ill suddenly ….. Come here, mate, let’s have a little chat. Why are you working on Fall Arrest? You’re supposed to be working on Fall Restraint (FR ‘restrains’ you going near the perimeter edge of the building, FA ‘arrests’ your fall if, well, if you fall. If you’re hanging off a building we’ve got less than ten minutes to reach you before you start going into toxic shock brought on by suspension trauma. In other words, we need a Rescue Plan, which is why we’d prefer people work on Fall Restraint)

The Coach’s head was oblong with tiny slits that served as eyes, which drifted in tides slowly inward, as though the face itself were the sea or, in fact, a soup of macromolecules through which objects might drift, leaving in their wake, ripples of nothingness. The eyes—they floated adrift like land masses before locking in symmetrically at seemingly prescribed positions off-center, while managing to be so closely drawn into the very middle of the face section that it might have seemed unnecessary for there to have been two eyes when, quite likely, one would easily have sufficed. These aimless, floating eyes were not the Coach’s only distinctive feature—for, in fact, connected to the interior of each eyelid by a web-like layer of rubbery pink tissue was a kind of snout which, unlike the eyes, remained fixed in its position among the tides of the face, arcing narrowly inward at the edges of its sharp extremities into a serrated beak-like projection that hooked downward at its tip, in a fashion similar to that of a falcon’s beak. This snout—or beak, rather—was, in fact, so long and came to such a fine point that as the eyes swirled through the soup of macromolecules that comprised the man’s face, it almost appeared—due to the seeming thinness of the pink tissue—that the eyes functioned as kinds of optical tether balls that moved synchronously across the face like mirror images of one another. 'I wore my lizard mask as I entered the tram, last evening, and people found me fearless,' the Coach remarked, enunciating each word carefully through the hollow clack-clacking sound of his beak, as its edges clapped together. 'I might have exchanged it for that of an ox and then thought better. A lizard goes best with scales, don’t you think?' Bunnu nodded as he quietly wondered how the Coach could manage to fit that phallic monstrosity of a beak into any kind of mask, unless, in fact, this disguise of which he spoke, had been specially designed for his face and divided into sections in such a way that they could be readily attached to different areas—as though one were assembling a new face—in overlapping layers, so as to veil, or perhaps even amplify certain distinguishable features. All the same, in doing so, one could only imagine this lizard mask to be enormous to the extent that it would be disproportionate with the rest of the Coach’s body. But then, there were ways to mask space, as well—to bend light, perhaps, to create the illusion that something was perceptibly larger or smaller, wider or narrower, rounder or more linear than it was in actuality. That is to say, any form of prosthesis designed for the purposes of affecting remedial space might, for example, have had the capability of creating the appearance of a gap of void in occupied space. An ornament hangs from the chin, let’s say, as an accessory meant to contour smoothly inward what might otherwise appear to be hanging jowls. This surely wouldn’t be the exact use that the Coach would have for such a device—as he had no jowls to speak of—though he could certainly see the benefit of the accessory’s ingenuity. This being said, the lizard mask might have appeared natural rather than disproportionate given the right set of circumstances. Whatever the case, there was no way of even knowing if the Coach wasn’t, in fact, already wearing a mask, at this very moment, rendering Bunnu’s initial appraisal of his character—as determined by a rudimentary physiognomic analysis of his features—a matter now subject to doubt. And thus, any conjecture that could be made with respect to the dimensions or components of a lizard mask—not to speak of the motives of its wearer—seemed not only impractical, but also irrelevant at this point in time.

But Che was neither as innocent nor as friendly as she looked. She knew nothing of the global clash of ideas that brought American soldiers to Vietnam, but the war was her life. Her position in it was dead certain. With all the passion of youth, she hated the Saigon regime, the Republic of Vietnam. This enmity was largely an inheritance. Before she was born, her father had fought with the Viet Minh against the French, and when she was a child he had been imprisoned for years by the Saigon regime, which had followed the French. In her mind they were the same, only now the shadow behind the local oppressor was not France, but the United States. Her father, a bricklayer, had been fighting his whole life. For Che, the war had turned even more personal two years earlier, when the ARVN killed her big sister, a leader in the VC underground. She knew the regime’s soldiers as nguy (fake), a word that in Vietnamese suggested a familiar Asian face masking an alien soul.3

In the first century BC, the funeral processions of members of the political elite, including females, even halted at the Forum, where an oration was delivered.99 The family also arranged for “living statues” to accompany the procession; these were actors wearing the masks of important ancestors who had themselves been honored with public statues. By these means, which endured into the Imperial Age, descendants created a publicly visible representation of their families and their position in society.100 How did surviving associates and relatives mark the exceptional nature of a funeral? On the one hand, they did it by ostentatiously neglecting their own outward appearance, leaving their hair unkempt (or at least without ornament), and wearing ragged, “dirty” (or at least dark) clothing. In sum, by renouncing signs of social distinction.101 At the same time, however, the opportunity for public exposure that the mourning ritual provided was not to be missed, for it was yet another opportunity to showcase the personal status or the prestige of the family or group.

Christ. Study the roster. Study everybody’s photos,” she said. “Where’s the packing list for Earl?” Et cetera, et cetera . . . That spring, the gallery was putting up Ping Xi’s first solo show—“Bowwowwow”—and Natasha was up in arms about every little detail. She probably would have fired me sooner had she not been so busy. I tried to feign interest and mask my horror whenever Natasha talked about Ping Xi’s “dog pieces.” He had taxidermied a variety of pure breeds: a poodle, a Pomeranian, a Scottish terrier. Black Lab, Dachshund. Even a little Siberian husky pup. He’d been working on them for a long time. He and Natasha had grown close since his cum paintings had sold so well. During the installation, I overheard one of the interns whispering to the electrician. “There’s a rumor going around that the artist gets the dogs as puppies, raises them, then kills them when they’re the size he wants. He locks them in an industrial freezer because that’s the most humane way to euthanize them without compromising the look of the animal. When they thaw, he can get them into whatever position he wants.

National Socialism has tackled the Jewish problem by action and not by words. It has risen in opposition to the Jewish determination to dominate the world; it has attacked them everywhere and in every sphere of activity; it has flung them out of the positions they have usurped; it has pursued them in every direction, determined to purge the German world of the Jewish poison. For us, this has been an essential process of disinfection, which we have prosecuted to its ultimate limit and without which we should ourselves have been asphyxiated and destroyed. ...Quick to realize the danger, the Jews decided to stake their all in the life and death struggle which they launched against us. National Socialism had to be destroyed, whatever the cost and even if the whole world were destroyed in the process. Never before had there been a war so typically and at the same time so exclusively Jewish. I have at least compelled them to discard their masks. And even if our endeavors should end in failure, it will only be a temporary failure. For I have opened the eyes of the whole world to the Jewish peril.

Another aspect of this – one that he makes into an extended, if slightly ghoulish, case study – was to be found in the funerals of ‘distinguished men’. Again, Polybius must have witnessed enough of these to draw out their deeper significance. The body, he explains, was carried into the Forum and placed on the rostra, normally propped up somehow in an upright position, so it was visible to a large audience. In the procession that followed, family members wore masks made in the likeness of the dead man’s ancestors and dressed in the costume appropriate to the offices each had held (purple-bordered togas and so on), as if they were all present ‘living and breathing’. The funeral address, delivered by a family member, started with the achievements of the corpse on the rostra but then went through the careers of all the other characters, who by this time were sitting on ivory, or at least ivory-veneered, chairs lined up next to the dead man. ‘The most important upshot of this,’ Polybius concludes, ‘is that the younger generation is inspired to endure all suffering for the common good, in the hope of winning the glory that belongs to the brave.

It was too easy! It was much too easy! Five hours had not yet gone by since I had met you. How easy it was! If only you had shown at least a modicum of resistance. Well, how long should you have resisted to satisfy me? Six hours? Seven? Eight? I was being stupid and ridiculous. Your licentiousness would be the same, if you held back for five, fifty, or five hundred hours. Well, why didn’t I have the courage to put an end to this festering triangle? Because of a desire for revenge? Perhaps. But I think there was a different motive. Had it been simply desire for revenge, would it not have been more effective to tear the mask from my face on the spot? But I was afraid. Of course, the behavior of the mask, which was demolishing my calm everyday life, was cruel, but returning to the faceless, enclosed days was even more terrifying. Fear strengthened fear, and like a bird that has lost its feet and is unable to alight upon the ground, I would have to keep endlessly hovering. But that was not the end of it. If I really could not endure the situation, the mask, alive as it was, might well kill you. Your fornication would be difficult to deny, which gave me an alibi. But I did not kill you. Why? I wonder. Because I did not want to lose you? No, precisely not wanting to lose you was reason enough for killing you. It would be senseless to seek rationality in jealousy. Just look at yourself. You who had rejected me so positively, who had rebelled against my face, now lay broken beneath the mask!

Vivien (spelled the same way as Vivien Leigh, lucky thing) was quite possibly the most beautiful woman she'd ever seen. She had a heart-shaped face, deep brown hair that gleamed in its Victory roll, and full curled lips painted scarlet. Her eyes were wide set and framed by dramatic arched brows just like Rita Hayworth's or Gene Tierney's, but it was more than that which made her beautiful. It wasn't the fine skirts and blouses she wore, it was the way she wore them, easily, casually; it was the strings of pearls strung airily around her neck, the brown Bentley she used to drive before it was handed over like a pair of boots to the Ambulance Service. It was the tragic history Dolly had learned in dribs and drabs- orphaned as a child, raised by an uncle, married to a handsome, wealthy author named Henry Jenkins, who held an important position with the Ministry of Information. "Dorothy? Come and put my sheets to rights and fetch my sleep mask." Ordinarily, Dolly might've been a bit envious to have a woman of that description living at such close quarters, but with Vivien it was different. All her life, Dolly had longed for a friend like her. Someone who really understood her (not like dull old Caitlin or silly frivolous Kitty), someone with whom she could stroll arm in arm down Bond Street, elegant and buoyant, as people turned to look at them, gossiping behind their hands about the dark leggy beauties, their careless charm. And now, finally, she'd found Vivien. From the very first time they'd passed each other walking up the Grove, when their eyes had met and they'd exchanged that smile- secretive, knowing, complicit- it had been clear to both of them that they were two of a kind and destined to be the very best of friends.

Jews, notably, were defined as a ‘people’, while others, not even identified, were referred to only as ‘communities’. It was an extraordinary phrase that echoes down the decades and explains why Balfour is remembered a century later by Arabs as the architect of perfidy and disaster.16 Zionists, for opposite reasons, revere his memory; Balfour Street in Jerusalem is still the site of the official residence of the Israeli prime minister. The reservation had been inserted in the text to meet the strong objections raised by Lord Curzon, the former British viceroy of India and, as lord president of the council, an influential member of the war cabinet. Curzon – reflecting contemporary perceptions about the map and identity of the region – had referred to the ‘Syrian Arabs’ who had ‘occupied [Palestine] for the best part of 1,500 years’, and asked what would become of them. ‘They will not be content either to be expropriated for Jewish immigrants or to act merely as hewers of wood and drawers of water to the latter’, he predicted with the help of another then familiar biblical reference.17 The declaration’s second reservation – about the rights of Jews in other countries – was a response to the opposition of Edwin Montagu, the secretary of state for India, even though he was not in the war cabinet. Montagu was a Jewish grandee who feared that an official expression of sympathy for Zionism in fact masked anti-Semitic prejudice and would undermine the hard-won position of British Jews and their co-religionists elsewhere in the world. However, it did not weaken his vehement opposition, any more than the words about ‘non-Jewish communities’ assuaged Arab fears. Over time, Jewish attitudes to Zionism would change significantly; Arab attitudes, by and large, did not.

The first signal of the change in her behavior was Prince Andrew’s stag night when the Princess of Wales and Sarah Ferguson dressed as policewomen in a vain attempt to gatecrash his party. Instead they drank champagne and orange juice at Annabel’s night club before returning to Buckingham Palace where they stopped Andrew’s car at the entrance as he returned home. Technically the impersonation of police officers is a criminal offence, a point not neglected by several censorious Members of Parliament. For a time this boisterous mood reigned supreme within the royal family. When the Duke and Duchess hosted a party at Windsor Castle as a thank you for everyone who had helped organize their wedding, it was Fergie who encouraged everyone to jump, fully clothed, into the swimming pool. There were numerous noisy dinner parties and a disco in the Waterloo Room at Windsor Castle at Christmas. Fergie even encouraged Diana to join her in an impromptu version of the can-can. This was but a rehearsal for their first public performance when the girls, accompanied by their husbands, flew to Klosters for a week-long skiing holiday. On the first day they lined up in front of the cameras for the traditional photo-call. For sheer absurdity this annual spectacle takes some beating as ninety assorted photographers laden with ladders and equipment scramble through the snow for positions. Diana and Sarah took this silliness at face value, staging a cabaret on ice as they indulged in a mock conflict, pushing and shoving each other until Prince Charles announced censoriously: “Come on, come on!” Until then Diana’s skittish sense of humour had only been seen in flashes, invariably clouded by a mask of blushes and wan silences. So it was a surprised group of photographers who chanced across the Princess in a Klosters café that same afternoon. She pointed to the outsize medal on her jacket, joking: “I have awarded it to myself for services to my country because no-one else will.” It was an aside which spoke volumes about her underlying self-doubt. The mood of frivolity continued with pillow fights in their chalet at Wolfgang although it would be wrong to characterize the mood on that holiday as a glorified schoolgirls’ outing. As one royal guest commented: “It was good fun within reason. You have to mind your p’s and q’s when royalty, particularly Prince Charles, is present. It is quite formal and can be rather a strain.

I’ve only an hour,” Colin said as he attached the safety tip to his foil. “I have an appointment this afternoon.” “No matter,” Benedict replied, lunging forward a few times to loosen up the muscles in his leg. He hadn’t fenced in some time; the sword felt good in his hand. He drew back and touched the tip to the floor, letting the blade bend slightly. “It won’t take more than an hour to best you.” Colin rolled his eyes before he drew down his mask. Benedict walked to the center of the room. “Are you ready?” “Not quite,” Colin replied, following him. Benedict lunged again. “I said I wasn’t ready!” Colin hollered as he jumped out of the way. “You’re too slow,” Benedict snapped. Colin cursed under his breath, then added a louder, “Bloody hell,” for good measure. “What’s gotten into you?” “Nothing,” Benedict nearly snarled. “Why would you say so?” Colin took a step backward until they were a suitable distance apart to start the match. “Oh, I don’t know,” he intoned, sarcasm evident. “I suppose it could be because you nearly took my head off.” “I’ve a tip on my blade.” “And you were slashing like you were using a sabre,” Colin shot back. Benedict gave a hard smile. “It’s more fun that way.” “Not for my neck.” Colin passed his sword from hand to hand as he flexed and stretched his fingers. He paused and frowned. “You sure you have a foil there?” Benedict scowled. “For the love of God, Colin, I would never use a real weapon.” “Just making sure,” Colin muttered, touching his neck lightly. “Are you ready?” Benedict nodded and bent his knees. “Regular rules,” Colin said, assuming a fencer’s crouch. “No slashing.” Benedict gave him a curt nod. “En garde!” Both men raised their right arms, twisting their wrists until their palms were up, foils gripped in their fingers. “Is that new?” Colin suddenly asked, eyeing the handle of Benedict’s foil with interest. Benedict cursed at the loss of his concentration. “Yes, it’s new,” he bit off. “I prefer an Italian grip.” Colin stepped back, completely losing his fencing posture as he looked at his own foil, with a less elaborate French grip. “Might I borrow it some time? I wouldn’t mind seeing if—” “Yes!” Benedict snapped, barely resisting the urge to advance and lunge that very second. “Will you get back en garde?” Colin gave him a lopsided smile, and Benedict just knew that he had asked about his grip simply to annoy him. “As you wish,” Colin murmured, assuming position again.

Few grown humans can normally survive a fall of much more than twenty-five or thirty feet, though there have been some notable exceptions—none more memorable perhaps than that of a British airman in World War II named Nicholas Alkemade. In the late winter of 1944, while on a bombing run over Germany, Flight Sergeant Alkemade, the tail gunner on a British Lancaster bomber, found himself in a literally tight spot when his plane was hit by enemy flak and quickly filled with smoke and flames. Tail gunners on Lancasters couldn’t wear parachutes because the space in which they operated was too confined, and by the time Alkemade managed to haul himself out of his turret and reach for his parachute, he found it was on fire and beyond salvation. He decided to leap from the plane anyway rather than perish horribly in flames, so he hauled open a hatch and tumbled out into the night. He was three miles above the ground and falling at 120 miles per hour. “It was very quiet,” Alkemade recalled years later, “the only sound being the drumming of aircraft engines in the distance, and no sensation of falling at all. I felt suspended in space.” Rather to his surprise, he found himself to be strangely composed and at peace. He was sorry to die, of course, but accepted it philosophically, as something that happened to airmen sometimes. The experience was so surreal and dreamy that Alkemade was never certain afterward whether he lost consciousness, but he was certainly jerked back to reality when he crashed through the branches of some lofty pine trees and landed with a resounding thud in a snowbank, in a sitting position. He had somehow lost both his boots, and had a sore knee and some minor abrasions, but otherwise was quite unharmed. Alkemade’s survival adventures did not quite end there. After the war, he took a job in a chemical plant in Loughborough, in the English Midlands. While he was working with chlorine gas, his gas mask came loose, and he was instantly exposed to dangerously high levels of the gas. He lay unconscious for fifteen minutes before co-workers noticed his unconscious form and dragged him to safety. Miraculously, he survived. Some time after that, he was adjusting a pipe when it ruptured and sprayed him from head to foot with sulfuric acid. He suffered extensive burns but again survived. Shortly after he returned to work from that setback, a nine-foot-long metal pole fell on him from a height and very nearly killed him, but once again he recovered. This time, however, he decided to tempt fate no longer. He took a safer job as a furniture salesman and lived out the rest of his life without incident. He died peacefully, in bed, aged sixty-four in 1987. —

Archer arrived early the next morning. Grey was still asleep on the sofa in his study when he heard tapping on the window. He opened his eyes and immediately regretted it as the sharp light of day pierced his brain. Squinting, he tried to focus on his brother, since he already knew who his visitor was. Only one person ever announced himself so annoyingly. “Open the bloody window, Grey!” Grumbling, Grey slowly rose into a full sitting position. His back and neck were stiff and his head felt as though someone had kicked it repeatedly from all sides. And his mouth! Christ, he didn’t want to even think about what might have died inside it. He staggered to the window, unlatched it and swung it open. “What the hell do you want?” Wide-eyed, Archer made a tsking noise. “Is that any way to greet your favorite brother?” “You’re not my favorite,” Grey scowled. Unaffected, Archer easily adapted. “Is that any way to greet your second-favorite brother?” Grey grinned, he couldn’t help it. Archer had always had a knack for making him smile, just as he had a knack for pissing him off as well. “I’m hung over and feel like shite. What do you want?” “You look like shite. What’s this I hear about you making an appearance at Saint’s Row last night?” “Rose tell you that?” “She did. I’m surprised you took such a risk just to see her.” Grey thought of her in that teal gown, the lights illuminating the luster of her skin. “It was worth it.” “Worth it, eh? So worth it you immediately came home and got sloshed.” “Something like that. And then Rose came home and I got even more sloshed.” Archer’s expression turned to concern as he leaned against the window frame. “What happened?” Grey shrugged. He’d already revealed more than he’d wanted. “Suffice it to say she now knows what kind of man I am.” His brother snorted. “That girl has always known exactly what kind of man you are.” The words were plain enough, but there was a cryptic edge to them that had Grey puzzled. “What the hell does that mean?” Arch shook his head. “Come to the stables with me. I want to show you something.” He looked down at himself. He was wearing the same clothes he’d worn last night and he was wrinkled beyond hope. Not to mention that he smelled like a distillery-an unwashed one at that. And his mask was up in his room. What if someone happened by and saw him… He wasn’t a coward. He just didn’t wish to be seen looking less than his best. An oath punctuated the early morning air. Grey was grabbed by the front of the shirt and yanked-hard. His only course of action was to brace one booted foot on the bottom sill to keep from falling. Of course, that action only succeeded in making it easier for Archer to haul him completely out onto the lawn. He landed hard on both feet, the impact going straight to his ready-to-implode skull. “What the hell?” Fist cocked, Grey punched his brother in the shoulder. “Jesus, man! What are you about?” Archer punched him back. It hurt, and oddly enough it seemed to wake him up-clear the fog and some of the pressure surrounding his brain. “I’m trying to help you, you bugger.” “To do what?” Grey demanded. “Die?

Auto-Zoomar. Talbert knelt in the a tergo posture, his palms touching the wing-like shoulder blades of the young woman. A conceptual flight. At ten-second intervals the Polaroid projected a photograph on to the screen beside the bed. He watched the auto-zoom close in on the union of their thighs and hips. Details of the face and body of the film actress appeared on the screen, mimetized elements of the planetarium they had visited that morning. Soon the parallax would close, establishing the equivalent geometry of the sexual act with the junctions of this wall and ceiling. ‘Not in the Literal Sense.’Conscious of Catherine Austin’s nervous hips as she stood beside him, Dr Nathan studied the photograph of the young woman. ‘Karen Novotny,’ he read off the caption. ‘Dr Austin, may I assure you that the prognosis is hardly favourable for Miss Novotny. As far as Talbert is concerned the young woman is a mere modulus in his union with the film actress.’ With kindly eyes he looked up at Catherine Austin. ‘Surely it’s self-evident - Talbert’s intention is to have intercourse with Miss Taylor, though needless to say not in the literal sense of that term.’ Action Sequence. Hiding among the traffic in the near-side lane, Koester followed the white Pontiac along the highway. When they turned into the studio entrance he left his car among the pines and climbed through the perimeter fence. In the shooting stage Talbert was staring through a series of colour transparencies. Karen Novotny waited passively beside him, her hands held like limp birds. As they grappled he could feel the exploding musculature of Talbert’s shoulders. A flurry of heavy blows beat him to the floor. Vomiting through his bloodied lips, he saw Talbert run after the young woman as she darted towards the car. The Sex Kit.‘In a sense,’ Dr Nathan explained to Koester, ‘one may regard this as a kit, which Talbert has devised, entitled “Karen Novotny” - it might even be feasible to market it commercially. It contains the following items: (1) Pad of pubic hair, (2) a latex face mask, (3) six detachable mouths, (4) a set of smiles, (5) a pair of breasts, left nipple marked by a small ulcer, (6) a set of non-chafe orifices, (7) photo cut-outs of a number of narrative situations - the girl doing this and that, (8) a list of dialogue samples, of inane chatter, (9) a set of noise levels, (10) descriptive techniques for a variety of sex acts, (11) a torn anal detrusor muscle, (12) a glossary of idioms and catch phrases, (13) an analysis of odour traces (from various vents), mostly purines, etc., (14) a chart of body temperatures (axillary, buccal, rectal), (15) slides of vaginal smears, chiefly Ortho-Gynol jelly, (16) a set of blood pressures, systolic 120, diastolic 70 rising to 200/150 at onset of orgasm . . . ’ Deferring to Koester, Dr Nathan put down the typescript. ‘There are one or two other bits and pieces, but together the inventory is an adequate picture of a woman, who could easily be reconstituted from it. In fact, such a list may well be more stimulating than the real thing. Now that sex is becoming more and more a conceptual act, an intellectualization divorced from affect and physiology alike, one has to bear in mind the positive merits of the sexual perversions. Talbert’s library of cheap photo-pornography is in fact a vital literature, a kindling of the few taste buds left in the jaded palates of our so-called sexuality.

Silverland held two oddly misplaced fears,” continued Carter. “He always acted like he was the cheerful sort who never sweated the details, but like any bully who gets the bully pulpit, his focus on the big picture was just a mask meant to hide what a scared little boy he was. He was a lot like a Southern gambler. In the end, a gambler places more value on a reckless, fearless, all-or-nothing bet than he does on reason. Silverland had reckless courage, but his intellect was just pretense, and in extreme situations, he couldn’t stop himself from making childish decisions. In other words, it was his own despotic creed that no matter what contemptible thing he might do, the person who held the highest position was unconditionally the greatest person, and it followed that the highest level decisions must always be made only by the person in the highest position of authority.” “Enough with

Barely across the Ourcq, Donovan’s battalion began taking fire from three sides. One bullet grazed Wild Bill’s thigh; another tore off the heel of his boot. A shell fragment would surely have killed him had it not struck the respirator of his gas mask. Donovan’s adjutant, Lieutenant Oliver Ames, ran forward and flung himself down alongside the major, joined by a mess cook, John Kayes. A sniper’s bullet whizzed past Donovan and struck Ames in the head, killing him instantly. Kayes was fatally riddled by machine-gun fire. Donovan reached out toward the men and was shot through the hand. Two days later, still deployed along the Ourcq, Donovan, with Kilmer at his side, crept to the northern edge of a wood for a better view of the enemy’s position. Suddenly he realized that Kilmer was not with him. He retraced his steps and found the sergeant sprawled on the ground, a bullet through his brain.

An American pilot flying a Spad VII swooped low and dropped a bomb over their position. Walter was hit and badly wounded. He clutched at Bücher’s sleeve. “I won’t die now that there’s an armistice, will I?” he pleaded. Bücher attempted to reassure the youth. As he spoke, gas shells began laying a poisonous cloud over the lines. Bücher pulled a mask over Walter’s head, then over his own. Through the goggles he could make out shapes emerging from the odorous haze as the black Americans continued their attempt to breach the line. Bücher stole a glance at his watch. It was two minutes to eleven.

That was diverse.” Poppy looks surprised as she slides down the wall like a bird that’s forgotten how to fly, landing in a crumpled heap on the curb. “Positively Dionysian,” I manage to slur. The world is a crazed kaleidoscope. Colors fight for space, desperate to steal each other’s names. “They’re just labels!” I yell at the untidy bundle of shades and bones near my foot. “Are you talking to me?” Patterns birthed by multiple reflections coalesce into Poppy’s face. “Maybe. I think other people’s musical chi has saturated my cells.” Myriad venues and tonal flavors are scattered through my memory, like broken harmonies. “Why did I feed on so many tunes?” “You wanted filtered sounds to rain down and seep clean through, beyond blood, to the soul.” A lone streetlight flickers behind her and for a few alienating seconds she shimmers in and out of existence. “Too much.” My stomach turns over, but I manage to keep everything down. If I throw up now, nothing will come out but music. “Tonight’s orgy of sound has left us in a pure, concentrated haze of other people’s emotions,” Poppy announces proudly, unperturbed by the fact I’m squatting in a gutter. She holds out her arms to me, palms turned up. “Look, I’m full of music.” I stare at the small woman, posed like a crazed Messiah. The cat mask is still caught in her hair. A cracking sound fills the air and her face starts to fracture into pieces, like shards of a broken mirror. Closing my eyes, I take deep breaths till my head calms down. When I open them again, Poppy is gone.

However, even though I find much of this anti-essentialist-inspired analysis compelling, I nonetheless hope to illuminate two problems that arise when this form of criticism is uncritically wielded in the context of Indigenous peoples’ struggles for recognition and self-determination. First, using recent feminist and deliberative democratic critiques of Indigenous recognition politics as a backdrop, I demonstrate how normative appropriations of social constructivism can undercut the liberatory aspirations of anti-essentialist criticism by failing to adequately address the complexity of interlocking social relations that serve to exasperate the types of exclusionary cultural practices that critics of essentialism find so disconcerting. Second, and perhaps more problematically, I show that when constructivist views of culture are posited as a universal feature of social life and then used as a means to evaluate the legitimacy of Indigenous claims for cultural recognition against the uncontested authority of the colonial state, it can serve to sanction the very forms of domination and inequality that anti-essentialist criticism ought to mitigate.

GROUP FIFTEEN had its own private medical facilities attached to a well-known London teaching hospital. State-of-the-art facilities, the best doctors in the country, absolute discretion. Control watched through the window as the surgeon bent low to examine the damage that had been done to Twelve’s knee. The man—and his three colleagues—were wearing green smocks, their faces covered by surgical masks and latex gloves over their hands. Twelve had been anaesthetised and was laid out on the operating table, covered by a sheet with a long vertical slit that allowed easy access to his right leg. The surgeon had already sliced open his knee, a neat incision that began just below the quadriceps and curved around the line of his leg. The opening was held open by medical clips, and a miniature camera on an articulated arm had been positioned overhead, its feed visible on the large screen that was fixed to the wall in the observation suite.

Your fearful ego will avoid taking risks by engaging in mindless activities that keep you occupied. Absently turning on the TV, playing a video game for endless hours, or seeing what other people are doing for distractions on social media sites. All of these distractions can mask your fear and, once the activity ends, you are back to feeling anxiety and fear all over again.

The operative word here is “intimate.”We have to get on a core, gut level because shame is core, gut level stuff. Toxic shame masks our deepest secrets about ourselves; it embodies our belief that we are essentially defective. We feel so awful, we dare not look at it ourselves, much less tell anyone. The only way we can find out we were wrong about ourselves is to risk exposing ourselves to someone else’s scrutiny. When we trust someone else and experience their love and acceptance, we begin to change our beliefs about ourselves. We learn that we are not bad; we learn that we are lovable and acceptable. True love heals and affects spiritual growth. If we do not grow because of someone else’s love, it’s generally because it is a counterfeit form of love. True love is unconditional positive regard. Unconditional positive regard allows us to be whole and accept all the parts of ourselves. To be whole we must reunite all the shamed and split-off aspects of ourselves. Virginia Satir speaks of the five freedoms that accrue when one is loved unconditionally. These freedoms involve our basic powers. These are the power to perceive, the power to love (choose and want), the power to emote, the power to think and express, and the power to envision or imagine.

By Thursday the news had leaked out and a group of photographers waited for her outside the hospital. “People thought Diana only came in at the end,” says Angela. “Of course it wasn’t like that at all, we shared it all.” In the early hours of Thursday, August 23 the end came. When Adrian died, Angela went next door to telephone Diana. Before she could speak Diana said: “I’m on my way.” Shortly after she arrived they said the Lord’s Prayer together and then Diana left her friends to be alone for one last time. “I don’t know of anybody else who would have thought of me first,” says Angela. Then the protective side of Diana took over. She made up a bed for her friend, tucked her in and kissed her goodnight. While she was asleep Diana knew that it would be best if Angela joined her family on holiday in France. She packed her suitcase for her and telephoned her husband in Montpellier to tell him that Angela was flying out as soon as she awoke. Then Diana walked upstairs to see the baby ward, the same unit where her own sons were born. She felt that it was important to see life as well as death, to try and balance her profound sense of loss with a feeling of rebirth. In those few months Diana had learned much about herself, reflecting the new start she had made in life. It was all the more satisfying because for once she had not bowed to the royal family’s pressure. She knew that she had left Balmoral without first seeking permission from the Queen and in the last days there was insistence that she return promptly. The family felt that a token visit would have sufficed and seemed uneasy about her display of loyalty and devotion which clearly went far beyond the traditional call of duty. Her husband had never known much regard for her interests and he was less than sympathetic to the amount of time she spent caring for her friend. They failed to appreciate that she had made a commitment to Adrian Ward-Jackson, a commitment she was determined to keep. It mattered not whether he was dying of AIDS, cancer or some other disease, she had given her word to be with him at the end. She was not about to breach his trust. At that critical time she felt that her loyalty to her friends mattered as much as her duty towards the royal family. As she recalled to Angela: “You both need me. It’s a strange feeling being wanted for myself. Why me?” While the Princess was Angela’s guardian angel at Adrian’s funeral, holding her hand throughout the service, it was at his memorial service where she needed her friend’s shoulder to cry on. It didn’t happen. They tried hard to sit together for the service but Buckingham Palace courtiers would not allow it. As the service at St Paul’s Church in Knightsbridge was a formal occasion, the royal family had to sit in pews on the right, the family and friends of the deceased on the left. In grief, as with so much in Diana’s life, the heavy hand of royal protocol prevented the Princess from fulfilling this very private moment in the way she would have wished. During the service Diana’s grief was apparent as she mourned the man whose road to death had given her such faith in herself. The Princess no longer felt that she had to disguise her true feelings from the world. She could be herself rather than hide behind a mask. Those months nurturing Adrian had reordered her priorities in life. As she wrote to Angela shortly afterwards: “I reached a depth inside which I never imagined was possible. My outlook on life has changed its course and become more positive and balanced.

Backward masking was used on rock and roll records a few decades ago to negatively influence people with Satanic messages. I found if you played some Country music songs backward you would actually experience positive feelings.

Emma pulled open the door in what was probably a sorry excuse for a smile on her face and froze. Sean stood on the porch, his face set in the expression she recognized as the one he used to mask uncertainty. But her gaze only settled on his face for a few seconds before being drawn to his chest. He was wearing a button-up dress shirt and it was pink. And not a tint of pale blush, either. It was pink. “Hey,” he said, handing her a small bouquet of pink-and-white gladioli, the stems tied together with a length of pink ribbon. Her breath caught in her throat as she took them, her mind racing to make sense of what she was seeing. What did it mean? Why was he here, dressed like the man of her ten-year-old self’s dreams? “I, uh…made some revisions to your owner’s manual.” She hadn’t even noticed the journal in his other hand, but when he held it out, she took it. “Okay.” Her voice was as shaky as her hands. She opened the cover and found a bright pink sticky note stuck to the first page. I miss you. “I miss you too,” she whispered, and slowly turned the pages. You don’t take any crap from me. You make me laugh. Missionary is my favorite position now because I can see your face. That made her laugh, even as the sweetness of the sentiment warmed her heart. I’ll let you drive. She gave him a doubtful look and then turned the page. Sometimes. Yeah, there was the Sean she knew and loved.

Can you describe for me the tastes that you experienced as you said those words?" "Certainly. Mashed peas, dried apples, wine gum, weak tea, butter unsalted, Walkers crisps..."Mr. Roland replied. What I was experiencing at that moment wasn't an out-of-body experience. It was an in-another-body experience. Everything but this man and me had faded into darkness. He and I were at the two ends of a brightly lit tunnel. We were point A and point B. The tunnel was the most direct, straight-line route between the two points. I had never experienced recognition in this pure, undiluted form. It was a mirroring. It was a fact. It was a cord pulled taut between us. Most of all, it was no longer a secret. I don't remember getting up, but I must have. I do remember kneeling in front of the TV. I touched the image of Mr. Roland's face as his words jumped, swerved, coalesced, attacked, and revealed. As the interview continued, he became more comfortable with the interviewer, and his facial tics and rapid blinking lessened. He masked what he couldn't control by taking long sips from a glass of water (or perhaps the clear liquid was gin). He also turned his head slightly and coughed into his left hand, which provided him with a second or two of privacy. It soon became clear to Mr. Roland and to me that the interviewer wanted him to perform for the camera. After each question-and-answer exchange, the interviewer would ask him for the tastes of her words and then his. Mr. Roland was oddly obliging, much more so than I would have been in his position. I soon realized that his pool of experiential flavors, in other words his actual food intake, was very British and that he didn't venture far from home for his gastronomical needs. "Curry fries" was the most unusual taste that this piano tuner from Manchester listed. The word "employment" triggered it, he told the interviewer. I said "employment" aloud and tasted olives from a can, which meant I tasted more can than olives. I felt more than a tinge of envy.

Mask-wearing meant acceptance of the official expert position that the country was in a state of perpetual pathogen siege and that this justified the government exercising vast emergency powers.

Every intellectual project of a political kind should follow a number of basic principles1) Be deeply suspicious of anything that masks itself in universal regalia. Bring into question that which is not being questioned in the normal state of affairs. (2) Move beyond any self-righteous and self-absolving assessments of the operations of power. Look to deal with power at the level of its effects and the ways in which it positively manipulates subjects to wilfully abandon their own political freedoms. (3) Foreground the affirmative qualities of subjectivities. Not only is this integral in the fight against fascism in all its forms. It opens a challenge to the narcissism of those who would have us surrender to the mercies of the world. (4) Speak with confidence about the ability to transform the world, not for the better, but for the sake of it. Without an open commitment to the people to come, the struggle is already lost. (5) Use provocation as a political tool. Not to evidence extremist views. But to illustrate how normalizing power truly fears anything that appears remotely exceptional. The poetic most certainly included. (6) Trust in the irreducible qualities of human existence. The feelings we have, the atmospheres we breathe, the aesthetics we enfold, the fables we scribe, the playful personas we construct, they are all integral to the formation of a new image of thought. (7) Have faith in people. Just as they will resist what they find oppressive and intolerable, so they will also find their own dignified solutions to problems in spite of our best efforts. (8) Do not shy away from conflict. Without conflict there is no resistance to power. And without resistance to power there is no creation of alternative existences. (9) Reveal fully your political orientations. Do not abstract them from the work. Such a deception is of the order for those embarrassed by the mediocrity of their power. (10) Speak with the courage to truth that narrates a tale to affect a number of meaningful registers. No book should be read if it doesn't intellectually challenge and emotionally move us.

Do we let people in far enough, or do we dodge and weave our way through life with only the masks we want others to see?

In Who Was That Masked Man?, David Rothel gives verbatim, often conflicting, interviews with people in key positions at the time of The Lone Ranger’s creation. And Dick Osgood, who worked 36 years at the Ranger’s birthplace, combines his experience with the accounts of his coworkers in Wyxie Wonderland: An Unauthorized 50–Year Diary of WXYZ, Detroit.

We were open and nice as far as society demanded, that way we maintained our position in it. My attraction towards a low-caste boy endangered that position. That hollow position in this hollow society.

His first book, Black Faces, White Masks (1954), asserted that Western civilization repressed not only its own passions, as Freud had said, but those of the peoples it colonized as well. White Europeans sensed the vitality and cultural health of the nonwhite races, particularly blacks like Fanon himself, and therefore placed them in a subordinate position. Whites then trained the nonwhite intellectual to think of his own culture as inferior and lacking in “civilized” values. By accepting this denigration of his own culture, the nonwhite intellectual in effect denied his own humanity. He became a neurotic, Fanon explained in clinical detail, and permitted the white man’s unconscious fears of vitality to dictate his own life choices.

We find ourselves in the wake of a global pandemic. COVID-19 has opened my eyes to many things; the least of which is how many more people are now walking around the block for exercise, mental health, and, at least some kind of, social interaction. But the pandemic has magnified, and helped me see more clearly, other ideas found on these pages: That we’re all in this together – locally, nationally, and globally. That lots of people doing little things – social distancing, wearing masks, taking care of one another – can bend the curve of history in a positive direction.

This invisible, these ideas, cannot be detached from the sensible appearances and erected into a second positivity. The musical idea, the literary idea, the dialectic of love, and also the articulations of the light, the modes of exhibition of sound and of touch speak to us, have their logic, their coherence, their points of intersection, their concordances, and here also the appearances are the disguise of unknown 'forces' and 'laws.' But it is as though the secrecy wherein they lie and whence the literary expression draws them were their proper mode of existence. For these truths are not only hidden like a physical reality which we have not been able to discover, invisible in fact but which we will one day be able to see facing us, which others, better situated, could already see, provided that the screen that masks it is lifted. Here, on the contrary, there is no vision without the screen.

The use of internal and external masking creates what can be called our “noble lie”. This is the fictitious story we tell ourselves to maintain a positive self-image in the face of our many flaws. While having a positive self-image is beneficial, problems arise when it is too reliant on the use of internal and external masking. For if our self-deceptions become too flaunting of reality we become akin to an individual walking over a deep chasm on a poorly constructed bridge. “The chasm was life itself”, wrote Leo Tolstoy in his book Anna Karenina, “the bridge that artificial life” While the bridge of our self-deceptions may hold for many years, we always face the risk that the bridge will break and we will be forced to confront the chasm of life – which after years of lying to ourselves, and denying, rather than dealing with our weaknesses, we will be ill-equipped to cope with.

The thought may seem remarkable, but perhaps not so much so as it would at first. First of all, there was never anything unusual about the Baron's sex life, even if it may tickle one's curiosity when presented in so balanced a fashion, and there is certainly nothing unique about the case. On the contrary, I would like to intimate that I have never, especially in artistic circles, met an individual who could be called psychically monosexual through and through. Our manliness-with all due respect-does not preclude a certain amount of femininity, thank God; it would be a great pity if it were otherwise. This 'second phase', then, which is so prevalent in the Baron's psychosexual makeup, this balanced perception of the feminine side of his nature, only seems special when studied in a superficial way. It should rather be seen as something entirely natural and normal. For if within an utterly male body with clearly defined male sexual feelings a soul is contained - I use the word in an abstract sense in order to get my point across more easily and directly - a soul, I say, which is animated by feminine feelings, generally speaking these feelings won't be strong enough to vanquish the natural restraints that stand in the way of an outspoken male-male bonding. The instinct remains focused on the female, and even when it finds itself in a feminine position vis-a-vis the soul, the apparent ambivalent result is only seeming. The masculine yearning for the female body basically remains, even when it finds itself flooded by feminine feelings, and the ostensible homosexuality is merely a mask. I do not consider Baron von Friedel's case to be anything more than an exceptionally clear-cut textbook case describing a phenomenon I have, for my part, seen often enough, if hardly ever in such pronounced form. "The Death Of Baron Jesus Maria Von Friedel

How we react to the presidency of Donald Trump will be the first test of our preparedness. His administration in its infancy is already wracked with scandals. But the real scandal is that he is president at all. Yes, a few extra votes in key states might have changed the electoral college outcome. But a Democratic victory would not have masked the fact that it was a third force that surged from below to fill a vacuum and defeat both parties. There proved to be an untapped yearning to hear someone address America’s new challenges in a different key, someone willing to champion change and say without equivocation that America can be great. Trump offered an authoritarian snarl and an ever-changing string of bizarre spontaneous “positions,” not a political vision. But his demagogic skills were sufficient to move millions to applaud his race baiting, his misogyny, his hardly veiled threats of violence, his contempt for the press, and his contempt for the law.

Why did I think that the mask was a better portrayal than my authentic self? We can get hidden under layers of illusion, can’t we?

(showing 1-2 of 2) sort by ↑ top up up 1 position down down ↓ bottom Remove this quote from your collectionSalvador Dalí “I don't do drugs. I am drugs.” ― Salvador Dalí tags: drugs 918 likes ↑ top up up 2 position down down ↓ bottom Remove this quote from your collection “But it's funny how even after all these years you find yourself wondering just how well you know anyone. Hell, we've all been tight since we we're kids - been through a lot together - but we still have secrets, don't we? All of us. None of us are ever exactly, precisely what we claim to be, are we? We're one way with some people, another way with other people, maybe another way still when we're all alone. That's what it boils down to fellas. At night, when you're lying there in bed looking at the ceiling, remembering the day, thinking back through things you did and what lies ahead, when it's just you and whatever god you pray to in the dark ...that's when all the masks are peeled away and it's just you. Just you..., and whoever...or whatever you are.

She sensed the pirate grabbing for her shoulder and was on her feet before his fingers could graze the black wool of her cloak. He stood a good head taller than her. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” she crooned. Rolfe’s eyes gleamed with the challenge. “You’re in my city, and on my island.” Only a handbreadth separated them. “You’re not in any position to give me orders.” Sam cleared his throat, but Celaena stared up into Rolfe’s face. His eyes scanned the blackness beneath the hood of her cloak—the smooth black mask, the shadows that concealed any trace of her features. “Celaena,” Sam warned, clearing his throat again. “Very well.” She sighed loudly, and stepped around Rolfe as if he were nothing but a piece of furniture in her way.

Unlike uplifting light fiction, narrative nonfiction’s trammeled territory provides no safe room where an unnerved writer can banish their unpleasant memories. Narrative nonfiction must make use of our sour feelings, pungent memories, gloomy thoughts, and other indigestible nougats of a black disposition. Given a choice between experiencing nothing and inconsolable grief, the writer will always take the epic grief that composes the grandeur of human tragedy. Without a mask of consolation to shunt the unseemly undercurrent that disturbs them, writers whom dabble in memoir or personal essay writing must swallow hard and make use of the entire range of their toxic temperament. The tonicity of narrative nonfiction need not be bleak, but it must be true to the full panoply of both positive and negative emotions that heave through the writer’s torrid veins.

Hey, just saying.” Tristan lifted his hands in a placating manner. “I didn’t mean to…upset you.” “I’m not upset.” “You don’t need to put on a brave face,” Tristan said, donning his sincerest expression. “We’re family, after all.” The glare he received was positively murderous. Tristan dropped his mask and met Gabriel’s eyes. “Seriously, get a grip. You’re boring me. It’s no fun to kick someone who’s already down. You’re no challenge these days.” “I have no idea what you mean.” Tristan let out a laugh. “You’ve been behaving like a kicked puppy for months. A puppy without its owner. That’s just sad and pathetic.” A muscle pulsed in Gabriel’s cheek. Tristan sneered. “Your weird clingy thing for Jared was pretty pathetic in itself, but this—the useless moping—is a new low for you. If you really want him back so much, what’s the problem? Get him back.” “He doesn’t want to come back,” Gabriel grated out. Tristan raised his eyebrows. “So? If I want something, I’ll walk over anyone to get it, instead of moping and doing nothing. You used to be the same way—” “Used to be,” Gabriel bit off. “Not anymore.

Emery was kneeling outside “gardening” when Ceony and Langston stepped through the illusion that masked the paper magician’s house. He had positioned himself outside the curving garden of meticulously crafted paper flowers, and seemed to be replacing all the red, tulip-shaped flower heads with blue, lily-shaped ones. Fennel chewed on the discarded spells as Emery worked, crumpling them in his paper mouth and then spitting the balls into an overturned trash receptacle.

his size, change his shape. He seeks independence from nature. Withdrawing from nature is the first step in this process. Detached from nature, a Tapasvin feels no pain, hears no sound, sees no image, tastes no flavour and smells no odour. In art, Tapasvins are shown as seated in cross-legged positions with creepers around their feet, termite hills over their bodies and serpents slithering around their necks. These men are intellectually, emotionally and physically liberated from all things material. A traditionally decorated Shiva-linga without a mask

Posit the unconscious not as a first consciousness to be masked, i.e., forgotten adequation...but as indirect consciousness or without exactitude or thinking for itself...according to a system of signs weakly articulated...As a result, the ego and its 'defense mechanisms' are also to be conceived in these terms: their avoidance of the repressed is not knowledge of the unconscious but indirect consciousness as well; that which is to be avoided is not denied (which would be to say known) but bypassed--the ego as official, thetic, recognized domain...Through this reform, one will no longer have causality of the id or causality of the ego--one will have a relationship that is not face to face--a relationship of infrastructure to superstructure, i.e., the sexual = the Soil that supports life.

Among the things I owe to Benjamin is my acquaintance with the grotesque tales (a literary form that became impossible after Hitler and is virtually inaccessible today) of Mynona, particularly the volume entitled Rosa die schöne Schutzmannsfrau [Rosa the beautiful policeman’s wife], an unsurpassed work in this genre that almost knocked me off my chair with laughter at the time; unfortunately, I can read it today only with utter indifference. The philosophical background of these tales engaged Benjamin’s attention and then led him to a great appreciation of Mynona’s magnum opus, Schöpferische Indifferenz [Creative indifference], published under the author’s real name, Salomo Friedländer. Friedländer was an orthodox Kantian as well as a strict logician and moral philosopher in theory, but in practice he was, if anything, the prototype of a cynic, or at least he wore that mask. Since the days of the Neopathetisches Kabarett he had been acquainted with Benjamin, who frequently spoke of him in rather positive terms. Friedländer was one of the most prominent personalities in the Expressionist circle, which he himself tended to regard with amusement.

Masks have served no one but those in positions of authority and power. They have only made Americans sicker—physically, emotionally, and psychologically.

The storm relented on the morning of the eleventh. The winds dropped to about thirty knots. Stuart Hutchison and three Sherpas went in search of Yasuko and me. They found us lying next to each other, largely buried in snow and ice. First to Yasuko. Hutchison reached down and pulled her up by her coat. She had a three-inch-thick layer of ice across her face, a mask that he peeled back. Her skin was porcelain. Her eyes were dilated. But she was still breathing. He moved to me, pulled me up, and cleaned the ice out of my eyes and off my beard so he could look into my face. I, like Yasuko, was barely clinging to life. Hutchison would later say he had never seen a human being so close to death and still breathing. Coming from a cardiologist, I’ll accept that at face value. What do you do? The superstitious Sherpas, uneasy around the dead and dying, were hesitant to approach us. But Hutchison didn’t really need a second opinion here. The answer was, you leave them. Every mountaineer knows that once you go into hypothermic coma in the high mountains, you never, ever wake up. Yasuko and I were going to die anyway. It would only endanger more lives to bring us back. I don’t begrudge that decision for my own sake. But how much strain would be entailed in carrying Yasuko back? She was so tiny. At least she could have died in the tent, surrounded by people, and not alone on that ice. Hutchison and the Sherpas got back to camp and told everyone that we were dead. They called down to Base Camp, which notified Rob’s office in Christchurch, which relayed the news to Dallas. On a warm, sunny Saturday morning the phone rang in our house. Peach answered and was told by Madeleine David, office manager for Hall’s company, Adventure Consultants, that I had been killed descending from the summit ridge. “Is there any hope?” Peach asked. “No,” David replied. “There’s been a positive body identification. I’m sorry.

The most important mystery of ancient Egypt was presided over by a priesthood. That mystery concerned the annual inundation of the Nile flood plain. It was this flooding which made Egyptian agriculture, and therefore civilisation, possible. It was the centre of their society in both practical and ritual terms for many centuries; it made ancient Egypt the most stable society the world has ever seen. The Egyptian calendar itself was calculated with reference to the river, and was divided into three seasons, all of them linked to the Nile and the agricultural cycle it determined: Akhet, or the inundation, Peret, the growing season, and Shemu, the harvest. The size of the flood determined the size of the harvest: too little water and there would be famine; too much and there would be catastrophe; just the right amount and the whole country would bloom and prosper. Every detail of Egyptian life was linked to the flood: even the tax system was based on the level of the water, since it was that level which determined how prosperous the farmers were going to be in the subsequent season. The priests performed complicated rituals to divine the nature of that year’s flood and the resulting harvest. The religious elite had at their disposal a rich, emotionally satisfying mythological system; a subtle, complicated language of symbols that drew on that mythology; and a position of unchallenged power at the centre of their extraordinarily stable society, one which remained in an essentially static condition for thousands of years. But the priests were cheating, because they had something else too: they had a nilometer. This was a secret device made to measure and predict the level of flood water. It consisted of a large, permanent measuring station sited on the river, with lines and markers designed to predict the level of the annual flood. The calibrations used the water level to forecast levels of harvest from Hunger up through Suffering through to Happiness, Security and Abundance, to, in a year with too much water, Disaster. Nilometers were a – perhaps the – priestly secret. They were situated in temples where only priests were allowed access; Herodotus, who wrote the first outsider’s account of Egyptian life the fifth century BC, was told of their existence, but wasn’t allowed to see one. As late as 1810, thousands of years after the nilometers had entered use, foreigners were still forbidden access to them. Added to the accurate records of flood patters dating back centuries, the nilometer was an essential tool for control of Egypt. It had to be kept secret by the ruling class and institutions, because it was a central component of their authority. The world is full of priesthoods. The nilometer offers a good paradigm for many kinds of expertise, many varieties of religious and professional mystery. Many of the words for deliberately obfuscating nonsense come from priestly ritual: mumbo jumbo from the Mandinka word maamajomboo, a masked shamanic ceremonial dancer; hocus pocus from hoc est corpus meum in the Latin Mass. On the one hand, the elaborate language and ritual, designed to bamboozle and mystify and intimidate and add value; on the other the calculations that the pros make in private. Practitioners of almost every métier, from plumbers to chefs to nurses to teachers to police, have a gap between the way they talk to each other and they way they talk to their customers or audience. Grayson Perry is very funny on this phenomenon at work in the art world, as he described it in an interview with Brian Eno. ‘As for the language of the art world – “International Art English” – I think obfuscation was part of its purpose, to protect what in fact was probably a fairly simple philosophical point, to keep some sort of mystery around it. There was a fear that if it was made understandable, it wouldn’t seem important.

The diagnosis should be especially careful in the first round. Fighting lightly and carefully, try to explore your opponent's combat capabilities, reaction speed and other properties as closely as possible. Through deceptively masked actions, you can get an idea of ​​the opponent's way of fighting, his favorite blows and types of defense, his ability to lead a half-distance fight. During the reconnaissance, be careful and avoid unexpected blows of the opponent. Diagnosis should be made imperceptibly, so that the opponent does not recognize the boxer's distinctive tactics and by misleading actions did not evoke from his side an incorrect idea of ​​his intentions and manner of conducting the fight.

Each boxer's combat movement has its starting position, after which one can guess the intentions of the boxer and prepare the appropriate counteraction. However, if these starting positions are skillfully hidden and masked, unexpected blows can always be made.

The boxer should take care to hide the moment of attack and its very nature, by inverting in any way the attention of the opponent from the chosen target and the intended decisive hit. Therefore, it is necessary to accurately mask the starting position to the task of making misleading movements. In addition, every boxer should be able to hide his physical and moral state from an opponent. The skills of concealing one's weakness, fatigue or effects of the blow often save the boxer from failure.

We human beings have always known that our eyes reveal our true nature. It’s nearly impossible to hide emotions in them. “Look me in the eye and tell me the truth,” the questioner will say to the accused, because both parties know that while words can mask the truth, our eyes will invariably reveal it.

The positive thing about being Masked Up is that it saves us from witnessing all the fake smiles that are aimed at us.

A splash of light snuck beneath the a dressing room door. He heard a groan. A shuffle. A bump. A heavy sigh. "Uh, too tight." He walked toward the back, stopping outside the dressing room. The door was cracked a fraction. He rested a shoulder against the wall, and glanced inside. Grace as Catwoman blew his mind. A feline fantasy. The three-way mirror tripled his pleasure. He viewed her from every angle. Hot, sleek, fierce. The lady could fight Batman in her skintight black leather catsuit and come out the winner. After a moment she scrunched her nose, slapped her palms against her thighs. Stuck out her tongue at her reflection in the mirrors. He saw what had her so frustrated. Sympathized with her disappointment. Her costume didn't fit. The front zipper hadn't fully cleared her cleavage, which was deep and visible. She wore no bra. She gave a little hop, and her breasts bounced. Full and plump. He felt a tug at his groin. Superhero lust. He cleared his throat and made his presence known. She caught his image in the corner of the glass, and reached for the fitting room chair, positioning it between them. Like that would keep him from her. He should've looked away, but couldn't. He sensed her embarrassment. Her panic. Flight? She had nowhere to go. He blocked the door. He wasn't leaving until they'd talked. "Archibald's going to love your costume," he initiated. She didn't find him funny. Her gaze narrowed behind the molded cat-eye mask with attached ears. Her fingers clenched in her elbow-length gloves. Inspired by the movie The Dark Knight, she'd added a whip and a gun holster. Her thigh-high stiletto boots were killer, adding five inches to her height. Her image would stick with him forever. She backed against the center mirror, and nervously fingered the open flaps over her breasts. A yank on the zipper broke the tab. The metal teeth parted, and the gap widened, revealing the round inner curves of her breasts. A hint of her nipples. Dusky pink. All the way down to the dent of her navel.

problems with approaches similar to yours. 10. Be a tempered radical. If your idea is extreme, couch it in a more conventional goal. That way, instead of changing people’s minds, you can appeal to values or beliefs that they already hold. You can use a Trojan horse, as Meredith Perry did when she masked her vision for wireless power behind a request to design a transducer. You can also position your proposal as a means to an end that matters to others, like Frances Willard reframing the right to vote as a way for conservative women to protect their homes from alcohol abuse. And if you’re already known as too extreme,

believe the first step is simple: end our isolation. Drop our masks, reach out to others, dare to show our true colors and share our real stories. We have the capacity for great compassion and great positive change. I believe if we connect over the vast global net, change will come as we realize we are all just people,

From the standpoint of the society of prohibition, enjoyment is embodied in the external Other—those we ostracize from the social order. Hence, though we feel anxiety about it, we know where enjoyment is located; it has a context in which it exists. When we encounter an outbreak of enjoyment, we can’t understand it, but we can interpret it, make clear its symbolic context. It seems to occur within a universal frame. However, in a society that commands, rather than prohibits, enjoyment, this context seems to evaporate. The imperative to enjoy has the effect of masking the presence of the universal, making it seem as if there is no longer a functioning universal. This is why interpretation is so difficult within the society of enjoyment. Enjoyment is no longer confined to an external position, but confronts us at every turn—within the social order rather than just outside it. In this way, the society of enjoyment produces paranoia: paranoia results from constant confrontations with the enjoying other and the belief that this other is enjoying in our stead. We receive an imperative to enjoy, but rather than feeling as if we are actually enjoying ourselves, we impute enjoyment to the other, a enjoyment that is “rightfully” ours. The problem is that this appearance of the other’s enjoyment does not simply appear in its “proper” context, as external to the social order, at a distance. Instead, it appears directly in front of us, exposing our failure to enjoy and flaunting its success. Because of the seeming proximity of this enjoyment, it is impossible to locate it in a proper symbolic context. This impossibility shapes our response: we can’t interpret the other’s enjoyment, so we feel as if we must destroy it. This is precisely the dynamic at work in the attack on the Convent that opens Paradise.

I faked a yawn not so subtly and Darius pulled his attention from his fan club back to me again. “Sorry,” he said. “Shall we go?” I almost choked on my own tongue at the sound of him apologising and could only raise my eyebrows in response as he guided me towards the door by placing a hand on the bare skin at the base of my spine. At that exact moment, Marguerite came into the room flanked by three of her friends and her face fell into a mask of absolute horror as she spotted her former boyfriend and me on our way out together. “What the hell is this?” she demanded, tossing her red hair over her shoulder so violently that it whipped her friend in the eye. Darius cast a lazy glance in her direction without replying before increasing the pressure of his hand on my back to get me moving. I stepped forward so that he was no longer touching me and began to head for the door despite the livid mean girl blocking our way out. Marguerite looked like she wanted to set me alight, her hand half raised like she was genuinely considering it. Darius noticed the action and threw an arm around my shoulders which I instantly shrugged back off. “I’m not your date, dude,” I reminded him, not bothering to lower my voice. “If people see us together acting like a couple they’ll give you an easier time,” he said, staying close enough to me that I could feel the heat of his body a heartbeat away from mine. “I’m not a damsel in distress either,” I added. Not that he was the Prince Charming type any other day of the week so I really wasn’t sure why he was taking this act so far. Marguerite seemed to think better of attacking while the Heir clearly had me marked as his but the look in her eyes told me the next time she saw me alone I’d be in for some serious shit from her. I threw her a taunting smirk as we passed because, what the hell? She was clearly gunning for me anyway so why not let her bring it on? “Besides, you’ll be back to your usual self tomorrow, encouraging them all to hate me so what’s the point of pretending?” I asked. That remark didn’t get an answer and we headed downstairs to the exit in silence. To my surprise, Darius stepped forward and opened the door for me. Apparently the asshole could turn on the charm when he wanted to. That just left me wondering which version of him was the act though. Did he do all of the horrible things he did to maintain his position and keep up appearances for the sake of proving his power? Or could he just pour on the sweetness when it suited him to get his own way? He was so hard to read that I had no idea which version was the real him. But I guessed for one night I could indulge in the fantasy that he actually had a few scraps of decency about him. (Tory)

How are Good Europeans such as ourselves distinguished from the patriots? In the first place, we are atheists and immoralists, but we take care to support the religions and the morality which we associate with the gregarious instinct: for by means of them, an order of men is, so to speak, being prepared, which must at some time or other fall into our hands, which must actually crave for our hands. Beyond Good and Evil, — certainly; but we insist upon the unconditional and strict preservation of herd-morality. We reserve ourselves the right to several kinds of philosophy which it is necessary to learn: under certain circumstances, the pessimistic kind as a hammer; a European Buddhism might perhaps be indispensable. We should probably support the development and the maturation of democratic tendencies; for it conduces to weakness of will: in "Socialism" we recognise a thorn which prevents smug ease. Attitude towards the people. Our prejudices; we pay attention to the results of cross-breeding. Detached, well-to-do, strong: irony concerning the "press" and its culture. Our care: that scientific men should not become journalists. We mistrust any form of culture that tolerates news-paper reading or writing. We make our accidental positions (as Goethe and Stendhal did), our experiences, a foreground, and we lay stress upon them, so that we may deceive concerning our backgrounds. We ourselves wait and avoid putting our heart into them. They serve us as refuges, such as a wanderer might require and use — but we avoid feeling at home in them. We are ahead of our fellows in that we have had a disciplina voluntatis. All strength is directed to the development of the will, an art which allows us to wear masks, an art of understanding beyond the passions (also "super-European" thought at times). This is our preparation before becoming the law-givers of the future and the lords of the earth; if not we, at least our children. Caution where marriage is concerned.

Some smiles realize what fake happiness is Some smiles realize what a beautiful mask looks like on face Some smiles realize what ointment is on wounds Some smiles realize what happiness is Some smiles realize what positivity is Some smiles realize what beauty is Some smiles realize what God's miracle is And your smile comes in the last one A God's miracle

A couple in distress attending a workshop provides an additional illustration of how nonspecific language can hamper understanding and communication. “I want you to let me be me,” the woman declared to her husband. “I do!” he retorted. “No, you don’t!” she insisted. Asked to express herself in positive action language, the woman replied, “I want you to give me the freedom to grow and be myself.” Such a statement, however, is just as vague and likely to provoke a defensive response. She struggled to formulate her request clearly, and then admitted, “It’s kind of awkward, but if I were to be precise, I guess what I want is for you to smile and say that anything I do is okay.” Often, the use of vague and abstract language can mask oppressive interpersonal games.

The droid brought him to the operating room. A black figure lay on the operating table. Black gloves and boots covered the new mechanical limbs; a mirror shiny black mask hid the scarred face. The table began to tilt, moving the figure to an upright position. There was the sound of breathing. Yes, Darth Sidious thought. He will terrify them. And even if he is not as powerful as I had once hoped, he will still be far more powerful than anyone else.

The bold, black masked pup goes to a surgeon in Santa Barara with two young daughters. The surgeon’s wife, Jill, takes one look at the pup’s confident gait and names him “Brag.” He’s a handsome fellow with over-sized paws and a serious disposition. The official name for his coloring is sable, which means he has as much black on him as he does brown. Brag grows deeply attached to his new family, never straying far from the little girls and always with one eye on Jill, whom he adores. Before Brag is a year old, Jill’s husband – an amateur pilot – hops in his plain and flies to Bakersfield for business. On his way home later that night, with two friends seated behind him, he miscalculates his position and flies into a mountain north of Santa Barbara. The plan disintegrates on impact. No one survives

The word personality comes from the Latin persona, which means “mask.” In the public we all wear masks, and this has a positive function.