20/6/07

If your hair were an army deployed in the field, and your hairline its front line (we're thinking of a Napoleonic army here), then the tactics of the (invisible) enemy would be clear: advance simultaneously on its left and right flanks to drive corridors deep into its opponent's ranks, then concentrate its fire on the resulting salient formed on the crown, which it will eventually envelop, cut off from the main body of the retreating army, and safely massacre. This process, already far advanced, has left a too-broad forehead still broader, a naked and senseless expanse between brow and hairline, while the hair itself now grows well behind the point at which the skull begins to curve away and level off, accentuating its bulging, domed appearance. In the meantime both the disc of the frontal bone and the sharp, rectangular edges of the temporal bone above and behind the brows have become more pronounced, introducing a geometrical element where before there was none, their lines of fissure appearing, at times, like those of distinct metal plates beneath the flesh. At the bottom end of the forehead a jutting brow echoes, though distantly and invertedly, its upper curve, on which grow a pair of wiry, too bushy eyebrows. The eyes beneath this brow, largish (really?), bluish and roundish, are correspondingly deep set: so much so that the lids are barely visible unless I close them. Between them the bridge of the nose narrows, then broadens again to a flattened point, which looks angular in profile and blunt in three-quarter profile and makes it strangely hard to draw; an effect, perhaps, of the oddly pinched flare of the nostrils that fold beneath it. To either side of the nose are a pair of flat, indeed virtually invisible cheekbones that descend almost featurelessly into the cheeks themselves. Each of these is composed of two planes: an upper, pinkish one that surrounds the nose and the muzzle, and a lateral, greyer (because bestubbled) one which descends almost vertically to the jawline. This lateral cheek plane, and the jaw in which it terminates, is, besides the hair, perhaps the biggest physical change that has happened to me since maturity: the wings of the jawbone, which originally formed a far narrower angle at my chin, folding gradually outwards to produce a 'fuller' face.
Beneath the nose, and at the lowest point where the frontal and lateral cheeks meet is the mouth: smallish, thin-lipped, and with the wings of the upper lip sharply divided. It sits within a sort of sagging triangle of flesh, whose apex would be the middle of the nose, whose two diagonal sides descend in lightly curving lines from the upper corners of the nostrils to the lower, and outer, corners of the mouth, and whose base is a strict line beneath the lower lip, where the muscles of the lower mouth, which hang like fleshy pouches - or perhaps like Hale's sunken eggs - beneath and either side of the lower lip, meet the bonier structures of the lower chin. The latter is squarish, almost box-like in some respects, and curves inwards peculiarly so that the line of the jaw is not straight but undulating. Beneath it descends a shortish, narrowish neck.
As I've grown older I've begun to recognise elements not so much of my father - whom I undoubtedly resemble in certain respects (the eyes especially, or so N. tells me) - but less immediate relatives such as my grandfather and uncles. My nose, for example, looks like a less pronounced version of my mother's brother's; the line of the cheek and jaw, and the angle of the ears as they meet it, like old photographs of my mother's father in his stiff-collared shirt and crewcut (or whatever it was called); and the knobblier features of my face - the forehead perhaps, certain elements about the nose, and the baldness - of my paternal grandfather. It is only of my mother herself that I see no traces - unless it is the mouth. But that, of course, may merely be because I am constitutively unable to see them.