Human Faces Fake Us, and We Frown

In the course of a day, a person's face may take on and inhabit a million different shapes and configurations of expressions. Each combination expressing an equal number of feelings, ideas, reactions, personal characteristics, idiosyncrasies - all personal and unique to the person: the twist of a lip, the angle of an eyebrow, the opening of the lips, the openness of eyes, the tendency to smile or not smile, to sigh, laugh, grimace, or simply stare in a certain direction when bored. Each person we know, because of their features and the way they express and use them (or are used by their expressions), is unique because of their face. Most of the time.

But there's something different about a person's face, when they eat. They somehow lose themselves, their regular expression, all expressiveness, when they tear into a burrito, a sandwich, a potato, a banana. All animation, personality, uniqueness, individuality, all mannerisms, shapes, and usual features that make this person recognizable and that express this person's personality fades away and is replaced with the pure animal face. They resemble more a dog as it gnashes at its bowl of food. The eyes are closed or half closed, looking nowhere, the mind fully absorbed with the most automatic and instinctual of acts - an act begun in the womb through the umbilical chord and replaced with the mouth the first moment the baby latches its mouth onto a nipple. Peaceful, certain, serious. The human adult bites at food with perfect confidence without thought or cognition, just action. At these moments it's pure survival. The automatic animal survival face.

A person's face also gets this instinctual look during sex, when the usual looks of smiles, seriousness, sadness, or concern all fade away eventually during the act of forincation. The eyes may partially close or close all the way, showing a certain sameness, a look that transcends the individual and connects the species: the look of work, or pleasure in work, of being worked on/upon, the look of satiation, of being filled up: the most natural of acts, and perhaps the most unoriginal. The unoriginal procreation face

In death the face falls, stretches, lightens, and all fullness of person and individuality just a shadow, a poor imprint of that person's life and soul and personality and all we knew about them, a mere hint of what they were. The skin sags, despite the best efforts of the mortician to give some sense of the person. This face is barely a face; biologically it is, but it's already fading, quickly decaying, for good. This face is sad to us and expressionless, only a reminder of the person we knew. It's just skin and some bones underneath. The blood is all gone, all life, all color. The face is no longer a face. The face is there but the person is gone. It is no longer a face.