From birth, baby's face is kissed, patted, fed, washed, and generally worked on and fussed over, as if to make up for its inherent evanescence and to body it forth. This way is non-visual, and builds on the foundations of touch, muscular activity and tension, sensations of heat, cold, pain, and so on. (1) Building a face here (2) Importing a face from elsewhere (3) Going out to find a face. There are three ways of learning the Game, and they complement and reinforce one another. The young child is faceless, and his learning to pretend otherwise is a long and complicated business, starting almost at birth and hardly complete till his teens. However brief and spasmodic, this insight is a true preview of the Seer's Liberation or Enlightenment, which is accordingly described as 'becoming like a little child again'. The second - conscious facelessness - may be called: seeing one's absence (e.g. The first - mere facelessness - may be called: overlooking one's presence (e.g. Notice that there are, in fact, two very different kinds of facelessness apparent in these examples. John (11) tries - unsuccessfully - to explain to his parents that he is 'the space in which all these things happen'. Hakim, writing about himself at 10: 'I knew my arms and body were black, I could see them but I swore my face was white and if she (Shirley Temple) ever met me, she'd return my love.' She can't make out why her mother insists that she should include herself when she counts the players. At this stage her face is no problem.Ĭaroline (9) is sitting with the family round the table playing cards. Her forearms and the backs of her hands are sore she has been trying to scrub them white. Susan (8) is a black girl in a white school.

Fingering his head, he announced: 'But I don't have a head here.'Īsked where they do their thinking, most of the children in the class say: 'In our heads.' Peter (7) says he thinks in his arithmetic book. Mary (5) asks Mother why she and his sister have heads, and he hasn't. George (5), asked whether he has a brother, says: 'Yes'. Stephen (3:6), standing in the bath and looking down at his body, cries out: 'Mum, I haven't got a head!' He goes to see his friend, taking along a mirror to show him the stitches in his face. He then declares the picture finished.Īndrew (3) has an accident. But he insists on more and more till the whole face is covered with eyes. Then he wants eyes, so mother draws a pair. She draws a circle for a face, and asks: 'What next?' He asks for the trunk, then trousers, feet, hands (but not arms). Johnny (2:3) asks mother to make a picture. Simon (2), asked where Simon is, points straight outwards. She proceeds to the bathroom and starts washing her face - the face in the mirror. (Eventually he told his grandmother that he was a boy.) Around this time, when rebuked for being a naughty boy, he didn't mind being called naughty, but protested he was not a boy. He waves his hands aimlessly - a gesture which seems to say he is at large. In the following examples, the lesson has still to be learned: the child is still (momentarily, anyhow) as faceless as at birth.Ĭarlos (1:7), at a party, is asked to locate various uncles and aunties.

It takes years for the growing child to learn the Face Game thoroughly and to play it with conviction. This is the game which almost everyone plays (exceptions include infants, some retardates and schizophrenics, and Seers) in which the player pretends that he has a face where he has no face, that he is (at 0 inches) what he looks like (at, say 4 inches). (b) To be game-free is to cease playing the Face Game, and this (in religious contexts) is variously called Liberation, Self-realisation, Awakening, Enlightenment. (a) All the 'games people play' arise out of one basic game, which we call the Face Game.

Make a face games