Can we be presente in masks? At first it seems impossible. Within the mask not only the face but the heart is encased, one is separate and separated through concealment. Can there be a heartening beneath the hardness of stoicism? Can you be one with a mask (to be me, I have to walk and talk with others)? Can you be one within the otherness of the mask, across the borders of masks? The hardness of a mask is a refusal yet Paz, perhaps feeling his own heart bursting beneath the mask, pulses into verse:
And so great is the tyranny
of this dissimulation
that although my heart swells
with profoundest longing,
there is challenge in my eyes
and resignation in my voice. (43)
Perhaps like Deleuze, this refrain is used to usher Paz over the border of his threshold, to be home with himself, that his use of refrain can deterritorialize the borders of the self. The refrain of dissimulation, the response of “No one, señor. I am.” to the question “Who is in there?” (44) doesn’t just deterritorialize the speaker, but anyone who falls within their nullifying gaze. Dissimulation has its radical edge, the ghost refrain, the refrain that echoes against the hardness of masks, turns somebody into Nobody into nothingness. And somehow all these Nobodys and nothingnesses blend, harmonize. The nothingness blends into the landscape and the refrains they sing turns into a blanket of silence. This is perhaps a tragic presente, a double-negative presente, a presente in waiting. But Taylor reminds us that presente carries an “ethical imperative” (Taylor, 3). How might dissimulation lead to such an engagement?
Anzaldua writes: “but the skin of the earth is seamless” (3), I propose this silence is the skin of nothingness covering the earth and that there is a presente that allows for the blanket of silence to exist. Anzaldua also writes of “la facultad”–a survival tactic. Dissimulation, the concealment of one’s thoughts, feelings, or character, does not deny that feeling exists within the individual but that they cannot be allow to shine through the mask. Perhaps the pain that leads to dissimulation can also lead to la facultad, that the surface of silence can be penetrated to reveal “deeper realities, to see the deep structure below the surface” (38). I can’t help but think that the silence is not fully silent. That there is still a vibration of communication, of “a forked tongue” speaking many languages is working somewhere Paz’s prehistoric silence (55).
Taylor, Diana. "¡Presente!" ¡Presente!. 1-46. New York: NYU, 2018. Anzaldúa, Gloria. Boderlands: La Frontera. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Book Company, 1987. Print.Paz, Octavio. The Labyrinth of Solitude. New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1985. Print.