CASSIUS: Then, Brutus, I have much mistook your passion;
By means whereof this breast of mine hath buried
Thoughts of great value, worthy cogitations.
Tell me, good Brutus, can you see your face?
BRUTUS: No, Cassius; for the eye sees not itself,
But by reflection, by some other things.
CASSIUS: 'Tis just:
And it is very much lamented, Brutus,
That you have no such mirrors as will turn
Your hidden worthiness into your eye,
That you might see your shadow.
Julius Caesar
Act I, Scene ii
The media is overflowing with fuss over the portrait of Shakespeare. What did he look like? This question has as much substance as how much a Van Gogh is auctioned for has to do with Vincent’s tormented expression of the beauty locked inside the anguish. The portrait debate is a distracts us from the beauty in his work, I don't need to know if he was bald or bohemian to be enriched by his contribution.
The masks (faces) we wear are so convincing that we bow willingly in servitude to our own lies. When we take our own self portraits too seriously it consumes our lives to the point of extinction.
I went to dinner with a wonderful friend in Washington last night. She is beautiful but she is consumed with so much self-torment that you have to wait patiently to catch a glimpse of who she really is, beyond the thick haze of all her self hatred. She is wrapped up so tight, she has bound up her natural beauty in severe judgments of what has and has not happened in her life. Who has said what and did what or not to whom and all that. . .
She blames the past for the pain but the pain she is experiencing is not in the past, it is right here, in this very moment. Her husband died recently after a long painful struggle and then she lost her sister. I cannot presume to know her pain, no one can, this pain is hers and hers alone. This pain will not wear out over the years, it will remain inside her for the rest of her life. She cannot afford to bury it nor be consumed by it. It hurts like hell, it is there, it is just what it is and it will always be there.
She struggles with the losses and the pain, this struggle has become her face, her mask, her lens on the universe and her own existence. 
She has built a fragile wall of anger around herself. She is consumed with anger at the people who are gone and her intense love for them. She is struggling to make sense of it all, as if an emotional condition can be resolved with an intellectual balm.
Her struggles are as much a cause of the torment as the justifiable pain for the tragic losses and suffering.
She is so intense that she has become a caricature of her suffering.
She is so busy labeling life as good or bad, people as right or wrong, that she turns this same vicious judgment on her own life, her own self. It is no accident that the way she sees her situation and life is burned by this same anger.
Occasionally she will laugh and the room lights up with her deep chuckle, the pain is not far below the surface but at least for these brief moments it is not defining who or what she is.
All I see is a dam of beauty being held check, diverted from its natural currency and flow back into the ocean of life and death.
What do we look like? Who knows? Who cares? It is who we are right now that counts, we are much more than our labels. What did Shakespeare look like? Which portrait is real, which one is fake? Who really gives a fuck! We have too much going on right here right now in front us to pay attention to such foolishness.
I see a friend wrapped up inside her pain. I do not look at her face. I push past her self portrayal.
All I can do is look into her eyes in the hope she may catch a glimpse of her own beauty in the reflection of the love in my eye for her.
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