And I wasn’t playing a role – I was trying to be myself.
But the harder I was striving, the more I was realizing that I had probably lost that ‘myself’ somewhere between two perfectly performed roles...
Tags: reality romantic lost identity romance be-yourself secret try yourself mystery play trying suspense obsession lonely hidden perfect perfection gothic young-adult pretend postmodern mysterious masks lose mask postmodernism real myself hide pretending secretive roles who-you-are gothic-romance realize goth freya strive role masked young-adult-suspense cardew obsessive young-adult-gothic-romance who-i-am
I always am in a role, lovely – for you, for them – even for myself. Yeah... Even when I’m alone, I am still in a role – and I myself am the most exacting audience I have ever had.
Simona PanovaTags: strength romantic strong dramatic romance weak weakness theater emotion alone control drama self-image play feelings acting suspense theatre lonely gothic always young-adult audience pretend postmodern masks mask postmodernism hide feel fake emotional hiding forbidden demand actor actress pretending gothic-romance goth demanding forbid emotionless young-adult-gothic-romance exact exacting feelless stern
Even I don’t know myself... In fact, I don’t know if I really have a self at all, as I’m constantly playing different roles and pretending – not so much on stage as in real life...
Simona PanovaTags: life love reality knowledge romantic identity romance real-life relationships different live self playing living crisis fact understanding self-awareness self-image play acting suspense awareness hidden gothic young-adult postmodern relationship understand masks mask postmodernism hide aware actor know roles gothic-romance goth know-yourself role even young-adult-gothic-romance know-myself self-identity-crisis
March 1898
What a strange dream I had last night! I wandered in the warm streets of a port, in the low quarter of some Barcelona or Marseille. The streets were noisome, with their freshly-heaped piles of ordure outside the doors, in the blue shadows of their high roofs. They all led down towards the sea. The gold-spangled sea, seeming as if it had been polished by the sun, could be seen at the end of each thoroughfare, bristling with yard-arms and luminous masts. The implacable blue of the sky shone brilliantly overhead as I wandered through the long, cool and sombre corridors in the emptiness of a deserted district: a quarter which might almost have been dead, abruptly abandoned by seamen and foreigners. I was alone, subjected to the stares of prostitutes seated at their windows or in the doorways, whose eyes seemed to ransack my very soul.
They did not speak to me. Leaning on the sides of tall bay-windows or huddled in doorways, they were silent. Their breasts and arms were bare, bizarrely made up in pink, their eyebrows were darkened, they wore their hair in corkscrew-curls, decorated with paper flowers and metal birds. And they were all exactly alike!
They might have been huge marionettes, or tall mannequin dolls left behind in panic - for I divined that some plague, some frightful epidemic brought from the Orient by sailors, had swept through the town and emptied it of its inhabitants. I was alone with these simulacra of love, abandoned by the men on the doorsteps of the brothels.
I had already been wandering for hours without being able to find a way out of that miserable quarter, obsessed by the fixed and varnished eyes of all those automata, when I was seized by the sudden thought that all these girls were dead, plague-stricken and putrefied by cholera where they stood, in the solitude, beneath their carmine plaster masks... and my entrails were liquefied by cold. In spite of that harrowing chill, I was drawn closer to a motionless girl. I saw that she was indeed wearing a mask... and the girl in the next doorway was also masked... and all of them were horribly alike under their identical crude colouring...
I was alone with the masks, with the masked corpses, worse than the masks... when, all of a sudden, I perceived that beneath the false faces of plaster and cardboard, the eyes of these dead women were alive.
Their vitreous eyes were looking at me...
I woke up with a cry, for in that moment I had recognised all the women. They all had the eyes of Kranile and Willie, of Willie the mime and Kranile the dancer. Every one of the dead women had Kranile's left eye and Willie's right eye... so that every one of them appeared to be squinting.
Am I to be haunted by masks now?
Tags: death dream dead decadence plague masks mask nightmare automata puppets town cholera prostitutes mannequin mannequins marionettes
Masks! I see them everywhere. That dreadful vision of the other night - the deserted town with its masked corpses in every doorway; that nightmare product of morphine and ether - has taken up residence within me. I see masks in the street, I see them on stage in the theatre, I find yet more of them in the boxes. They are on the balcony and in the orchestra-pit. Everywhere I go I am surrounded by masks. The attendants to whom I give my overcoat are masked; masks crowd around me in the foyer as everyone leaves, and the coachman who drives me home has the same cardboard grimace fixed upon his face!
It is truly too much to bear: to feel that one is alone and at the mercy of all those enigmatic and deceptive faces, alone amid all the mocking laughs and the threats embodied in those masks. I have tried to persuade myself that I am dreaming, and that I am the victim of a hallucination, but all the powdered and painted faces of women, all the rouged lips and kohl-blackened eyelids... all of that has created around me an atmosphere of trance and mortal agony. Cosmetics: there is the root cause of my illness!
But I am happy, now, when there are only masks! Sometimes, I detect the cadavers beneath, and remember that beneath the masks there is a host of spectres.
Tags: decadence cosmetics masks mask corpse decadent decadents corpses
Her mask gave no sign of how this affected her.
Donna LeonTags: expression emotions mask
Elegance is the perfect disguise for our violent nature—a mask so convincing that we often fool ourselves the moment we don it.
Ashim ShankerTags: deception elegance mask disguise violent-nature
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