Guided Pathway

Before clouds became discrete and legible signs on an airy ground, with early 19^th century meteorologist Luke Howard’s system of nomenclature, the entire sky was a face. Wind had faces, as shown by Botticelli, in the Birth of Venus, and by Rubens, in his image of Neptune [#12.1-2] calming the storm. The sea was a face, and we speak of the face of the earth, or the face of a clock. It’s a face because it gives the perceiver a mirror for her own time-sense, while offering its visible limits to a temporal force whose secret remains inaccessible, not available for signification. Appearance, Arendt says, never just reveals. It also conceals, which is a part of the mode of the appearing of a face— it shines to conceal its secret. In facing we are ignited, to burn or to shine, by the other’s concealment. We never master a face’s meaning because it remains in continuous, unregulated movement, in both its visible and its obscured dimensions. Looking at the face of a storm we fail to know how not to be shipwrecked.

“Neptune, because the sea veils the lands as the clouds veil the sky,” says Varro, “gets his name from nuptus ‘veiling,’ that is, opertio ‘covering,’ as the ancients said.” (Varro 5.72) This is also part of the meaning of the difference between an image and a sign. Each image is multiply veiled with other images; never is its agency quantifiable. In his introduction to the Mnemosyne Atlas, Warburg identified the image/sign difference as fundamental to the work of consciousness in the orientation of human culture. Where a sign requires a reflective distance for its apprehension, an image can only be empathetically experienced. Signs are recognized; images are understood. Or misunderstood, which does not decrease their potency. Faces are images; so are the gods.