I do not know when I started paying attention to masks.
I remember returning to them.
That much I know.
I would find one in a description.
Keep reading.
And a few minutes later I would already be going back to check something.
I did not know exactly what.
Only that something there refused to settle.
In the literature of the Marquis de Sade, the metal mask is not merely an object of concealment. Its most unsettling effect is something else.
It turns the face into an uncertain surface.
The expression still exists.
But it is no longer fully available.
And that partial absence seems to generate more attention than any revelation.
Perhaps that is why I keep returning.
Not to understand the mask.
To check what happens when part of an identity disappears while the presence itself remains intact.
There is something strange about that contradiction.
The less the face reveals, the harder the imagination works.
The less is known, the more often one returns.
One night I found a forgotten note among my papers.
I did not remember writing it.
It contained only one sentence:
“I am not trying to see more.
I am trying to check what is missing.”
I read it several times.
Then I opened the book again.
Not because I expected an answer.
Because I wanted to verify whether the feeling was still there.
It was.
In the Sadean imagination, the mask becomes a silent anomaly.
It does not fully conceal.
It does not fully reveal.
It remains somewhere in between.
And perhaps that is why it is so difficult to leave behind.
I look at the screen.
I close it.
A few minutes later I open it again.
I keep telling myself that I am interested in the symbol.
What is strange is that I am becoming more interested in the return.
I am not asking what the mask hides.
I am asking when I started needing to check.
I have to move my neck I am not moving…
