The Lively Hinterland

The Face: A Natural History
By Daniel McNeill

(Page 10 of 12)

In Paysage de Baucis (1966), René Magritte depicts himself as a mere nose, mouth, and eyes beneath a bowler hat. These features float in vacant air, without musculature, bones, or outline. He looks depersonalized, for it is a face sapped of singularity and expressive range.

Beyond the well-known facial landmarks lies the matrix, the smooth skin of the cheeks and forehead. It seems an empty quarter, yet its muscles signal constantly and its parts even reach symbolic import. The cheeks are blazons of jollity and passion, and illuminati attach mystic significance to the forehead, home of the "third eye."

The cheeks are the soft flesh of the face, dropping from the eyes to the nasolabial folds. Why have them? They house the oral cavity and hold food for chewing. Hence they are mammal specialties, absent from reptiles like iguanas, though they do appear in some dinosaurs.

The cheeks are also a locus of facial excitement. They can be shallow, even gaunt, but joy flushes them and laughter swells them, so the chubby-cheeked seem merrier. Like the nose, they redden with drink, and Frans Hals's The Jolly Toper (1630) may be the classic ruddy-cheeked image. And "cheek," like "face," can mean effrontery, impudence.

At the same time, blushes find a ready seat in the cheeks. To admit embarrassment, we say, "Are my cheeks red!" In one study, 68 percent of interviewees said they blushed mainly on the cheeks, compared to 26 percent for the entire face. Emily Dickinson wrote, "A cheek is always redder/ Just where the Hectic stings." Against our will, the cheeks can signal desire, confusion, guilt, self-consciousness.

The forehead seems the seat of intellect, no doubt because of the organ behind it. We associate a high forehead like that of behaviorist B. F. Skinner with intelligence, and a "highbrow" is a lofty, often pretentious mind. In Poe's "King Pest," six corpse-like sots sit around a table, each with one huge feature-forehead, nose, ears, cheeks, mouth, eyes-and the giant forehead belongs to the king. If asked to point to the "you" in one's head, most people indicate a place just above the bridge of their noses. In Self-Portrait as a Tehuana, or Thinking about Diego (1943), Frida Kahlo painted her wayward Diego Rivera in the center of her brow. The eyes show thought and the mouth articulates it, but the forehead is its symbol.

Civilizations all over the world have sensed its emblematic nature. On Ash Wednesday, Catholics place gray smudges above the bridge of the nose. Nigerians once greeted each other by rubbing brows, a charming gesture. Muslims often develop a permanent bruise on the forehead from decades of touching it to the earth in prayer. In the Book of Revelation, the mark of the beast adorns the brows of the depraved, and the name of God those of happy dwellers in the New Jerusalem.

Swift made the forehead a site of specific omen. In Gulliver's Travels, a few rare children in Luggnagg are born with a red spot above their left eyebrow, indicating they are struldbruggs and will never die. The coin-sized spot grows over the years and changes color, to green at twelve, deep blue at twenty-five, and permanent black at forty-five.

But no culture treats the forehead more extravagantly than India. Its people daub the brow with tilaka, marks of dizzying variety. One scholar says the forehead became the host for tilaka because Hindus touched their brows to the ground before holy relics and lifted them to heaven in prayer.

Its purposes are legion. The tilaka can show sect. For instance, three vertical lines (for Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva) identify a member of the Ramanujacari sect, while a lone vermilion dot marks an extreme Shakta, and a design like a test tube holding a spot indicates a Vairagi. Some sects require the tilaka. A man without it, they say, is ignoble and anyone who happens to glance at him must look at the sun to purify himself. Other sects ban it, saying it leads to certain ruin.

The tilaka best known in the West is the scarlet dot women place above the bridge of the nose. Custom ordains this tiny disk, and researcher Priyabala Shah notes that many Indian women "do not know why they put a red mark on the forehead."

Tilaka can be potent charms. One holy book notes that the proper tilaka gives one "victory over kings, proud women, mad elephants, lions, tigers, serpents, giants." Another states that, with the right tilaka, "man becomes king and his enemies consider him like a lion or a tiger in front of a goat." Tilaka can also be beauty aids and elements of ritual.

Some Hindus have applied red arsenic as the tilaka, and others have used turmeric, saffron, sandalwood paste, betel leaf, and red lead. Early travelers among aboriginal tribes in India saw them sacrifice a human being and use his blood to dab a tilaka on a worshipper's brow. Orthodox families fear a forehead blank even momentarily, and tattoo the mark in place.

Like the tilaka, the notion of the third eye reached zenith in India. Some scholars believe it was flourishing there as early as the time of Buddha (6th cen. b.c.), who, tradition says, was born with a third eye in mid-forehead that took the shape of a hairy mole, called the urna.

The third eye normally refers to an organ that perceives inner essence, and it has an intriguing relationship with the recent quest for the nature of consciousness. Why do we have a sense of self? How does awareness of our inner workings benefit us? We could presumably make some good decisions without it, but social judgments would baffle us. Nicholas Humphrey, a psychologist at the University of Cambridge, suggests its function lies here. The self is an inner model of others. We sense our own reactions and project them onto others. We can thus predict their responses and act accordingly. The self, Humphrey says, is a cicerone to others' souls. He even calls this skill an "inner eye."

Of course such insight confers social power. In Hindu myth, the third eye is more: an extraordinary weapon. Turned outward, it emits a fiery beam that turns its target to ash and destroys the gods and all living beings at each periodic annihilation of the universe. The third eye also yields the aphrodisiac madhu, which flows forth like the Ganges.

What really lies behind the forehead? In fact, it is the frontal cortex, which not only helps control emotions like anger, but plays a key role in judgment. If wisdom is a matter of decision-making, then the third eye has hit the bull's-eye.

© 1998 by Daniel McNeill

About the Author

Daniel McNeill is a bestselling author and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for The Face. Mr. McNeill is the principal author of Fuzzy Logic, which won the 1992-93 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science and Technology. He has written numerous other books and articles on high technology, and his work has also appeared in fiction, travel, history, law, and education publications. He lives in Southern California.