Face, not a gesture or a sound us the first medium of communication. «Facial expression» is not the main part if such use of face. This part is pre-human, humans don’t have monopoly on face expression, we inherited this means of communication from monkeys.
Face is a special human means of communication when I communicate with my own self. When I look at my face reflected in a water or mirror and my imagination begins using face for self-cognition, self-investigation.
I cannot know the studies of this self-discovery, but I can try to arrange my own and other people experience. Simplest forms are not necessary first, most ancient stages, still I think that self-cognition begins with comparisons, metaphors. Human suffuses first of all that he is a flower. This comparison is mostly about face. We don’t think about our body as a plant, we think about our face as a blooming flower.
Personal names depicting flowers (Rose, Margo, Lilia etc.) are the result of such process. We with our children to be like perfect blossom because we think about ourselves as a sort of blossom. Sometimes blossom gives way to leaves, this is origin of Green Man and dryads.
This means of self-cognition is powerful because it is simple, but this power is very limited precisely because of simpleness. There a lot of fairy-tales about people becoming flowers (never vice a versa), but even Bible didn’t manage to get more than Solomon’s comparison of a beloved with rose of Sharon, a lily of the valley (Song of Solomon 2:11) and comparison of Solomon himself with a lily: «And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of theseю Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?»
Faith in God is the gift of God, but even God cannot present my with faith that I am better than a blossom.
18 august 2023