The hallucinated face reminds me of Ahab's talk of the mask in
Moby-Dick:
"All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ’tis enough."
Always pictured this almost literally, like the scene from Nightmare on Elm Street when Freddie appears behind the wall.
That sense of things beneath a sheet or layer is a really strong one for me in general. I first picked up on it at an indoor skatepark about 20 years ago. Something about the way they put it together looked like they'd positioned all the ramps and boxes and whatnot then just draped a huge continuous layer of plywood across the top, like a giant tablecloth. The features being things protruding and shaping the top layer rather than discrete obstacles.
I picture Beckett's conception of language similarly:
"As we cannot eliminate language all at once, we should at least leave nothing undone that might contribute to its falling into disrepute. To bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it - be it something or nothing - begins to seep through."
Deleuze has a concept called The Fold that comes to mind too. I don't understand it yet, but, in the Deleuzian spirit, I've nicked it and used it for my own ends by plugging it into the above and Pynchon's conception of 20th century history in
V. as gathered and rippled fabric:
“Perhaps history this century, thought Eigenvalue, is rippled with gathers in its fabric such that if we are situated, as Stencil seemed to be, at the bottom of a fold, it's impossible to determine warp, woof, or pattern anywhere else. By virtue, however, of existing in one gather it is assumed there are others, compartmented off into sinuous cycles each of which had come to assume greater importance than the weave itself and destroy any continuity. Thus it is that we are charmed by the funny-looking automobiles of the '30's, the curious fashions of the '20's, the particular moral habits of our grandparents. We produce and attend musical comedies about them and are conned into a false memory, a phony nostalgia about what they were. We are accordingly lost to any sense of continuous tradition. Perhaps if we lived on a crest, things would be different. We could at least see.”
Also the scene in Lot 49 where Oedipa cries looking at a Varo painting of women trapped in a tower, weaving the world:
" ... a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world."
Now I've this image of the world, universe, whatever as this single, continuous membrane, marked, folded, gathered, rippled and given form and texture by something pressing up against it.
