wait let me think

I look at the face. I can't remember the name that goes with it. This is frustrating. Annoying. I study the face. Try harder. No luck. It happens more and more. Old age. Or worse. Or it happens to everybody now and then. But I know that I know the name. To rewind, I know that I know the face, from somewhere. Not just the name. At one time the name was married to the face in my consciousness. So this is not a case of prosopagnosia, which I blogged about years ago. That's when you can't recognize a familiar face, often because of brain damage. This isn't that. I'll call this nomenprosopagnosia. That's a half-witted attempt to coin a useful word for this, based solely on my knowledge of nomen, the Latin word for name. See, four years of Latin is paying off. One of the reasons this annoys me is social. I do not want the embarrassment of asking someone their name if I clearly should know it. Save me from the possibility it's someone I know extremely well, say, a relative. I understand this can happen in high-stress situations, especially at introduction time. That's normal. The fear of that very forgetfulness happening heightens the pressure and the stress -- and the likelihood of a socially fatal error. Spread the net wider and you have a name-pool of friends and colleagues or former friends and former colleagues (some intimate) stretching all the way to mere acquaintances. I am willing to bet that this last category, mere acquaintance, is the most common breeding ground for this nomenloss, this nomenfright. Call it nomenamnesia. A memory trick often works for me. It's alphabetical. A. No, it's not Andrew or Amanda. B. Nope. Not Beth or Bob or Brenda or Billy. etc. Do the same with C, D, et cetera. You might get lucky early in the game. You might say to yourself, "E. Emily! Yes, that's it!" Why does that work? Or how? Do neuroscientists know? Sometimes, though, that little trick doesn't work, not even after you've gone through the alphabet, perhaps twice. And then you're back to Square One. No-Nomenland.

Saving Face

Did you know some people find it difficult to remember or identify faces? It's called prosopagnosia, or "face blindness." Here's a simple test you can take to see if you have it. (Hint: you have to guess whether it's Bush or Blair. Yuck! Why not Jennifer Lopez vs. Salma Hayek? Or Brad Pitt vs. George Clooney? Whatever.)

Not having one's face recognized is especially onerous in the Age of Celebrity. Imagine how slighted the glitterati feel.

It turns out authors are frequently among the unrecognized faces. But I'm alert to such sightings, probably because they are what I am not. Years ago I worked at Random House in New York. I saw Joseph Heller on the elevator. I approached John Updike in the lobby, asked for his autograph, and he chatted with me amiably. Kurt Vonnegut was often seen in the neighborhood. I saw Norman Mailer strutting up Second Avenue. (Before all that, I even met the satirist Peter DeVries at his house.) I saw James Baldwin sitting alone in a hotel lobby in Chicago in the 1980s, shook his hand (somewhat cold and feeble), and asked for his autograph. He pleasantly obliged, and his face warmed with a smile seemingly at the fact someone recognized his face.

(As you can see, I am a shameless name-dropper. Is it a sign of poor self-esteem? Or just living vicariously?)

I shouldn't joke about this face blindness phenomenon; it is considered a real neurological impairment. It's not that I think I have it, but I do find it difficult to describe a face to someone. It's hard for me to draw that picture with words. And I have no talent as a visual artist beyond the creation of stick figures.

I remember the youthful thrill of trying to rivet into my brain the image of the visage of someone I liked. (Typically, of course, I was unable to articulate such affection.) Must be what Lennon and McCartney had in mind with "I've Just Seen a Face."

Then there are the images of those I feared or loathed: a kid who bullied me, a teacher who smacked me to the ground. I wish I had no memory of their faces. Prosopagnosia for the antagonisti, call it.

Whether visually or otherwise, we seek to save face. In domestic quarrels, each participant tries to save face.

Barry Bonds held out on signing a $15.8 million contract with the San Francisco Giants, just to save face.

Nations and sects and rivals also fight to save face, even if it means destroying the whole body, the whole body politic, the whole soul, in the process.

I wonder if there is such a thing as mammogagnosia, "the forgetting of breasts"? I think I'm afflicted with whatever the opposite of that is. And let me tell you, Braille may not help but who cares!

There's even a romantic comedy film called Saving Face by Alice Wu. It concerns a Chinese-American lesbian.

Maybe right about now, some of you are wishing I'd do an about face (which is also the title of a work by Dario Fo, but not by Dario Marquez)!

Does all this make me a facist? (Read that last word carefully. Remember, spelling counts.)