mahiwaga

I don’t really know where it comes from. I just know it’s from somewhere external. I did not learn it. I was informed of it. Probably some sort of romantic—or even Romantic—garbage that I came across in high school, about how you can look into someone’s soul just by looking into their eyes. How you can identify intelligence by recognizing a spark.

My knee-jerk skepticism kicks in. You can’t tell shit about what someone is like just from the outside. Certainly not intelligence. We’re just blindly applying stereotypes. All the signs we see in other people are just as reliable as making decisions based on the positions of the stars, or from how a random deck of cards is shuffled.

Of course, I immediately backtrack. This isn’t exactly true. Evolution has sculpted the face. A smile, a frown, a grimace, a bemused look all signal some internal state that somehow improved reproductive fitness back in the day. A huge chunk of the brain is dedicated only to the task of parsing faces, of translating the accidents of someone’s outer appearance into a symbolic representation of someone’s spirit.

And there’s the fact that one of the skills I learned (increasingly disused in our era of blood tests and high-tech imaging) is all about translating outer appearance into some kind of insight about someone’s health.

Still, nothing is reliable. There’s always some error.