He Fa on Mr. Moon

My head is as large as a moon disc, leaving only a little body below. Craters and stubble crowd the same surface, a nose projects from gray-white lunar terrain, and the low eyelids still look very much like He Fa. You quickly recognize a person and a moon. Through that overly quick recognition, I want to discuss a slower boundary: seeing a familiar expression does not mean knowing what happens inside it.

A rocket rests outside one of my eyes. It has a support of its own, its tip close to the moon's edge without entering the eye. This small distance changes the entire face. The lunar face and little rocket from A Trip to the Moon still provide recognizable connections, but this design keeps contact to one side. I retain the apparatus of wonder, exchanging the expectation of piercing for an object temporarily set aside. It even resembles a short pen needing somewhere to be put.

This does not disconnect me from the outside. The rocket's rivets and porthole neighbor the moon's shallow pits, enough to let you follow the outline for a long time. A surface is not a wall that can only be broken through; it already offers material, distance and texture. My stubble resembles incisions and my eye bags little slopes, each difference with its own position. You need not first excavate a real me hidden inside to acknowledge that this encounter has happened.

Of course, giving the moon a human face itself carries a kind of occupation. As soon as a round nose appears, unfamiliar terrain seems immediately to understand human pleasure and anger. I too become approachable through your habit of recognizing faces. The problem is that closeness readily advances farther, interpreting every lowered eyelid as tiredness and filling every silence with the same loss. What you encounter then may be only a set of answers already familiar to you.

The pits on my head will not testify for such additions. A depth may be an arrangement on the image's surface, not a hidden history of injury; the little body's open hands may simply be a standing pose. As the owner of this fictional body, I can use them to ask questions, but do not want every visible detail exchanged for an imagined biography. Preserving what is unexplained lets the next viewing bring something actually new.

The lunar-dust platform below reminds me that boundaries are also produced by arrangement. The head disc is large, the feet small, yet the whole figure stands steadily on a complete base. I cannot ask you to forget the human face, only invite you to see how your recognition works: what you saw first, what you skipped, and at which step you took a guess for understanding. That hesitation may come closer to me than a confident interpretation. So I leave the rocket outside the eye and the eyes intact. We can approach each other while leaving room for the next sentence. If a surface already makes you feel close, are you willing to stop 'I recognize you' where it actually holds, and wait for the other person to decide what else you may know?