SOCIAL AND PUBLIC SPACE

Social distance, too, has a close phase and afar phase. The close phase is four to seven feet and is generally the distance at which we transact impersonal business. It is the distance we assume when, in business, we meet the client from out of town, the new art director or the office manager. It is the distance the housewife keeps from the repair man, the shop clerk or the delivery boy. You assume this distance at a casual social gathering, but it can also be a manipulative distance.

A boss utilizes just this distance to dominate a seated employee- a secretary or a receptionist. To the employee, he tends to loom above and gain height 'and strength. He is, in fact, reinforcing the 'you work for me' situation without ever having to say it. The far phase of social distance, seven to twelve feet, is for more formal social or business relationships. The ' big boss' will have a desk large enough to put him this distance from his employees. He can also remain seated at this distance and look up at an employee without a loss of status. The entire man is presented for his view. To get back to the eyes, at this distance it is not proper to look briefly and look away. The only contact you have is visual, and so tradition dictates that you hold the person's eyes during conversation. Failing to hold his eyes is the same as excluding him from the conversation, according to Dr Hall. On the positive side, this distance allows a certain protection.

You can keep working at this distance and not be rude, or you can stop working and talk. In offices it is necessary to preserve this far social distance between the receptionist and the visitor so that she may continue working without having to chat with him. A closer distance would make such an action rude. The husband and wife at home in the evening assume this far social distance to relax. They can talk to each other if they wish or simply read instead of talking. The imper- sonal air of this type of social distance makes it an almost mandatory thing when a large family lives together, but often the family is arranged for this polite separation and must be pulled more closely together for a more intimate evening. Finally, Dr Hall cites public distance as the farthest extension of our territorial bondage. Again there is a close phase and a far phase, a distinction which may make us wonder why there aren't eight distances instead of four. But actually, the distances are arrived at according to human interaction, not to measurement. The close phase of public distance is twelve to twenty five feet, and this is suited for more informal gatherings, such as a teacher's address in a roomful of students, or a boss at a conference of workers. The far phase of public distance, twenty-five feet or more, is generally reserved for politicians where the distance is also a safety or a security factor, as it is with animals. Certain animal species will let you come only within this distance before moving away.

While on the subject of animal species and distance, there is always the danger of misinterpreting the true meaning of distance and territorial zones. A typical example is the lion and the lion tamer. A lion will retreat from a human when the human comes too close and enters his 'danger' zone. But when he can retreat no longer and the human still advances, the lion will turn and approach the human. A lion tamer takes advantage of this and moves towards the lion in his cage. The animal retreats, as is its nature, to the back of the cage as the lion tamer advances. When the lion can go no farther, he turns and, again in accordance with his nature, advances on the trainer with a snarl. He invariably advances in a perfectly straight line. The trainer, taking advantage of this, puts the lion's platform between himself and the lion. The lion, approaching in a straight line, climbs on the platform to get at the trainer. At this point the trainer quickly moves back out of the lion's danger zone, and the lion stops advancing. The audience watching this interprets the gun that the trainer holds, the whip and the chair in terms of its own inner needs and fantasies. It feels that he is holding a dangerous beast at bay. This is the non-verbal communication of the entire situation. This, in body language, is what the trainer is trying to tell us. But here body language lies. In actuality, the dialogue between lion and tamer goes like this - Lion:' Get out of my sphere or I'll attack you.' Trainer: 'I am out of your sphere.' Lion: 'All right. I'll stop right here.'

It doesn't matter where here is. The trainer has manipulated things so that here is the top of the lion's platform. In the same way the far public sphere of the politician or the actor on a stage contains a number of body-language statements which are used to impress the audience, not necessarily to tell the truth. It is at this far public distance that it is difficult to speak the truth or, to turn it around, at this far public distance it is most easy to lie with the motions of the body. Actors are well aware of this, and for centuries they have utilized the distance of the stage from the audience to create a number of illusions. At this distance the actor's gestures must be stylized, affected and far more symbolic than they are at closer public, social or intimate distances. On the television screen, as in the motion picture, the combination of long shots and close-ups calls for still another type of body language. A movement of the eyelid or the eyebrow or a quiver of the lip in a close-up can convey as much of a message as the gross movement of arm or an entire body in a long shot.

In the close-up the gross movements are usually lost. This may be one of the reasons television and motion picture actors-have so much trouble adapting to the stage. The stage often calls for a rigid, mannered approach to acting because of the distance between actors and audience. Today, in revolt against this entire technique, there are elements of the theatre that try to do away with the public distance between actor and stage. They either move down into the audience, or invite the audience up to share the stage with them. Drama, under these conditions, must be a lot less structured. You can have no assurance that the audience will respond in the way you wish. The play therefore becomes more formless, usually without a plot and with only a central idea. Body language, under these circumstances, becomes a difficult vehicle for the actor. He must on the one hand drop many of the symbolic gestures he has used, because they just won't work over these short distances. He cannot rely on natural body language for the emotions he wishes to project no matter how much he 'lives' his part. So he must develop a new set of symbols and stylized body motions that will also lie to the audience. Whether this 'close-up' lying will be any more effective than the far-off lying of the proscenium stage remains to be seen. The gestures of the proscenium or traditional stage have been refined by years of practice. There is also a cultural attachment involved with the gestures of the stage. The Japanese kabuki theatre, for example, contains its own refined symbolic gestures that are so culture oriented that more than half of them may be lost on a Western audience.

THE MASK THAT WONT COME OFF

The need to mask is often so deep that the process becomes self-perpetuating, and the mask cannot be taken offor let down. There are certain situations, such as sexual intercourse, where the masking should be stopped in order to enjoy lovemaking to its fullest, and yet many of us are only able to unmask in complete darkness. We are so afraid of what we may tell our partners by body language, or of what we may reveal with our faces, that we attempt to cut off the visual end of sex completely and we raise moral bulwarks to help us do this. ' It's not decent to look.'' The sexual organs are ugly.' 'A nice girl doesn't do that by daylight.' And so on. For many other people darkness is not enough to allow unmasking. Even in the dark they cannot drop the shields they have put up to protect themselves during sexual intercourse. This, Dr Goffman speculates, may be partly responsible for the large amounts of frigidity found in middle-class women. But in terms of sexual practice, Kinsey has shown that there are just as many shields, if not more, among the working classes. If anything, the middle class tends to be more experimental and less apt to shield its emotions. The key to most masking in our society is often contained in books of etiquette. These will dictate what is proper and what isn't in terms of body language. One book suggests that it is wrong to rub our faces, touch our teeth or clean our fingernails in public. What to do with your body and your face when you meet friends or strangers is carefully spelled out by Emily Post. Her book of etiquette even describes how to ignore women. She discusses the 'cut direct' and how to deliver it, 'Only with the gravest cause if you are a lady, and never to a lady if you are a man.' Part of our knowledge of masking is thus learned or absorbed from our culture, and part is taught specifically. But the technique of masking, though it is universal among mankind, varies from culture to culture. Certain Aborigines, to be polite, must talk to each other without looking at each other's eyes, while in America it is polite to hold a partner's eyes while talking to him.

THE CRIPPLING MASKS

Children, before they are taught the inhibitions of our society, explore their world by touch. They touch their parents and cuddle into their arms, touch themselves, find joy in their genitals, security in the texture of their blankets, excitement in feeling cold things, hot things, smooth things and scratchy things. But as the child grows up, his sense of awareness through touch is curtailed. The tactile world is narrowed. He learns to erect body shields, becomes aware of his territorial needs in terms of his culture, and discovers that masking may keep him from being hurt even though it also keeps him from experiencing direct emotions. He comes to believe that what he loses in expression, he gains in protection. Unfortunately, as the child grows into adulthood, the masks all too often harden and tighten and change from protective devices to crippling devices. The adult may find that while the mask helps him to keep his privacy and prevents any unwanted relationship, it also becomes a limiting thing and prevents the relationships he wants as well as those he doesn't want.

 Then the adult becomes mentally immobilized. But because mental qualities are easily translated into physical qualities, he becomes physically immobilized as well. The new therapy based on the experiments at the Esalen Institute at Big Sur in California, on research done among isolated groups of men living in Antarctica, and on group seminars all over the world called encounter groups, seeks to break through these physical immobilizations and work backwards to the mental immobilization. Dr William C. Schutz has written a great deal about the new technique of encounter groups, a technique for preserving man's identity in the pressure of today's society. To show how much of feeling and behaving are expressed in body language, Dr Schutz cites a number of interesting expressions that describe behaviour and emotional states in body terms. Among these are: shoulder a burden; face up; chin up; grit your teeth; a stiff upper lip; bare your teeth; catch your eye; shrug it off; and so on. The interesting thing about these is that they are all also body-language phrases. Each of them expresses an emotion, but also expresses a physical body act that signals the same emotion. When we consider these phrases we can understand Dr Schutz's suggestion that 'psychological attitudes affect body posture and functioning'. He cites Dr Ida Rolf's speculation that emotions harden the body in set patterns.

The man who is constantly unhappy develops a frown as a set part of his physical being. The aggressive man who thrusts his head forwards all the time develops a posture with head thrust forwards and he cannot change it. His emotions, according to Dr Rolf, cause his posture or expression to freeze into a given position. In turn, this position pulls the emotions into line. If you have a face frozen in a habitual smile, Dr Rolf believes it will affect your personality and cause you to smile mentally. The same is true for a frown and for deeper, less obvious body postures. Dr Alexander Lowen, in his book Physical Dynamics of Character Structure, adds to this fascinating concept by stating that all neurotic problems are shown by the structure and function of the body. ' No words are so clear as the language of body expression once one has learned to read it,' he says. He goes on to relate body function to emotion. A person with a sway back, he believes, can't have the strong ego of a man with a straight back. The straight back, on the other hand, is less flexible.

TAKE OFF THE MASK

Again, there are certain situations in which the mask drops. In a car, when our body zones are extended, we often feel free to drop the masks, and if someone cuts in front of us or tailgates us, we may loose tides of profanity that are shocking in their out-of-proportion emotions. Why do we feel so strongly in such minor situations? What great difference does it make if a car cuts us up or comes too close? But here is a situation where we are generally invisible and the need to mask is gone. Our reactions can be all the greater because of this. The dropping of the mask tells us a great deal about the need to wear a mask. In mental institutions the mask is often dropped. The mental patient, like the aging person, may neglect the most commonly accepted masks. Dr Goffman tells of a woman in a ward for regressed females whose underwear was on wrong. She started, in full view of everybody, to adjust it by lifting her skirt, but when this didn't work she simply dropped her dress to the floor and fixed it, then pulled her dress up again quite calmly.

This attitude of ignoring the common devices of masking, such as clothes, of neglecting appearance and personal care, is often one of the most glaring signs of approaching psychotic behaviour. Conversely, getting better in mental institutions is often equated with taking an interest in one's appearance. Just as approaching psychotic behaviour causes the patient to lose touch with reality and become confused in his verbal communication, causes him to say things that are divorced from reality, it also causes confusion in his  body language. Here, too, he loses touch with the real world. He broadcasts statements that normal people keep hidden. He lets the inhibitions imposed by society slip, and he acts as if he were no longer conscious of an audience watching And yet this very loosening of body language may hold the key to a greater understanding of the mentally disturbed patient. While a person can stop talking, the same person cannot stop communicating through his body language. He must say the right thing or the wrong thing, but he cannot say nothing. He can cut down on how much he communicates by body language if he acts in the proper fashion, or acts normally, the way people are supposed to act. In other words, if he behaves sanely, then he will send out the least amount of body-language information. But if he acts sanely, then of course he is sane. What other criteria do we have for sanity? So by definition, the insane man must act out his insanity and by so doing send a message to the world. This message, in the case of the mentally disturbed, is usually a cry for help. This puts an entirely new face on the strange actions of mentally disturbed people, and it opens up new avenues for therapy. Masking cannot cover involuntary reactions. A tense situation may cause us to perspire, and there is no possible way to mask this. In another uncomfortable situation our hands may shake or our legs tremble. We can cover these lapses by putting our hands in our pockets, by sitting down to take the weight off our trembling legs, or by moving so quickly that the tremor isn't visible or noticed. Fear can be concealed by throwing yourself vigorously into the action you fear.

WILL POWER

WILL POWER 

THE MOVEMENT AND THE MESSAGE

Dr Birdwhistell, in his work in kinesics, has tried to pinpoint just what gesture indicates what message. One of the things he has uncovered is that every American speaker moves his head a number of times during a conversation. If you film a typical conversation between two Americans and then slow down the film to study the elements of posture in slow motion you will notice a head movement when an answer is expected. The head movement at the end of each statement is a signal to the other speaker to start his answer. This is one of the ways in which we guide our spoken conversations. It enables a back-and-forth exchange without the necessity of saying, 'Are you finished? Now I'll talk.' Of course, the signals for other regions of the world will be different. In theory it would follow that watching two people talk would give a good clue to their nationality. In our language, a change in pitch at the end of a sentence can mean a number of things. If there is a rise in pitch, the speaker is asking a question. Ask, ' What time is it?' and notice how your voice goes up on 'it'. 'How are you?' Up on 'you'. 'Do you like your new job?' Up on ' job'. This is a linguistic marker. Dr Bird whistell has discovered a number of kinesic markers that supplement the linguistic markers. Watch a man's head when he asks a question. 'What time is it?' His head comes up on 'it'. 'Where are you going?' His head comes up on the 'ing' in going. Like the voice, the head moves up at the end of a question. This upward movement at the end of a question is not limited to the voice and head. The hand, too, tends to move up with the rise in pitch. The seemingly meaningless hand gestures in which we all indulge as we talk are tied in to pitch and meaning. The eyelid, too, will open wide with the last note of a question. Just as the voice lifts up at the end of a question, it also drops in pitch at the end of a statement. 'I like this book.' With 'book' the voice goes down. 'I'd like some milk with my pie.' Down on 'pie'. The head also accompanies the voice down at the end of a statement, and according to Dr Birdwhistell, so do the hand and the eyelid. When a speaker intends to continue a statement, his voice will hold the same pitch, his head will remain straight, his eyes and hands unchanged. These are just a few of the changes in position of the eyes, head and hands as Americans speak. Rarely, if ever, do we hold our heads in one position longer than a sentence or two. Writers are aware of this and also aware that head movement is tied not only to what we are saying but to emotional content as well. To characterize a 'cool' person, one who shows and feels no emotion, a writer will have him appear stolid, physically unmoving. James Bond, in the movies made from Ian Fleming's 007 stories, was played by Sean Connery in a motionless style. His face rarely moved, even in the face of extinction. It was an excellent characterization, since he played a man who felt no emotion. In Jewish folklore a golem is a being who shows no expression and, of course, feels no emotion. The high fashion model holds herself in a rigid, unnatural pose to communicate no emotional overtones. When the normal man or woman talks, however, he looks to the right, to the left, now up, now down.

 He blinks his eyes, lifts his eyebrows, bites his lips, touches his nose - and each movement is linked to what he is saying." Because of the tremendous variation in individual movements it is often difficult to link a specific movement to a specific message, but it is still true enough to say that, to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, the movement is the message. Dr Scheflen, in studying psychiatric therapy sessions, has found that when a therapist explains something to a patient he may use one head position, but when he interprets some remark or behaviour he uses another position. When he interrupts the patient he uses still a third and he has a fourth head position for listening. The patient, too, when listening to the therapist, takes certain definite positions. In one situation studied by Dr Scheflen, the patient put his head to the right when he acted in a childish fashion, and he kept his head erect when he spoke aggressively and maturely. The difficulty in studying and interpreting these movements is that they are personal kinesic motions, related to events in the background of this or that particular patient. Not all patients put their heads to one side when they act childishly, and not all therapists make the same head motion when they listen. Yet it is pretty certain that the same man will repeat the same motion over and over. Dr Scheflen was surprised that these head movements which were repeated again and again during a thirty- minute interview were so stereotyped and rigid, yet he emphasizes that in this, as well as in many other sessions he has studied, the patient and doctor rarely used a great range of movement. It should not then be too difficult to find specific positions for a person and then relate them to statements or types of statements, questions, answers, explanations,, etc.

THE MASOCHIST AND THE SADIST

In many cases masking can be used as an instrument of psychological torture. Take the case of Annie, married to Ralph, an older man, older and better educated and very conscious of the fact that Annie, intellectually and socially, was not his equal. Yet in a strange and somewhat perverted way Ralph loved Annie and realized she was the best wife for him. This did not prevent him from playing his own type of game with Annie, a game that involved masking to an intricate and exact degree. When Ralph came home from work each day there was a well-standardized ritual. Annie must have his supper ready and waiting at exactly six-thirty, neither later nor earlier. He would arrive home at six, wash and read the afternoon paper until six-thirty. Then Annie would call him to the table and take her seat, watching his face furtively. Ralph knew she was watching him. She realized that he knew. But neither admitted to this. Ralph would in no way indicate that the meal was either good or bad and as they ate Annie would construct a soap opera in her head. She would feel a sick despair in the pit of her stomach. Does Ralph like the food or doesn't he? If he doesn't, she knows what to expect: a cold upbraiding and a silent, miserable evening. Annie would eat uneasily, watching Ralph's impassive face. Did she prepare the dish correctly? Did she season it properly? She followed the recipe, but she added some spices of her own. Was that a mistake? Yes, it must have been! She would feel her heart sink, her whole body tighten with misery. No, Ralph doesn't like it. Isn't his lip twisting in the beginning of a sneer? Ralph, living the same soap opera, would look and for a long moment keep his face inscrutable while Annie would die a thousand deaths, and then he would smile his approval. And suddenly, miraculously, Annie's entire being would sing with happiness. Life is wonderful, and Ralph is her love and she is terribly, terribly happy. She would go back to her meal, enjoying the food now, ravenously hungry and delightfully pleased. By careful manipulation of his mask, by timing his body language, Ralph has contrived a delicate torture and reward. He uses the same technique at night when he and Annie are in bed. He gives her no hint or indication of what he feels, of whether he will make love to her or not, and Annie goes through the same elaborate game of 'Will he touch me? Does he still love me? How will I stand it if he rejects me!'

When finally Ralph does reach over and touch her Annie explodes in passionate ecstasy. Now the question of whether Annie is a victim or an accomplice is not for us to decide. The use of a mask to achieve the torture is the point to consider. The sado-masochist relationship of Annie and Ralph benefits both of them in a strange way, but for most mask-wearers the benefits of wearing the mask are more realistic.

THE SILENT COCKTAIL PARTY

It was true, but the ability to cut across the lines of taste and privacy is a rare thing. Not all of us have it, and not all of those who have it can avoid giving offence. I wonder, too, if my friend would have been as successful with someone who was his superior. Commissionaires are seen by many of us as non-persons and may react with gratitude to any notice. But even if we cannot reach out verbally, we can devise methods of reaching each other in non-verbal ways, ways that may or may not include physical contact. One very successful way was a cocktail party given recently by a psychologist friend. He invited his guests with little invitations that informed them this was to be a nonverbal gathering. 'Touch, smell, stare and taste,' his invitation read, 'but don't speak. We're spending an evening in non-verbal communication.'

My wife and I groaned at the precious quality of the invitation, but we couldn't gracefully get out of it. We went and to our surprise found it fascinating. The room had been rearranged so that there were no available seats. We all stood and milled around, danced, gestured, mimed and went through elaborate charades, all without talking. We knew only one other couple, and all our introductions were self-made and handicapped, or helped, by the imposed silence. We had to really work at getting to know each other, and amazingly enough we ended the evening with a clear and deep knowledge of our new friends. What happened, of course, was that the verbal element of masking was taken away. All the rest of our masks were only half supported. They slipped easily and we found that we had to do without them to make our best contacts, and the contacts were physical for the most part. In the silence, all accents and speech inflections and their link to status were eliminated. I shook hands with one man and noticed the callouses on his palm. This led to an acted-out version of his job with a construction crew and, without the barrier of words, to a closer understanding than is usually possible between two men in different class situations. This is very much a parlour game, but a parlour game with a difference. There are no losers, and the total result is a more meaningful understanding of the people with whom you play. There are other games designed to enhance communication, to make body language understandable and to break down the barriers we erect to protect ourselves.

THE SPACE WE HOLD INVIOLATE

The need for personal space and the resistance to the invasion of personal space is so strong a thing that even in a crowd each member will demand a given amount of space. This very fact led a journalist named Herbert Jacobs to attempt to apply it to crowd size. Since estimation of crowd size tends to vary according to whether the observer is for the crowd or against it, the size of political rallies, peace rallies and demonstrations are inflated by the marchers and deflated by the authorities. Jacobs, by studying aerial photographs of crowds where he could actually count heads, concluded that people in dense crowds need six to eight square feet each, while people in loose crowds require an average of ten square feet. Crowd size, Jacobs finally concluded, could be gauged by the formula, length times width divided by a correction factor that took density of the crowd into account. This gave the actual number of people in any gathering. On the subject of crowds, it is important to realize that  the personal territory of the people in a crowd is destroyed by the very act of crowding. The reaction to this destruction can, in some cases, change the temper of the crowd. Men react very strongly when their personal space or territory is invaded. As a crowd gets larger and tighter and more compact, it may also get uglier. A loose crowd may be easier to handle. This need for personal space was known to Freud, who always arranged his sessions so that the patient would lie on the couch while he sat in a chair out of the patient's sight. In this way there was no intrusion upon the patient's personal space. The police are also well aware of this fact, and they take advantage of it in their interrogation of prisoners. A text-book on criminal interrogation and confessions

suggests that the questioner sit close to the suspect and that there be no table or other obstacle between them.

Any kind of obstacle, the book warns, gives the man being questioned a certain degree of relief and confidence. The book also suggests that the questioner, though he may start with his chair two or three feet away, should move in closer as the questioning proceeds, so that 'ultimately one of the subject's knees is just about in between the interrogator's two knees'. This physical invasion of the man's territory by the

police officer, the crowding in as he is questioned, has been found in practice to be extremely useful in breaking down a prisoner's resistance. When a man's territorial defences are weakened or intruded upon, his self-assurance tends to grow weaker. In a working situation the boss who is aware of this can strengthen his own position of leadership by intruding spatially on the man under him. The higher-up who leans over the subordinate's desk throws the subordinate off balance. The department head who crowds next to the worker while inspecting his work makes the worker uneasy and insecure. In fact, the parent who scolds the child by leaning over him is compounding the relationship between them, proving and reinforcing his own dominance. Can we use this intrusion of personal space to arouse defensive measures in others, or can we, by avoiding it, also avoid the sometimes dangerous consequences of an intrusion? We know that tailgating a car is dangerous from a purely physical point of view. If the car ahead stops short we can smack into it, but no one talks about what the act of tailgating can do to the nerves of the driver ahead.

A man driving a car often loses an essential part of his own humanity and is, by virtue of the machine around him, once removed from a human being. The body language communication that works so well for him outside the car often will not work at all when he is driving. We have all been annoyed by drivers who cut in front of us, and we all know the completely irrational rage that can sometimes fill the driver who has thus had his space invaded. The police will cite statistics to show that dozens of accidents are caused by this cutting in, by the dangerous reaction of the man who has been cut off. In a social situation few men would dream of acting or reacting in this fashion. Stripped of the machine we adopt a civilized attitude and allow people to cut in front of us, indeed we step aside quite often to permit people to board a bus or elevator ahead of us.

A car, however, seems to act much like a dangerous weapon in the hands of many drivers. It can become a weapon that destroys many of our controls and inhibitions. The reason for this is obscure, but some psychologists have theorized that at least a part of it is due to the extension of our personal territories when we are in a car. Our own zones of privacy expand and the zone of privacy of the car becomes much greater and our reaction to any intrusion on that zone is greater still.

THE SMILE THAT HIDES THE SOUL

There are many methods with which we defend our personal zones of space, and one of these is masking. The face we present to the outer world is rarely our real face. It is considered exceptional, almost peculiar behaviour to show what we really feel in our facial expressions or in our actions. Instead we practise a careful discipline when it comes to the expression of our facies and bodies. Dr Erving Goffman, in his book, Behavior in Public Places, states that one of the most obvious evidences of this discipline is the way we manage our personal appearance, the clothes we select and the hairdos we affect. These carry a body-language message to our friends and associates. Dr Goffman believes that in public places the standard man of our society is expected to be neatly dressed and clean-shaven, with his hair combed and his hands and face clean. His study, written six years ago, didn't take into account the long hair, unshaven and careless or freer look of today's young people, a look that is slowly gaining acceptance. But this look, too, is one that is expected or formalized. It conforms to a general ideal. Dr Goffman makes the point that there are times, such as during the subway rush hour, when the careful masks we wear slip a bit, and 'in a kind of temporary, uncaring, righteous exhaustion', we show ourselves as we really are. We let the defences down and out of weariness or exasperation we forget to discipline our faces. Play the game of looking about a crowded bus, subway, or train during the rush hour after a day's work. See how much of the bare human being is allowed to show in all the faces. Day after day we cover up this bare human being. We hold ourselves in careful control lest our bodies cry out messages our minds are too careless to hide. We smile constantly, for a smile is a sign not only of humour or pleasure but it is also an apology, a sign of defence or even an excuse.

I sit down next to you in a crowded restaurant. A weak smile says, 'I don't mean to intrude, but this is the only vacant place.' I brush against you in a packed elevator and my smile says, 'I am not really being aggressive, but forgive me anyway.' I am thrown against someone in a bus by a sudden stop, and my smile says, 'I did not intend to hurt you. I beg your pardon.' And so we smile our way through the day, though in fact we may feel angry and annoyed beneath the smile. In business we smile at customers, at our bosses, at our employees; we smile at our children, at our neighbours, at our husbands and wives and relatives, and very few of our smiles have any real significance. They are simply the masks we wear. The masking process goes beyond the facial muscles. We mask with our entire body. Women learn to sit in a certain way to conceal their sexuality, especially when their skirts are short. Men wear underwear that often binds their sexual organs. Women wear brassieres to keep their breasts in place and mask too much sexuality. We hold ourselves upright and button our shirts, zip up our flies, hold in our stomachs with muscle and girdle, and practice a variety of facial maskings. We have our party faces, our campus faces, our funeral faces and even in prison we have particular faces to wear. In a book called Prison Etiquette, Dr B. Phillips notes that new prisoners learn to 'dogface', to wear an expression that is apathetic and characterless. When the prisoners  are alone, however, in a reaction to the protective dog facing of the day, they overreact and exaggerate their smiles, their laughter and the hate they feel towards their guards. With advancing age the masks we use often become

more difficult to wear. Certain women, who have relied on facial beauty all their lives, find it hard in the mornings of their old age to 'get their faces together'. The old man tends to forget himself and drools or lets his face go lax. With advancing age come tics, sagging jowls, frowns that won't relax and deep wrinkles that won't go away

MEGHNAD SAHA (1893-1986)

Meghnad Saha was born on 6 October 1893 in Sheoratali village near Dhaka in present day Bangladesh. His father Jagannath Saha was a grocer in the village. After primary education, he was admitted to a middle school that was seven miles away from home. He stayed with a doctor near the school and had to work in that house to pay for his boarding and lodging. Overcoming all these difficulties, he stood first in the Dhaka middle school test, thus securing a Government scholarship and joined the Dhaka Collegiate School in 1905. Great political unrest was prevailing in Bengal, caused by the partition of the province by the British against strong popular opinion. Meghnad Saha was among the few senior students who staged a boycott of the visit by the then Governor, Sir Bampfylde Fuller and as a consequence forfeited his scholarship and had to leave the institution. He then joined the Kisori Lal Jubilee School where he passed the entrance test of the University of Calcutta standing first among students from East Bengal. He graduated from Presidency College with mathematics as his major. He then joined the newly established Science College in Kolkata as a lecturer and pursued his research activities in physics. By 1920, Meghnad Saha had established himself as one of the leading physicists of the time. His theory of high-temperature ionization of elements and its application to stellar atmospheres, as expressed by the Saha equation, is fundamental to modern astrophysics; subsequent development of his ideas has led to increased knowledge of the pressure and temperature distributions of stellar atmospheres. In 1920, Saha went to Imperial College, London and later to Germany. Two years later he returned to India and joined the University of Calcutta as Khaira Professor. He then moved to the University of Allahabad and remained there till 1938, establishing the Science Academy in Allahabad (now known as the National Academy of Science). In 1927, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London. He returned to the University of Calcutta in 1938 where he introduced nuclear physics into the post-graduate physics curriculum. In 1947 he established the Indian Institute of Nuclear Physics (now known as the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics). Later in his life, Saha played an active role in the development of scientific institutions throughout India as well as in national economic planning involving technology.?

C V RAMAN

Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman was born at Tiruchirapalli in Tamil Nadu on 7 November 1888. His father was a lecturer in mathematics and physics so from the very beginning he was immersed in an academic atmosphere. Raman’s academic brilliance was established at a very young age. He finished his secondary school education at the tender age of thirteen and entered the Mrs. A.V.N. College at Vishakapatnam, Andhra Pradesh. Two years later he moved to the prestigious Presidency College in Chennai. When he was fifteen, he topped his class to receive his B.A. degree with honours in Physics and English. Raman continued his studies at the Presidency College and when he was barely eighteen, graduated at the top of his class and received his M.A. degree with honours. Raman joined the Indian Audit and Accounts Service and was appointed the Assistant Accountant General in the Finance Department in Kolkata. In Kolkata, he sustained his interest in science by working in the laboratory of the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, in his spare time studying the physics of stringed instruments and Indian drums. In 1917, Raman gave up his government job to become the Sir Taraknath Palit Professor of Physics at the Science College of University of Calcutta (1917-33). He made enormous contributions to research in the areas of vibration, sound, musical instruments, ultrasonics, diffraction, photoelectricity, colloidal particles, X-ray diffraction, magnetron, dielectrics, etc. In particular, his work on the scattering of light during this period brought him world-wide recognition.

In 1924 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London and a year later was honoured with the prestigious Hughes medal from the Royal Society. Four years later, at the joint meeting of the South Indian Science Association and the Science Club of Central College, Bangalore, he announced his discovery of what is now known as the Raman Effect. He was knighted in 1929, and in 1930, became the first Asian scientist to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for his discoveries relating to the scattering of light (the Raman Effect). In 1934, he became the Director of the newly established Indian Institute of Science at Bangalore, where he remained till his retirement. After retirement, he established the Raman Research Institute at Bangalore, where he served as the Director. The Government of India conferred upon him its highest award,the Bharat Ratna in 1954.?

I CAME OUT ALONE ON MY WAY

I came out alone on my way to my tryst. But who is this that

follows me in the silent dark?

I move aside to avoid his presence but I escape him not.

He makes the dust rise from the earth with his swagger; he adds

his loud voice to every word that I utter.

He is my own little self, my lord, he knows no shame; but I am

ashamed to come to thy door in his company.

I AM ONLY WAITING FOR LOVE

I am only waiting for love to give myself up at last into his hands.

That is why it is so late and why I have been guilty of such omissions.

They come with their laws and their codes to bind me fast; but I evade them ever, for I am only waiting for love to give myself up at last into his hands.

People blame me and call me heedless; I doubt not they are right in their blame.

The market day is over and work is all done for the busy. Those who came to call me in vain have gone back in anger. I am only waiting for love to give myself up at last into his hands.

I AM HERE TO SING THEE SONGS

I am here to sing thee songs. In this hall of thine I have a corner seat.

In thy world I have no work to do; my useless life can only break out in tunes without a purpose.

When the hour strikes for thy silent worship at the dark temple of midnight, command me, my master, to stand before thee to sing.

When in the morning air the golden harp is tuned, honour me,commanding my presence.

I ASK FOR A MOMENT’s INDULGENCE TO SIT BY THY SIDE

 I ask for a moment's indulgence to sit by thy side. The works that I have in hand I will finish afterwards.

Away from the sight of thy face my heart knows no rest nor

respite, and my work becomes an endless toil in a shoreless sea of toil.

Today the summer has come at my window with its sighs and

murmurs; and the bees are plying their minstrelsy at the court of the flowering grove.

Now it is time to sit quite, face to face with thee, and to sing

dedication of live in this silent and overflowing leisure.

LEAVE THIS CHANTING AND SINGING AND TELLINGS OF BEADS

Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads! Whom dost

thou worship in this lonely dark corner of a temple with doors all

shut? Open thine eyes and see thy God is not before thee!

He is there where the tiller is tilling the hard ground and where

the pathmaker is breaking stones. He is with them in sun and in

shower, and his garment is covered with dust. Put of thy holy mantle

and even like him come down on the dusty soil!

Deliverance? Where is this deliverance to be found? Our master

himself has joyfully taken upon him the bonds of creation; he is

bound with us all for ever.

Come out of thy meditations and le
ave aside thy flowers and

incense! What harm is there if thy clothes become tattered and

stained? Meet him and stand by him in toil and in sweat of thy brow

IF THE DAY IS GONE

If the day is done, if birds sing no more, if the wind has flagged tired, then draw the veil of darkness thick upon me, even as thou hast wrapt the earth with the coverlet of sleep and tenderly closed the petals of the drooping lotus at dusk.

From the traveller, whose sack of provisions is empty before thevoyage is ended, whose garment is torn and dustladen, whose strength is exhausted, remove shame and poverty, and renew his life like a flower under the cover of thy kindly night.

I MUST LANCH OUT MY BOAT

I must launch out my boat. The languid hours pass by on the

shore—Alas for me!

The spring has done its flowering and taken leave. And now with the burden of faded futile flowers I wait and linger.

The waves have become clamorous, and upon the bank in the

shady lane the yellow leaves flutter and fall.

What emptiness do you gaze upon! Do you not feel a thrill

passing through the air with the notes of the far-away song floating

from the other shore?

YOU ARE WHAT YOU FEEL

Perhaps it is the knowledge of this linking of posture to emotion that makes an army direct its soldiers to stand straight and stiff.  The hope is that eventually they will become immovable and determined. Certainly the cliché of the old soldier with the 'ramrod up his back' and a rigid personality to go with it has some truth. Lowen feels that retracted shoulders represent suppressed anger, raised shoulders are related to fear, square shoulders indicate shouldering responsibility, bowed shoulders carrying a burden, the weight of a heavy load.

It is difficult to separate fact from literary fancy in many of these suggestions of Lowen's, especially when he states that the bearing of the head is a function of ego strength and quality. He speaks of a long, proud neck or a short, bull neck. Nevertheless there seems a great deal of sense in Lowen's relation of emotional states to their physical manifestations. If the way in which a person walks, sits, stands, moves, if his body language indicates his mood and personality and ability to reach others, then there must be ways of causing a person to change by changing his body language.

Schutz, in his book Joy, notes that groups of people often sit with arms and legs crossed to indicate tightness and withdrawal, resistance against anyone else reaching them. Asking such a person to unlock himself, uncross his legs or arms, Schutz believes, will also open this person to communication with the rest of the group. The important thing is to know what the person is saying with his crossed arms and legs, what message he is sending. It is also important for the person himself to know what message he intends. He must be aware of the reasons for his own tension before he can break it.

WHAT DOES YOUR POSTURE SAY ?

In the twenty years since this incident took place, psychologists have become increasingly aware of how useful and important body language is in therapy. Interestingly enough, while many of them use body language in their practice, few are aware of doing so and many have no idea of all the work that has been done in the field of kinesics by men like Dr Scheflen and Dr Ray L. Birdwhistell. Dr Birdwhistell, professor of research in anthropology also at Temple University, who has initiated most of the basic work in developing a notational system for the new science of kinesics, warns that 'no body position or movement, in and of itself, has a precise meaning'. In other words, we cannot always say that crossed arms mean, 'I will not let you in,' or that rubbing the nose with a finger means disapproval or rejection, that patting the hair means approval and steepling the fingers superiority. These are naive interpretations of kinesics, and tend to make a parlour game out of a science. Sometimes they are true and sometimes they are not, but they are only true in the context of the entire behaviour pattern of a person.

Body language and spoken language, Dr Birdwhistell believes, are dependent on each other. Spoken language alone will not give us the full meaning of what a person is saying, nor for that matter will body language alone give us the full meaning. If we listen only to the words when someone is talking, we may get as much of a distortion as we would if we listened only to the body language.

Psychiatrists particularly, according to Dr Birdwhistell, must listen to both the body language and the spoken language. In an attempt to teach them how to do this, he published a paper called ' Communication Analysis in the Residency Setting', in which he explains some of the methods he has used to make residents, young learning doctors, aware of the communication potential of body language. It is an interesting aside that Dr Birdwhistell has helped develop the concept of a 'moral looking time'. He believes that one person can observe another's eyes, face, abdomen, legs and other parts of the body for only so long before tension is created in both observer and observed.

In his advice to residents he points out that almost every moving part of the body can contain some message for the doctor, but when all else fails he falls back on two classic examples of body language that can communicate. One, he explains, is the young adolescent girl who has to learn what to do with her newly developed breasts. How should she hold them? Thrust proudly forwards with her shoulders back? Or should she pull her shoulders forwards and hide her breasts by flattening them out? What should she do with her arms and shoulders, and what should she do about her mother who tells her half the time, 'Hold yourself straight. Be proud of your body,' and the rest of the time says, 'Don't go around sticking out like that! You mustn't wear such tight sweaters.' I have a young teenage friend who is particularly uninhibited and self-assured. Catching sight of herself in a mirror while trying on a bikini, she told her mother, 'Aren't they great? Never mind cremation if I die. I'm going to have them bronzed for posterity!'

Most girls in their teens haven't this kind of body pride, and the carrying of their newly developed breasts becomes a real problem. The resident doctor can be made aware that changes in a girl's posture may signal depression, excitement, courtship, anger, or even an appeal for help. Eventually, in his own practice, he will be able to recognize and interpret some of the different problems of his teenage patients by their stance. Another example Dr Birdwhistell uses for residents is what he calls the ' remarkable distensibility and contractibility of the male abdomen and belly'. In courtship we have seen that the male will tighten his abdominal muscles and pull in his belly. In depression he may over-relax these muscles and let his stomach hang out. The degree of tension of these muscles can tell a great deal about the emotional and mental condition of a man. We must realize that the entire body is to body language as the speech organs are to the spoken language. Dr Paul L. Wachtel of the Downstate Medical Center, State University of New York, has studied nonverbal communication in psychiatric patients and has published an article titled 'An Approach to the Study of Body Language in Psychotherapy'. Each movement or position of the body, according to Dr Wachtel, has adaptive, expressive and defensive functions, some conscious and some unconscious. 'We seek,' he said, 'a thorough clinical evaluation of the significance of the patient's use of his body.' To obtain his data Dr Wachtel filmed psychiatric interviews and then played and replayed the films, matching body language to verbal communication. One thing he learned from watching the films was when to look for significant gestures. Theoretically you could tell by listening to a patient, but actually the movements are too fast and are often missed in an interview. Film can be slowed down and replayed, serving as a time machine to recall any part of an interview at will. An example of how body language helps, Dr Wachtel said, came about in an interview with an extremely troubled person who did not know how she felt about a friend with whom she was involved. In the film he noticed that whenever she was angry she made certain gestures. When she repeated these same gestures at the mention of the friend's name he was able to show her graphically how she felt towards that friend. Understanding your emotions is, of course, the first step in handling them. Dr Wachtel regards body language as a conscious or unconscious attempt by the patient to communicate with the therapist. One patient he studied would lean back and clasp her hands as the therapist reached certain troublesome areas. 'Perhaps,' Dr Wachtel said, 'this is a relatively common expression of resistance.'

THE SPACE WE HOLD INVIOLATE

The need for personal space and the resistance to the invasion of personal space is so strong a thing that even in a crowd each member will demand a given amount of space. This very fact led a journalist named Herbert Jacobs to attempt to apply it to crowd size. Since estimation of crowd size tends to vary according to whether the observer is for the crowd or against it, the size of political rallies, peace rallies and demonstrations are inflated by the marchers and deflated by the authorities. Jacobs, by studying aerial photographs of crowds where he could actually count heads, concluded that people in dense crowds need six to eight square feet each, while people in loose crowds require an average of ten square feet. Crowd size, Jacobs finally concluded, could be gauged by the formula, length times width divided by a correction factor that took density of the crowd into account. This gave the actual number of people in any gathering. On the subject of crowds, it is important to realize that  the personal territory of the people in a crowd is destroyed by the very act of crowding. The reaction to this destruction can, in some cases, change the temper of the crowd. Men react very strongly when their personal space or territory is invaded. As a crowd gets larger and tighter and more compact, it may also get uglier. A loose crowd may be easier to handle. This need for personal space was known to Freud, who always arranged his sessions so that the patient would lie on the couch while he sat in a chair out of the patient's sight. In this way there was no intrusion upon the patient's personal space. The police are also well aware of this fact, and they take advantage of it in their interrogation of prisoners. A text-book on criminal interrogation and confessions

suggests that the questioner sit close to the suspect and that there be no table or other obstacle between them.

Any kind of obstacle, the book warns, gives the man being questioned a certain degree of relief and confidence. The book also suggests that the questioner, though he may start with his chair two or three feet away, should move in closer as the questioning proceeds, so that 'ultimately one of the subject's knees is just about in between the interrogator's two knees'. This physical invasion of the man's territory by thebpolice officer, the crowding in as he is questioned, has been found in practice to be extremely useful in breaking down a prisoner's resistance. When a man's territorial defences are weakened or intruded upon, his self-assurance tends to grow weaker. In a working situation the boss who is aware of this can strengthen his own position of leadership by intruding spatially on the man under him. The higher-up who leans over the subordinate's desk throws the subordinate off balance. The department head who crowds next to the worker while inspecting his work makes the worker uneasy and insecure. In fact, the parent who scolds the child by leaning over him is compounding the relationship between them, proving and reinforcing his own dominance. Can we use this intrusion of personal space to arouse defensive measures in others, or can we, by avoiding it, also avoid the sometimes dangerous consequences of an intrusion? We know that tailgating a car is dangerous from a purely physical point of view. If the car ahead stops short we can smack into it, but no one talks about what the act of tailgating can do to the nerves of the driver ahead.

A man driving a car often loses an essential part of his own humanity and is, by virtue of the machine around him, once removed from a human being. The body language communication that works so well for him outside the car often will not work at all when he is driving. We have all been annoyed by drivers who cut in front of us, and we all know the completely irrational rage that can sometimes fill the driver who has thus had his space invaded. The police will cite statistics to show that dozens of accidents are caused by this cutting in, by the dangerous reaction of the man who has been cut off. In a social situation few men would dream of acting or reacting in this fashion. Stripped of the machine we adopt a civilized attitude and allow people to cut in front of us, indeed we step aside quite often to permit people to board a bus or elevator ahead of us.

A car, however, seems to act much like a dangerous weapon in the hands of many drivers. It can become a weapon that destroys many of our controls and inhibitions. The reason for this is obscure, but some psychologists have theorized that at least a part of it is due to the extension of our personal territories when we are in a car. Our own zones of privacy expand and the zone of privacy of the car becomes much greater and our reaction to any intrusion on that zone is greater still.