Mysteries surround us

[halloweenjack]

Photographs of young women with letters and/or numbers written on their foreheads, apparently bought at a flea market or junk shop or something. (I found it, as usual, at the same place I find most of the best things on the web, Boing Boing.) Read the comments for speculative explanations: some people think that it had to do with plastic surgery, but then a plastic surgeon writes in and says no, that's not it; some people see common features that suggest certain obscure genetic disorders; most just seem to be deeply freaked out, as am I. These photos remind me strongly of some of the work of Dan Clowes and Charles Burns, only with the added spookiness that these were (or are) real people, not just the figments of some alternative cartoonist's imagination.

The worlds that we live in (and I do mean that in the plural, because we don't all live in the same one) are subsets of reality, formed as much by exclusion of certain things as by inclusion of others, and inexplicable things like this help remind me that there are people all around us, who look like us and speak the same language, more or less, but live lives and say and do and think and believe things that couldn't be weirder if they came from a parallel dimension several dimensions removed from ours. (David Lynch has based almost his entire career around this notion.) If there is this plethora of possible existences contemporaneous with ours, then how many more have existed in generations past?

Comments

[bleakdesolation.livejournal.com]

They look related. Those could be initials and ages, but the question of why remains.