Contemplating the face of Oscar Pistorious

I watched a bit of the Oscar Pistorious trial today. Among other things I am fascinated by the faces of the audience. You hear Oscar's trembling and highly emotionally charged voice, crackling out of his face that is hidden from you. You can't see his eyes. You can't see him purse his lips and lick them to moisten them. But you can hear, if you listen hard, his tongue pulling back, working desperately, as if independently of him, to keep his mouth moist. And you see the faces of those whose gaze is fixed on his face. They are all set like flint, hard, unflinching, unmoving. The sculpture pose of the faces is only momentarily upset by the rapid blinking of the eyes. You look harder into those faces, searching, screening, hoping to pick up the slightest movement that can reconfirm for you that they are actually humans, that they are still human beings. These faces belong to people who, by choice or for duty's sake, are forced to sit in there, saying nothing, watching and not even in any way able to determine the out come, or influence the course of the trial. There are there, wearing these unflinching faces, now and again mirroring to us what the face of Oscar might be looking like. As I study these faces, and allow them to distract me from the actual words of the trial, as the eye of my mind tries to imagine the contours of the face of Oscar, I keep asking myself: To what avail?