The Face: A Time Code (Kindle Single)

by Ruth Ozeki

The trick, I learned, was to appropriate the punch line.

I don’t mind meeting him here in the mirror. It’s kind of nice. Hey, Dad. How are you doing?

Zen koans are little allegorical nuggets designed to break your head on.

My parents never seemed to mind or take offense. They were both linguists, and they understood the human love of taxonomies and our need to identify, classify, and pin down meaning with words.

No way

Growing up then, I was both the observer and the observed, both self and other. Half-Asian and half-anthropologist, is it surprising that I should now find myself sitting in front of a mirror, studying my face?

As a Japanese woman, saving face came naturally to her.

in the end I decided to spare us all by offering to use a pen name instead. “Ozeki” took care of the problem,

Ozeki is not my father’s face nor my mother’s face, either. Ozeki is my face, the face I chose, a nominal face that keeps them safe from me, and me safe from them.

I like my cheekbones. They are my mother’s cheekbones, and her father’s cheekbones.

It’s surprising I have any eyebrows left at all. When I was a child, I suffered from trichotillomania, or hair-pulling disorder. I used to pull out my eyebrows and eyelashes and split the ends of my hair, making collections of the small, curled leavings on a white page or on the ivory keys of the piano when I was supposed to be doing homework or practicing.

Trichotillomania seems to lie somewhere on the spectrum of obsessive-compulsive disorders, and the peak age of onset is between nine and thirteen, which was exactly when my own compulsions started. The behavior is often triggered by depression or stress, which the ritual of hair-pulling relieves.

Bro

It was more that by engaging in this ritual, I was able to control the tension and hold it locked in my body so I wouldn’t explode.

The iconic Japanese Noh mask, called the ko-omote, depicts a young girl of about fourteen or fifteen. She has a round white face, full cheeks, and lustrous white skin that is almost pearlescent.

The mask is buried in the block of wood, and it’s the carver’s job to release it.

Together, wabi and sabi evoke the aching appreciation of the beauty of the moment, which arises from our human awareness that everything in life is transient. Wabi-sabi is the aesthetic expression of the Zen teaching of the three marks of existence: suffering, impermanence, and no-self.

Perfectly imperfect.

Look at something long enough and it becomes strange. Repeat a word over and over and it becomes nonsense. Is this what’s happening to my face? I can’t see the whole anymore, only the smallest details. Defamiliarization... decomposition... disintegration... dissociation. Is this a path to madness?

I fell madly in love with the sixteen-year-old actress who played Juliet.

[She takes hold of her hair and looks at it.] Shall I rip it from my head? Throw it away?

For one thing, All Over Creation was a novel about potato farming. Gumboots and overalls was more the look I had in mind, not semi-naked-Asian-sex-kitten-wrapped-in-Persian-lamb. But my primary objections were more complex.

I want to find some beauty in this face, the way it is. I want to be okay with who I am. Right now. Just this.

Men are less attached to their hair—or their hair is less attached to them—but for a woman, hair is part of her identity and central to who she feels she is…

PLEASE

“There you are!” I whispered. “Where have you been all this time?”

“So you’re okay with it?” She looked at me, patiently. “I don’t have much choice,” she explained, “so I may as well be happy.”

I’m going to do this, too, some day. This is what dying looks like. This is what Dad looked like when he died, and what I’m going to look like, too. Like Mom and Dad. It was comforting to know what I would look like. It made death a little less frightening, a little more intimate, a little more dear.

After so many years, my fingertips know these surfaces so well, and it’s nice of them to take such good care of me.

This is why we read novels, after all, to see our reflections transformed, to enter another’s subjectivity, to wear another’s face, to live inside another’s skin.

“To study the buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by the myriad things (of the world).”