Ozeki's Timecode of a Face

Readers and writers sometimes like to talk about literature as if it’s a form of virtue. Someone is supposedly better, wiser, more empathetic, if only they read. They claim that if more of our leaders had taken a humanities degree, we would have a kinder world. Given the predominance of the politics, philosophy and economics triple among our parliamentarians, I’m not quite so sure it’s the instant fix they assume it is. Despite the rationalisations of readers however, it is certainly a truism that reading enables one to consider the world from the perspective of others. I say all of this by way of introduction because a book that did this for me as soon as I started reading it is Ruth Ozeki’s Timecode of a Face.

Much like Montaigne’s essays which originated the genre, Timecode of a Face is an essay based on a meditation of the self. Much unlike Montaigne’s essays,’meditation’ here is literal. To produce this text, Ozeki stared at her own face in the mirror for three hours. The resulting essay is a combination of timestamped thoughts as she meditates, interspersed with meditations (metaphorical) on various aspects of her life related to the thoughts her face inspires. Like Montaigne, the value in this act of individualistic self-attention is that it says something about a broader human experience.

A component of Ozeki’s individual experience is that she has a European-American father and a Japanese mother. Like many mixed-race children, she felt the tensions of being mixed-race in a predominantly white society. As a child, she joined in the games wherein she and other children pulled at their eye-lids to appear Chinese or Japanese. As a teenager in a country which sexualised young asian women, she received the sexual attention of adult men. As an adult, she is no less aware that, as someone other than the ‘norm’, faces examine her the moment she enters a room. They make the calculation – half white, half asian – to determine how she belongs to their society.

As a white person in a majority white country, you don’t naturally think about the fact you are white, that so many aspects of our culture and society reflect a default to which you belong. You have to choose to think about it. The same is often not true for anyone else. I learned, when I read Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, that to be a member of a minority group is to be made to think about that racial membership. That my wife happens to be black and from a muslim background means I now think about this much more.

Because of this, Ozeki’s playground experiences did not lead me to wonder about my own playground experiences. Instead, they led to me to reflect on the fact that if all goes well and my wife and I have children in the next few years, her experience will not be so dissimilar from their experience. Not exactly, of course. Our children will be a different mix, in a different country and a different time. But they too will have the experience of being seen as a deviance from the norm. That they are white as well as black will not register. I wonder whether if we have daughters, if they will be fetishised as mixed-race in their teenage years. I wonder whether I will be any help at all to them as they go through an experience I never could have.

I see myself in Ozeki’s father. He had many good qualities, but a more ambiguous quality which I think caused his loved ones some pain was his strong sense of privacy and reservation. Her mother regularly read magazines, and wrote letters good enough to be published in them. After reading one in Time, he asked her to stop, because he could not bear to see the family name present¹. Ozeki later learned that her father wished to spare his sister, who was an elderly and devout fundamentalist Christian. Ozeki speculates that the motivation was honest, but that her aunt was a tougher and more tolerant person than he believed.

I see myself in him because I too am a reserved and private person by disposition. In itself, there is nothing wrong with that, any more than there is anything wrong with the opposite. But like any temperament, a failure to control it, or allow that one’s loved ones differ in temperament and thus needs, risks being a source of pain for them. All things may be good in moderation, but I recognise this personality trait is not a moderate one in me. Even writing from a perspective of self-reflection as I am now is a difficult act for me. My preference is to write about things, like Ozeki’s essay, or ideas, or events. But not myself.

For me, these two reflections illustrate what I think is best about Ozeki’s meditation (literal and metaphorical): its ability to let me see the world not only through Ozeki’s eyes, but through the eyes of others beyond Ozeki. Other thoughts in the book cover wabi sabi (the acceptance of transience and imperfection²), Noh theatre, on compulsively pulling out her hair as a child, on what having a bald head as a woman historically signified and what it signifies today, on being a Buddhist (priest), on her mother’s Alzheimer’s.

Interestingly enough, among Ozeki’s closing thoughts in the book is a reflection on the mirror room between dressing room and stage in Noh theatre, which reflected my own thoughts when I began reading the essay:

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.

The only difference between her reflection here and mine is that for me, we can remove the word ‘novels’. In any good book, one learns something new, and often about other people. Ozeki’s book is one such good book. In the end, the meditation (literal) transformed her. She finds that, contra Narcissus, the experience has led her to be more observant of others, to wonder more about their subjective experience of the world, about what they focus on and see when they themselves look into a mirror. And by reading her account, it has transformed me too – at the very least by enabling me to reflect on her experiences.

Footnotes