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    The Face: A Time Code
    The Face: A Time Code
    The Face: A Time Code
    Ebook78 pages1 hour

    The Face: A Time Code

    By Ruth Ozeki

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    About this ebook

    “Ruth Ozeki, a Zen Buddhist priest, sets herself the task of staring at her face in a mirror for three full, uninterrupted hours; her ruminations ripple out from personal and familial memories to wise and honest meditations on families and aging, race and the body.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune

    What did your face look like before your parents were born? In The Face: A Time Code, bestselling author and Zen Buddhist priest Ruth Ozeki recounts, in moment-to-moment detail, a profound encounter with memory and the mirror. According to ancient Zen tradition, “your face before your parents were born” is your true face. Who are you? What is your true self? What is your identity before or beyond the dualistic distinctions, like father/mother and good/evil, that define us?

    With these questions in mind, Ozeki challenges herself to spend three hours gazing into her own reflection, recording her thoughts, and noticing every possible detail. Those solitary hours open up a lifetime's worth of meditations on race, aging, family, death, the body, self doubt, and, finally, acceptance. In this lyrical short memoir, Ozeki calls on her experience of growing up in the wake of World War II as a half-Japanese, half-Caucasian American; of having a public face as an author; of studying the intricate art of the Japanese Noh mask; of being ordained as a Zen Buddhist priest; and of her own and her parents’ aging, to paint a rich and utterly unique portrait of a life as told through a face.

    Alternately philosophical, funny, personal, political, and poetic, the short memoirs in The Face series offer unique perspectives from some of our favorite writers. Find out more at www.restlessbooks.com/the-face.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRestless Books
    Release dateMar 1, 2016
    ISBN9781632060150
    The Face: A Time Code

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      Book preview

      The Face - Ruth Ozeki

      Prologue: a Koan

      What did your face look like before your parents were born?

      I first read this koan when I was eight or maybe nine years old. Someone had given me a little book called Zen Buddhism—or perhaps the book had belonged to my parents and I’d taken it from their shelves, thinking it ought to be mine. The book was small and slim, the perfect size for a child to hold, but more importantly, it had a friendly face, which made it stand out from the other duller books on my parents’ shelves. A book’s face is its cover, and this one, with its simple flowers against a muted orange background, appealed to me. A solid black box in the upper right corner contained the title: ZEN. The letters were tall and hand-drawn, in a floaty, white, Art Nouveau font that looked like ghosts, dancing. Beneath, in very small caps, was the word

      BUDDHISM

      .

      Inside the cover was the subtitle: An Introduction to Zen with Stories, Parables and Koan Riddles of the Zen Masters, decorated with figures from old Chinese ink-paintings—an exceedingly long subtitle for such a small book. It was published in 1959 by Peter Pauper Press, and I know this because I did an online image search for Zen Buddhism small orange book, and there it was, a familiar face, instantly recognizable, looking out at me from my computer screen after more than five decades.

      The little book was a talisman, a teacher, a gate. It was filled with gnomic tales of old Zen masters posing paradoxical questions that confounded my nine-year-old notions of rational narrative in a way I found both fascinating and perplexing, and so I assumed they must be profound and very wise.

      What is the sound of one hand clapping?

      How can one catch hold of Emptiness?

      Does a dog have buddha nature?

      When there is neither I nor you, who is it who seeks the Way?

      Listed like this, these koans might sound clichéd, but they were brand new to me. The crazy old Zen masters, with their staffs and whisks and comic antics, who were always slapping and cuffing each other, cutting off their arms and eyelids, and pulling each other’s ears and noses, seemed to hold a key to my nine-year-old identity.

      What is your original face?

      I read the koans earnestly, searching for an answer.

      Time Code 00:00:00

      00:00:00 I’ve put the mirror on the altar where the Buddha used to be. Laptop’s just below it. Fussing now with the seating, arranging the cushions. How close should I be? How much proximity can I tolerate? How is the lighting? Flattering? Unflattering? Does it matter? Should I change into a turtleneck to hide the lines on my neck? Hide them from whom? Is the neck even part of the face, and do I need to wash my hair? Do I need reading glasses, or can I type without them? Can I see without them? No, no glasses. No need to look at the computer screen. Just face and me, facing off in the mirror.

      00:04:14 Okay. Ready. No, wait, there’s dust on the mirror. Must clean it. Do I have vinegar? Yes, under the sink.

      00:07:26 Mirror’s spotless.

      00:08:56 How do I start?

      The Experiment

      The experiment is simple: to sit in front of a mirror and watch my face for three hours. It’s a variation of an observation experiment I came across in The Power of Patience,¹ an essay about the pedagogical benefits of immersive attention by Jennifer L. Roberts, a professor of art history and architecture at Harvard. In her essay, Professor Roberts describes an assignment she gives her students each year: to go to a museum or gallery and spend three full hours observing a single work of art and making a detailed record of the observations, questions, and speculations that arise over that time. The three-hour assignment, she admits, is designed to feel excessively long. Painfully is the word she uses, asserting that anything less painful will not yield the benefits of the immersive attention that she seeks to teach. Paintings are time batteries, she writes, quoting art historian David Joselit. They are exorbitant stockpiles of temporal experience and information that can only be tapped and unpacked using the skills of slow processing and strategic patience—skills that our impatient world has caused to atrophy. She’s trying to help her students develop their stunted skill set so they will learn not simply to look at art, but to see it.

      My face is not a work of art. There is no reason for me to look at it other than to make sure there’s no spinach stuck between my teeth. I rarely put on makeup. My hair seems to take care of itself, more or less. But after reading Roberts’s article, it occurred to me that a face is a time battery, too, a stockpile of experience, and I began to wonder what my fifty-nine-year-old face might

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