Last April, I ran into a neighbour on the street. This was not a person I knew well, just someone I used to see from my window, walking masked around the neighbourhood during that first locked-down winter of the pandemic. But by spring 2021, the dangers seemed to be subsiding. People in our Massachusetts town were vaccinated and venturing outside unmasked, happy to stop and chat with anyone. It was a beautiful morning; the sunlight remaking the world so that everything looked a bit too bright and clear, as if racked into sudden and unsettling focus. And there was something unsettling about my neighbour, too. We were laughing and swapping lockdown stories, enjoying the in-person, face-to-face communion, when suddenly it struck me that it had been over a year since I’d seen a mouth belonging to someone other than my husband operating at close range. As mouths go, this one was quite ordinary, and a year earlier, I wouldn’t have given it a second thought. But masking had defamiliarised mouths, turning them into something strange. This mouth was so brazenly red, its lips rubbery and wet. Inside it, I could see teeth, gums, even a tongue, and all these parts were moving. The mouth did not look like it should belong to the man’s face; it was a body part, an orifice too intimate to be on display. I couldn’t stop staring. The pandemic has changed our experience of faces – our own faces and others’ – in radical and subtle ways. Masks disrupt what psychologists call holistic processing, our ability to see a face as an integrated, harmonious whole. Instead, we experience the face as fragments, whose meaning and value have been altered by politics and public health. In a subway or an airport, a naked nose poking out over a mask is not only a potentially lethal threat of viral contagion, but also a powerful signifier of social attitude and political stance. That nose tells me everything I need to know about its owner, and when it comes near me, I mutter darkly and move away. As a film-maker turned novelist, I have been studying faces professionally for almost four decades. People-watching is part of the job description, and when I teach, it’s a skill I ask my students to practise. I look for distinctive features and facial tics, for signs of harmony and disharmony, and all the stories that a face can reveal. And I’ve subjected my own face to this kind of scrutiny, too. A year or so before my 60th birthday, I accepted a commission to write “a memoir of my face” as part of a series launched by Restless Books. The project seemed interesting, and so I said yes, but when I sat down to write, I was horrified by what I’d agreed to. I can’t possibly write 10,000 words about my face! My face is not interesting. I don’t like looking at it, I don’t like thinking about it. I have nothing to say. This project is stupid. Narcissistic. Masochistic. Solipsistic. An exercise in vanity, not for me … It’s not that I don’t like my face. I have a fine face, perfectly serviceable. But after a certain age (was it 40? 50?) my face ceased to interest me the way it had when I was younger, when I was still getting to know myself. My face was new then, and I needed to keep an eye on it to see who I was becoming. But as I approached 60, my face was growing older, and the process of becoming had lost much of its appeal. My face was no longer something I wanted to dwell on. Time passed. The deadline for the essay came and went and I couldn’t procrastinate any longer. I had to confront the problem, and I realised then that, as a longtime meditator and Zen Buddhist priest, I actually knew how. I set up a mirror in front of my meditation cushion and sat down. For the next three hours, I stared at my face, watching it disassemble into parts as my holistic processing failed, and this was the point. I wanted to objectify and defamiliarise my face. I needed to see it differently in order to write about it. When you repeat a word over and over, the word becomes unfamiliar and loses its meaning, a psychological effect called semantic satiation, and this is what happened to my face. But this loss of meaning yielded new meaning as well, and as my usual perception shifted, I started to notice things: the ghost of my grandfather in my cheekbones; my mother’s irony in my smile. In my father’s high forehead was the scar from a long-forgotten sledding accident, and in my tired eyes was his face when he died. As these observations arose, I recorded them on a time log, and made notes of all the memories and associations they evoked. I have never looked at faces the same way since. Two years into the pandemic, we’re all engaged in a similar defamiliarisation experiment with our faces. Masked, we’ve all suffered a disruption of holistic processing, experiencing faces as disparate elements, seeing vacancies where moving parts should be. And this has been taxing. Let’s return to mouths for an example. Mouths do so much of the work of a face, but when we’re masked, other features have to work harder. When I’m speaking to someone with my mask on, I can feel my eyes straining to compensate. They widen, or narrow, or crinkle at the corners, trying to accomplish what my mouth could do so easily with a smile. My ears struggle, too. I have some minor hearing loss, and I hadn’t realised how much I rely on lip-reading until we started wearing masks. In the classroom, some of my colleagues wear a brand of surgical mask called The Communicator, which has a small window of clear plastic over the mouth that reveals the lips. Their students like them because they can tell if their professor is smiling or not, but they refuse to wear them themselves, and I can see why. The plastic window is creepy, like a peep show for the lips. And then there’s Zoom, a technology of disembodiment. In the beginning, I quite liked Zoom. Sure, it disfigures and dismembers us, flattens our faces and severs our heads from our bodies, but I often prefer being just a head. I prefer being two dimensional. Performing the self is so much simpler this way. Bodies are cumbersome and hard to control, and in the three-dimensional world, anyone can, just by looking, see all sides of you, without your permission. But on Zoom, I am just my face, neatly and safely contained within a frame of my choosing, and as long as my frontal plane looks OK, I don’t have to worry about the rest of me. If I have to yawn or pick my teeth, I can turn my camera off. I can disappear. And for more formal functions like interviews or book tour events, I can touch up my appearance with a soft-focus filter, like virtual Vaseline. The three-dimensional real world doesn’t offer convenient features like this, and I’ve become so used to them, I’m startled when I catch sight of my face, unfiltered. When we pivoted to working remotely, I was fascinated by people’s backgrounds and what these backgrounds revealed. A novelist is like a data-mining algorithm, and I quickly learned to keep my face attentive as I scrolled through the participants’ screens, studying the living room decor, the cluttered kitchens, the messy bedrooms, and the pets, of course. Doesn’t everyone do this? My university students, banished from campus, were back in their parents’ homes, logging on from their childhood bedrooms. Remembering myself at their age, the sight of the high school trophies on the shelves, the posters on the walls, the stuffed animals and dirty laundry piled on the unmade beds saddened me. Even more heartbreaking were the careful rooms: the bed neatly made, the tidy row of painstakingly curated books on the shelf, the plant placed just-so inside the frame. They reminded me of me, and it’s painful when one’s efforts are so evident. Of course, I feel this way because however much I might aspire to casual indifference, when I set up my Zoom station, I made an effort, too. I can’t help it. I used to art-direct low-budget horror films, and I know how important set dressing is. Shooting a talking head against a flat surface makes a person look trapped – literally backed up against a wall – so I chose an area of my office with some depth of field, and no windows in the background (which would cause problems with backlighting). I dressed the side wall with a large framed photograph of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s yellow umbrellas, a “statement piece” to add interest and colour. On the table at the far end of the room I placed two antique globes and random-seeming stacks of books, making sure my boxed collections of One Story (an independent literary magazine) were clearly visible. On the desk next to me, just inside the frame, were some more artfully disarrayed books, whose titles could be seen (ones I was recommending and wanted to promote). I bought a ring light to clip behind my computer, and a second lamp to create some fill. I positioned the computer so that the webcam was in line with the top of my head and tilting slightly downwards (a high angle flatters any face). Framing is critical, as is proximity to the camera. A face should occupy at least two-thirds of the frame. Sitting too far from the camera, or leaving too much headroom, makes a face look small, compressed and insignificant. A face has to work hard to penetrate layers of glass, silicon and liquid crystal, to translate itself into pixelated data, surf the radio waves, and squeeze through fibre-optic cable, in order to project itself into another’s presence. I lean into the screen. My eyes strain to meet my interlocutor’s gaze, but there is no way to make eye contact across this uncanny valley. If I tilt my head up to look directly into the webcam, they can look into my eyes, but I can’t see their face. I can see mine, though, boxed in the upper right-hand corner of my screen, and I try to keep from glancing up at it. (My psychotherapist does this, and it bothers me. Her eyes flick upwards, and then reflexively she fixes her hair. Should I say something?) I sit on my hands and try not to gesticulate, because on a small screen too much movement is distracting. I hold my body as still as I can, and my face freezes into an expression that is bright, tight, upbeat, and sunny. I am performing attention, and I feel like a morning talkshow host, which is somewhat alienating at first, but after several months, it starts to feel natural. I teach classes. I do interviews. I “go” on book tour. In Christchurch, New Zealand, I attend a literary festival, and I’m enjoying myself now. The large conference hall is filled with rows of socially distanced dining tables, where in-person guests are seated, drinking cocktails and nibbling appetisers. The lights are dimmed. At the foot of each table is a large, vertical video screen, where normally a host would sit. Instead, my enormous face is projected there, bodiless, like the Face of Boe (the humungous, wrinkly talking head, sealed in a jar, from Doctor Who), only more so. The Face of Boe is still an individual, whereas I am now an array. There are dozens of me, in rows, floating above our chairs in the darkened room. My interviewer asks questions, and all my enormous faces reply in unison. We laugh, we raise our glasses, we chat with our guests, while I sit alone in front of my laptop, under my ring light, in my room in Massachusetts. Virtual reality is normal now. I put on my magic Zoom sweater, turn on my computer, and I’m in Tokyo, or London, or Washington DC, or all of these places, simultaneously, live or pre-recorded, in real time or posted for posterity. My face now transcends place and time. It has staying power. Its present moment is eternal and this is no big deal. To borrow from Walter Benjamin, this is the face in the age of mechanical (or is it viral?) reproduction. In his essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Benjamin writes about aura, and how, when a work of art becomes a reproducible commodity, it loses this aura, along with its authenticity and authority. What it gains, instead, is a democratic ubiquity, an ability to reach and be owned and critiqued by the masses. Politically, Benjamin suggests, this may not be a bad fate, for a society or for an objet d’art. But my face is not a work of art. While it enjoys connection, it never asked for ubiquity. It never wanted to be an object or a commodity, made up of parts. It was never meant to be an array. It likes being integrated, place-specific, and located in its own moment in time. It doesn’t even mind getting old, because old age has its own aura, authority and authenticity. In short, my face is tired of feeling alienated from itself. It wants its subjectivity back, and this is a problem, but, thankfully, it’s one I know how to confront. In Kamakura, Japan, there is a Rinzai Zen nunnery called Tōkeiji, founded in 1285 by an aristocratic samurai woman named Shido. Tōkeiji was famous as a sanctuary and place of refuge for women, and in the meditation hall, the nuns practised zazen in front of an enormous bronze mirror. There, each nun contemplated her reflected face, until she could see beyond her face, beyond her reflection, beyond the mirror itself, and directly experience her original nature. In this hall of mirrors that is our socially mediated pandemic world, mirror zen seems like something we’re being forced to do whether we are aware of it or not. The challenge is not to get stuck on the surfaces or fooled by the reflections. The challenge is to go beyond, so I make another effort. Taking a deep breath, I shut off my camera and close my eyes, and instead of performing attention outwardly, I turn my attention inward. Little by little, I reconstruct my face, but from the inside: directing awareness to my forehead, my temples, my eyes; becoming conscious, from the inside, of my cheeks, my jaw, my mouth. Breathing and softening all the little muscles, until my face finally relaxes, rests, and rejoins my body, and I start to feel somewhat whole again. Timecode of a Face by Ruth Ozeki is published by Canongate on 24 March at £9.99. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy for £8.36 at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.