michele hau

The narrator, a portrait artist, finds before him a client with no face in Murakami's Killing Commendatore. This is described matter of factly, "where the face should have been, there was nothing, just the slow whirl of a fog". The night before our photoshoot I may have dreamed myself to be the same. She couldn't see us. We kept missing each other. Dizzy, then the dream was over: a sweet blue blanket of blankness. The morning sun peaked questions into awareness: Are you what others see? How does it feel to be known? Are the lightness of his eyes universally true? The narrator is a professional face reader, just like our photographer Grace Ann.

I read On Photography one day sitting by a cloudy window at the University of Victoria library. Sontag's meditations on photos are piercing, critical, and lucent. Then, I was alone with the orca whales miles away from anywhere and found comfort in the viciousness of decolonial theory. Today, I felt reminded by her essays for their observations. Distilled quietly Sontag notes "to take a photograph is to participate in another person's morality, vulnerability, and mutability". To take a picture is to also have an interest in things as they are, "to be in complicity with whatever makes a subject interesting, worth photographing". The photographer shoots in relation to inevitability, her particular way of seeing, and in tension with the truth of her objects.

Never before had I thought seriously about being the object of portrayal in a photoshoot. Being perceived opens a naked wound of being misrepresented. How typical is the experience of sifting through piles of photos, each a vivisecting papercut confirmation of the ugliness of your own insecurity, assailability, mortality. It's a scary place to be: lost in your own stuffy world, the terror of being unknowably alone and unrecognized, a nobody.

I put on my shoes. The table was adjusted once more, books were placed and shooting started. It was an uncanny 80 degree April afternoon. Daniel and I are directed to hold hands and smile across the table. Our ring is framed, and his fingers graciously cover my unpainted nails. Grace Ann moves quietly around us, shooting at different angles. She says to laugh and smile. I tell Daniel a compliment from a dear friend, inviting a curious and tender look. We smile at each other, trying to act normal and in conversation. She's listening too — I know, and am also trying to lose track of her as she shutters around us like a butterfly looking for the perfect flower to land on. I follow the cues, look left, tilt down, kiss, smile smile smile.

* * * * *

Grace Ann and Daniel move the trash bin and random buckets in the corner to recompose the scene. "It's easier to do this than photoshop". I sense she's someone who would rather touch the world with her hands. It's her first time here, and yet she's a regular. She moves fluidly and comfortably, finding pockets of potential and testing them out. I admire how she steps into the right place at the right moment and anticipates something unfolding. When it doesn't materialize, she pivots onto the next idea swiftly, editing in real time.

Grace Ann positions us in pockets of light and shadow. Banalities are massaged into open potentialities. The angle of a staircase, the busy yellow of a conic rowhome, a glimpse through a window, the street crossing. What is she searching for? What can't I see that she can? She tells us to kiss and leaves us there. Her body is here and her mind is somewhere else I don't have access to. It's particularly intense and enchanting to witness.

Being a subject is uncomfortable. My father followed me around with his camcorder my whole life, my mom tagging behind him pointing out the grooves in my tiny pliant body. Daniel is unsettled by the perception that reveals itself through my shabby photography — the soft image of himself triggers a recoil. It's all too self-effacing. Anxiety magnifies when we're photographed together. In his depths, he wrestles with what it looks like to be a good partner. In mine, I shallowly dodge opportunities to be critiqued. We both wonder: how do you bring into existence a feeling of who we are, when it's intangible and inscrutable to us too?

Beauty shines haphazardly. Daily, moments unfold both ordinary and extraordinary and this is nothing special, the zen koan¹ invites us to accept. A perfectly balanced pyramid of beer cans outside of the baseball stadium. A happy birthday balloon dodging pearly clouds drifting sideways into the atmosphere. A tap on the shoulder to get you to notice. A crack of a whip. In Sally Rooney's Beautiful World Where Are You — Eileen relays to her best friend Alice the mystery of how she felt once:

"Walking around, even on a bad day, I would see things — I mean just the things that were in front of me. People's faces, the weather, traffic. The smell of petrol from the garage, the feeling of being rained on, completely ordinary things. And in that way even the bad days were good, because I felt them and remembered feeling them. There was something delicate about living like that — like I was an instrument and the world touched me and reverberated inside me."

Independently, on our separate paths we graduated from our schools, got jobs, met someone nice, showed up on holidays and dutifully accepted extra responsibilities as assigned. Over seven years we realize together that we shouldn't do it all. Our ability to tap into the equanimity of the world comes and goes, and when it visits we hear each other with clear eyes. A good day in our book is as follows: it's a silver Sunday morning, we wake up fully rested with no obligations, find our way to the farmers market, buy 4 pounds of peaches and stretch out on a table outside at this coffee shop, chirping with the birds. We try to recreate the feeling of ease for the camera.

I smile and keep following her prompts. The day's humidity catches up to me and in a moment of rest, a bee of doubt zips by — are we doing the right thing here? The voice of doubt, a familiar rumble, magnified on the way to the wedding reminds me of the tectonic plates we're standing on. Nothing about being a bride and dressing in white is natural to me. The attention and expectations of being flawless are at once flattering and laughably insurmountable. The process puts me against my own capacity for joy — do you deserve this happiness? With the aid of his phone camera, I put on a playful veil. Yes? Yes. Of course I do. We smile for real now.

The momentum carries a bounce from shot to shot and the first two legs of our shoot wrap quickly and furiously. As Grace Ann loads a camera into her backpack — I appreciate how our earnest request to portray a truth, the essence of Daniel and I, is both nearly impossible and also completely ordinary. "Creative work requires a loyalty as complete as the loyalty of water to the force of gravity" Mary Oliver writes. The fortitude of her effort reveals itself through her endurance. We receive it and try our best to keep up — surrendering ourselves to her skill of perception. We're late on arrival for the next setting, a relief for me because it means we're doing something more important than keeping time on the clock.

* * * *

Money, as a tool of life, makes everything the same. It places a value relative to another and it levels out essential differences. In truth, love refuses to accept in totality the compulsive need to determine the market value of everything, because it is not a simple pact of practical coexistence between two individuals reduced to objects. Daniel and I lie in the bed we make, our relationship is a mosaic of what we dream about.

A common refrain: it's just one day. People often tell me how much weddings cost, that they are expensive, exorbitant, and outrageous. "Really, you can use that money and buy a big house or pay off all your debt." I agree, and yet an unsettled kind of market cynicism to make all practical, invariable, and smooth underpins these comments — the purpose of money is to hoard it and spend it on things that are ultimately acceptable, practical and utilitarian. Marriage too, is a kind of smoothing.²

After our apartment building burned and our things were spared, Daniel and I asked ourselves what the point of limitless maintenance of wealth is if it can be arbitrarily destroyed. It's a double bind that is particularly modern: in an era of unprecedented consumer choice and opportunities for individuation, the ocean of fluff is so homogeneous that all that could be interesting and unique melts into sameness.³

I wonder about the couples she meets on the job, and what those openings look like in comparison to ours. They deal with navigating the same kinds of tensions: preserving themselves in the sea of the same and resisting the psychic headwinds that force relationships to collapse. In my bag is a copy of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." the first line reads. It is true and infamous for a reason.

Comedically, Daniel and I learn through pain and many strange conversations⁴ that weddings are both expensive and a site of adoration and resentment. They are charged with both fanaticism and hatred, tears of joy and fists of envy. Ruptures that ooze magma of wholeness and separateness, dependence and independence, expectations and disappointments, trust and apprehension of the unknown.

Grace Ann is a lovely companion because she is utterly independent and entirely engaged. In a dull moment crossing the street, she asks us if we're having fun, as if to say I am having fun! Me too. We chose her to be our photographer over others not because of her skill but her devotion to the curiosity that lurches her forward. When she speaks about her work and what excites her, it sounds like pop rocks, diet coke, and jazz.

Like good writing, a good wedding is not an objective truth, but a subjective web of affective attachments, lights flickering on and off within a disjointed minefield of enjoyment and disgust. A question to consider: How is it so the same event can mean so many things to so many people? It's a trick mirror that brings me back to the comfort of the smooth and agreeable.

Except these are extraordinary times and I feel more than ever a commitment to jagged lines. I sit there for a while.

* * * *

Daniel and I are from the same country but come from different ways of seeing the world. We like each other partially because we are radically different from each other. We scream at each other too for the same reasons. The desire to crush the other's differences, to make them subservient, to delete them and force them to play out your way is as natural as water carving its way through rock.⁵

As a daughter and a son, we wrestle with what Jung notes as the unique burden of the child — the "unlived life of its parents". During our wedding process, desires find space to be made explicit — unleashed and justified through shifty murmurs, daggered compliments, and outright confrontation.

Over a winter night's hot pot at my parent's house we chew quietly until it's time to discuss what we came to: the wedding. Both my parents come from relatively conservative Vietnamese households. For their wedding, my grandmas' orchestrated the happenings of the day in what I can only guess was a chaotically beautiful concert with two conductors. My parents find themselves in similar roles, clashing between themselves to determine the right course of action for the gods, and what can be left to a modern interpretation. From the date, to the dress, to the ceremony and the meal, the wedding is traditionally an homage to the family, the village. We must include family, friends of elders, family friends, their children, estranged relationships in Vietnam, and coworkers. In other words, the event is for the other, not us.

I worry how not to disrespect and dishonor while thinking about how to manage the lack of space for the new tables, the villagers that must be included, the ancestors that demand to be acknowledged. In doing so, my own desire pushes through the stress of compromising it. Akin to a beach ball held underwater for too long, it slips out violently and catatonically. We should really have a celebration that feels like us.

We run into similar problems with Daniel's family. The strenuous dance of etiquette, playing polite and reverent to those who don't blink to discard us gets old quickly. We learn through our bruises that continuing to be boundaryless and bend to the will of others meant abdicating a selves that refused to be recognized anyway.

Rituals in one way or another, change over time, as people do. Traditionally in Vietnam, there is no ceremony of walking down the aisle, but rather a tea ceremony in the bride's family home where the groom and his family present themselves with dramatic gifts, ask for the bride, and the families share union over tea. The new couple serves tea and bows to their elders, endowing importance, piety, and respect. In reciprocity, the elders share advice and wisdom down to the newlyweds.

We preserve the spirit of the tea ceremony during our wedding day, but the force of time, logistics, and who we are constrain us to staying in the city. My mom is disturbed deeply by the removal of the bride's family home as the setting, perhaps squandering a second chance to relive a day that slipped from her. She holds back her anger, only to release it when we visit the venue space.

She asks "So you will serve tea here?" I nod. She shakes her head reproachfully and walks away.

Later on the phone she broaches the topic again, proposing that we scrap the ceremony altogether. I try to reassure her that it'll be okay and all of the core elements will remain the same.

A screaming moment of silence to convey she'd rather not have the ceremony be mutilated.

The tension breaks and she spits back: "You're American. You do what you want to". She's trying her best and being real with me. I have no good retort against tradition and family. Angst, shame and vindication swirl, and I hope we're making the right decision.

"You're right" I reply to her.

* * * * *

In Florence, Daniel and I decided to climb up the 463 stairs to the top of the Duomo. On the journey up, a son fluttered up the stairs with lightness and ease as his father puffed in heavy agony behind him. The father was diligent about taking pictures of his son at every creepy door, and unshy about praising his radiant son through the lens. I overhear the father mentioning something that makes me think he is divorced. I wonder where these photos will go and potentially how horrific they may look, if he needs the photograph to serve as a pretext to speak kindly and admiringly towards his son.

Once we reach the top and the view of peachy terracotta Florence emerges in front of us, I feel like I want to stay here for a long time. Daniel attunes to the magnificent slowness of Italian life and releases his grippy new york clench as if he was born 800 years ago during the renaissance.

80 degrees in April, the DC humidity drips and the sun peeks out from the clouds. Tulips are in bloom and stretch out to us. As we move through locations I notice Grace Ann scanning. I glimpse a small window of ourselves through hers and it opens my heart. It's been a particularly vapid and soul crushing three month period in my life, brought on by a third world president and aggrieved voters, arbitrary powers beyond my control. Five of seven days a week, I'm under fluorescent lights — a professional clicky clacky desk monkey. Color returns and so does resonance.

Once Daniel and I decided that we loved each other the summer we met, a doomsday clock loomed over our heads until I had to leave DC. He insisted on taking photos of us everywhere we went. I didn't appreciate this because I was not convinced I was as cute as he thought I was. It was strange considering he was generally shy about his emotions and bashfully resisted my attempts to be photographed. Skeptical, I wondered where would these photos go anyway? To his boys group chat? To his mom?

At the top of the Duomo, we quietly admire the views of this ancient city. I scan for opportunities to avoid my fear of heights. He listens to the languages all around us. I see a woman that looks like she's from the 80s or 90s. She's with her husband, who refuses to take a picture with her. He, an old man that looks like he could be someone's dad I used to love, looks especially leggy and from God's country, as if he knows how to both skin a squirrel and harvest ripe cherries.

She asks and asks again. And again and once more.

Eventually after tug and pull he takes a selfie with her. Then his horns peak out and he growls he'll delete it later.

Then and now, I worry about the performance of photos, the capacity to distract and destroy — a deflection against life itself. The woman certainly manipulates her husband to take a photo with her, he hides his contempt on the phone screen. The son, alive and in the action of climbing, ricochets his attention from his father's capturing lens. The rare photos of my parents and family in Vietnam show them as regal, stately, and strong looking in spite of the calamity of the war and loss shattering their childhoods.

Near the bathroom at the Duomo, an art exhibit by Lucia Baldini captures photos of tourists on their phones, oblivious to the eternal and majestic beauty of the cathedral they attempt to capture. The description characterizes two types of tourists:

"As in a dream, women and men stand or walk singly within the ancient and noble architecture… In their secluded journeys, they rediscover the specificities of their souls, along with freedom of thought, finally released from the conditioning that flattens and renders uniform.

"And a stone's throw away, others who have supinely submitted to the market's admonitions crowd in, without even seeing, entrusting to external electronic memories what the heart itself once knew how to preserve."

The exhibit is airily metaphysical and functionally passive aggressive. We laugh at its covert placement near the bathroom. How does the heart deepen and become attuned to the quiet musings of the soul in our fleshy, exhausted vessels? And also too, how ordinary is it to walk away from the quieting — to use a technology to capture and seize the memory, to own it? Are performance and authenticity two sides of the same coin?

Before our photoshoot with Grace Ann, we struggled to figure out how to communicate a vision without overriding trust in hers. We resisted being clients plugging in inputs and expecting a particular copy-paste output of a fantasy come to life, an image money can buy.

Instead, we let her in on feelings and ideas we hoped to capture. These were all negotiable, and in the process of refining what we wanted from what we didn't, we became more clear as a group what we would like to do. It's a simple plan, one that will be thrown out in the momentum of the encounter if we align ourselves right.

The last night before I left DC we planned a grand date but never got out of my apartment, instead swimming in the stagnant lake of mutual tears. We were leaving each other. I sent him off with a letter and a sad book and tried to reassure him and myself that we would be ok. He presented me with a leather bound photo book of photos of us from the last four weeks.

Oh so that's what this was for.

Daniel had been stretching his comfort zone to recognize and archive what we were building together.

As I flipped through the pages, I could see more clearly how adoringly he saw me, and for a moment or two, I felt that way towards myself too: worthy. We were in pain and happy together.

* * * *

Around 4pm, we didn't expect there to be such a line for gelato, but of course there is. On our first date, it was inconveniently buzzy too. We're here to take fun photos of this gelato shop that is a part of our story. We're also here to make a new memory with her, to laugh and let her in on who we are — to let cones melt together on a hot day. At the corner of my eye I spot the small patch of sidewalk where Daniel proposed. It's a place where we left no physical mark, just an emotional gong that breaks us into a sharp sad happy mush.

As a matter of fact, it is just one day. I'm sympathetic to the cacophony of it all. My parents have to navigate the fantasy of a Vietnamese wedding that can't exist for their American daughter and her North Carolina fiancée — a betrayal of their way of living. Daniel's parents are more easygoing, but have to wrestle with the reality that the symbols of their son's wedding day are anchored by a culture completely foreign to them instead of their own. Daniel has the task of becoming a bridge between the two worlds, maintaining the roles of a good son to both families, and also the warrior bridegroom to connect us all together. We're all uncomfortable and are confronted with the edges of our experiences in the face of the other.

In writing, critique is encouraged as an activity to sift through fantasy. What is only imagined and therefore false can be unmasked for the achievement of a deeper truth. So the truth might be this: when we clash, we have converging fantasies about what matters the most. These desires are not isolated from the world around us, but are deeply intertwined with our relationships and realities we live in. So it follows that desire is the desire of the other.

We don't do as much in our encounter as to reshape, redirect, and redistribute what's already there. The fulfillment of fantasy is not for the other to give, even if this were possible. So, the results of just one day will contain the shadow too of what couldn't be.

In a particularly benign and unsuspecting light after a nasty negotiation of our needs and their wants Daniel and I look at each other exhausted and he utters the words "they care to know us well enough".

In art and in life, decisions are to be made — the cutting away of some options and approvals to expose the grandness and alignment of others. The day begins to take shape and form. I hope those kernels can be kneaded into genuine sustenance, and in our case, a sincere offering to our new life of commitment, vow, and wholeness.⁶

At our fourth and last location, I feel pleased that our choice of museum is not a jail for austere paintings but rather an unserious playpen for us. Grace Ann, Daniel and I eavesdrop on the diligent chaperones' attempt to herd middle schoolers into attentiveness, snapping photos in the chaos. In front of the electronic superhighway, we all take in the visual overwhelm and magnetically varied ways of being in American life.

She shoots around us and plops us in front of a piece that resembles broken red blood cells scattered in a bloodstream. Behind her, a docent dressed in black looms. She rapid fires flash despite the obnoxious signs prohibiting it. A bolt of courage in an attempt to reach for the most beautiful takes over. The aggressive challenge to the rules dawns on me. Wow. Bold. She wants to get kicked out. We do, eventually and happily, but not after we get what we want, running away with Zeus' lightning bolt in hand.

* * * *

"Cézanne sees a tree. He sees it in a way no one else has ever seen it. He experiences, as he no doubt would have said, being grasped by the tree…

The painting that emerges from this encounter between a human being, Cézanne, and an objective reality, the tree, is literally new, unique and original. Something is born, comes into being, something that did not exist before — which is as good a definition of creativity as we can get."

We're asked to understand our lives in such impossibly convoluted and impenetrable conditions, to live with each other, and if we're lucky to survive, celebrate our differences. Creativity is the process through which we encounter and form our understanding of the world: how to make sense out of nonsense, meaning out of chaos, coherence out of conflict. Rolo May in Courage to Create suggests Art is not merely just decor or "frosting on the cake of life, but the fountainhead of human experience". The taste of an apple is neither in the apple itself, nor the mouth of the eater — it requires a contact between them.⁸ Relationship, encounter, and the process of seeing is contained in every work that springs and sings.

We began our wedding planning with a goal in mind: to celebrate and honor our relationship. A wedding is a ritual and a creative act: "Beauty saves me from myself".⁹ We struggle through the process to discover who we are by revealing what we are not. We learn how to be witness to others and in turn we witness pieces of ourselves.

The day was drawing to a close, and my face began to hurt from sincere smiling: evidence of an afternoon well spent. When the shoot started, I instantly regretted not hugging Grace Ann. Maybe I felt like we didn't know each other: a shy little girl hiding from the lens again.

Later, we walked around as kids, finding playgrounds to play in and rocks to kick around. By evening though, the mystery and anxiety of the artifacts produced pricked me. What really, had we been doing all day anyway?

Her job is to capture photos, and what is a photo but a piece of evidence too. I wonder if my hair looks ok. Daniel, finally almost relaxed, shakes his head dismissively side to side when I ask him "what do you think the photos will look like?". He wants a break from giving me shade in the spotlight.

Affronted and seized up by the man with no face, Murakami's narrator is unfortunately plagued with anxiety. "I had no idea where to begin, or how to get started. There was only a void, and how are you supposed to give form to something that does not exist?" The portraitist runs out of time, and the man disappears. The face is not seen. The encounter between them collapses under pressure and neither of them, the artist or the man with no face, are able to come to conversation and encounter themselves through the other.

When we part ways, Grace Ann gives us both hugs and I give her an extra one as she grabs her things. She leaves and moments later I chase her to give her a parting gift, we hug again and swap smiles. Photos are objects of memories. The memory behind the photo will be of an encounter and a day spent together. The photos will show an interpretation of that. Something happened today I think? I wish.

I text my friends that I think the shoot broke my brain permanently. They laugh, support and kindly listen to my shuffled retelling, bouncing sounds that pose as words — pieces of adrift sea glass to be found lost ashore later. It's hard to tell if the experience is a catalyst or a keepsake of who we are becoming. Maybe nothing special happened today. And too, a genuine encounter.

Later, the photos come and we are silent. I sense my pupils both dilating and wanting to look away.

I can say without exaggeration that I have never really seen us completely as that — as a particular, blooming, radiant, dynamically vivid couple until I had seen and absorbed Grace Ann's interpretation of it. There's a kind of goodness portrayed that is dynamic and undeniable. Holy shit. We whisper loudly.

When I rest in that fault line there are little words to say. An edge was found and a new universe clicked open. A false door of perception has been punched through and I'm lost and found.

I'm overwhelmed by a rootlessness and disorientation by the possibility of new meaning, the weight of an emerging perspective not present before. Daniel, despite his bashfulness, beams a smile of relief and elation.

When we see the world through her eyes, can it really look like that? Who are they?

Beauty reflects the quality of expression of the artist's vision and encounter with reality. To be seen, recognized and translated by the other into a whole and then confront that vision is simply reality shattering and healing: transformative. Like Cézanne's trees, every artifact is unique, original. Her sensitivity and tenderness shows. Grace Ann sees in a way unique to her experience. A light that generates photoluminescence, a spark that catches fire and burns autonomously. We celebrate the offering for the truth it inspires, the circuit of beauty that reveals a depth we hadn't known.

A numinous work possesses a quality that is alive and with a vitality of its own. Saved by the other, we continue to be in conversation.