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tags:wabi-sabiphilosophy
Wabi-sabi might not be to everyone’s liking, but it is worthwhile to oppose.
Related to many more “emphatic anti-aesthetics that invariably spring from the young, modern, creative soul: beat, punk, grunge or whatever it’s called next.”
Wabi-sabi is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent and incomplete.
It is a beauty of things modest and humble.
It is a beauty of things unconventional.
“Fostering the myth of inscrutability for aesthetic reasons. Wabi Sabi needs to remain mysterious and elusive - hard to define - qualities because ineffability is part of the specialness. It is another aspect of its inherent “incompleteness”.
It is a type of beauty, but can also be a way of life. “Rustic” represents a limited view of the aesthetic. Sabi originally meant “chill” “lean” or “withered.” Wabi meant “misery of living alone from society”. 14th century saw a turn to more positive aesthetic value - self imposed isolation and voluntary poverty became considered opportunities for spiritual richness.
Comparison to modernism (absolute, universal solutions, faith in progress, romanticize technology, people adapting to machines) vs (relative, personal idiosyncratic solutions, one of a kind-variable, present oriented, romanticize nature, organic forms - soft edges vague shapes.)
Further comparison modernism to wabi-sabi - box vs bowl, manmade vs natural, needs to be maintained vs accommodates to degradation and attrition, solicited reduction of sensory info vs solicits expansion of sensory info, light and bright vs dark and dim, everlasting vs to every thing there is a season.
Spiritual Values - Truth comes from observation of nature. Beauty can be coaxed out of ugliness. Greatness exists in the inconspicuous and overlooked details. Things are devolving toward, or evolving from, nothingness.
Material Qualities - the suggestion of natural process, irregular, intimate, unpretentious, earthy, murky, simple.
“And nothingness itself - instead of being empty space, as in the west - is alive with possibility.
As dusk approaches in the hinterlands, a traveler ponders shelter for the night. He notices tall rushes growing everywhere, so he bundles an armful together as they stand in the field, and knots them at the top. Preso, a living grass hut. The next morning, before embarking on another’s day journey, he unknots the rushes and presto, the hut de-constructs, disappears and becomes largely indistinguishable from the larger field of rushes once again. The original wilderness seems to be restored, but minute traces of the shelter remain. A slight twist or bend of the reed here and there. There is also the memory of the hut in the mind of the traveled - and of the reader reading the description. Wabi-sabi, in its purest, most idealized form, is precisely about these delicate traces, this faint evidence, at the borders of nothingness.
Wabi-Sabi is about the minor and the hidden, the tentative and ephemeral: things so subtle and evanescent they are invisible to vulgar eyes. As dose decreases, the effect becomes more potent, more profound. The closer things get to nonexistence, the more exquisite and evocative they become. Consequently, to experience W-S you have to slow down, be patient and look closely.
Mud, paper and bamboo have more W-S qualities than gold, silver and diamonds.
How do you exercise restraint that simplicity requires without crossing over to ostentatious austerity/ How do you pay attention to details without being overly fussy? How do you achieve simplicity without inviting boredom.It must be arrived at by a sober, modest, heartfelt intelligence. It doesn’t mean diminishing something’s “interestingness” the quality that compels us to look something over and over, again.
At the end of the wabi era all tea drinkers would have to crawl through a small opening to the room, a humbling effect in contrast to previous standing entrances. Things were recycled, old bowls that were cracked were repurposed. It fell out of fashion, returning to the conservative, courtly, ritualized version of tea (tea being akin to golf meetings). In W-S imitation was discouraged.
Wabi-Sabi is the aesthetic other. It is a bulwark against sameness, a differentiation from the conventional prevailing aesthetic.
Finding some bits of papa in here. Plants on a the red painted rocking chair spelling out Julie. The chicken and rice, each time subtly different.
Wabi-sabi’s appeal from some creators in as a counterpoint to ongoing pervasive digitalization of reality. The author says “the modern project” is ontologically incompatible with W-S. When either the will of the maker, the machinery or the power fails, digital reality ceases to be. Wabi-Sabi cannot exist in a dimension that requires the application of effort to be, or is subject to the machinery and an external power source.
Metaphorically W-S is a spectrum of grays. Everything digital must be encoded in 1s and 0s, but it is between 1s and 0s that W-S mostly exists.
W-S exists in actualness. In a program composed of pixels there will always be a point where actual-ness dissolves and all that is left is pixels.
Inherent finiteness is a problem along with sensorial deficiency.