Wabi Sabi, the aesthetic of decay

Globalisation and industrialisation can be understood to unfold in two diametrically opposite ways (as with any politic)--their proponents view them as ways to produce things more "efficiently" and bridge cultures, while opponents view them as mechanisms of ecological and cultural homogenisation, mechanisms of disregard for people and place. What cannot be denied, though, is that mass production of anything leads to a uniformity of outcome. Assembly lines strive to make the same exact car, and forks and spoons and jeans and computers are all made to be the same. On the other hand, you have the Japanese aesthetic of Wabi Sabi, so wonderfully described by John Flowers, a philosophy graduate student at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, at the Building Bridges conference on philosophy and waste. Just as I did yesterday, I would like to quote some passages from John's paper first.

Whereas the western potter would see the cracked, imperfect pot as a wasted effort, a Japanese potter, enmeshed in the aesthetic of wabi would have little qualms with the display of this vase as an epitome of his aesthetic craft. That is, wabi, as an aesthetic, seeks to find and represent the beautiful in those things that are imperfect, withered, or even damaged by the passing of time. Wabi then seeks the beautiful not in the perfect symmetry prized by western ideals of beauty, but in the asymmetry and irregular structure evidenced in the natural world that surrounds us: it is an ideal that elevates imperfection, as representative of impermanence, or mujou in the Zen Buddhist lexicon, to the highest levels of beauty and thus finds the beauty in those things whose form has long since deteriorated.

Thus, wabi, as an aesthetic, takes objects ravaged by time or imperfect in their creation, and finds within them a conspicuous beauty that surpasses the material. More than that, wabi takes objects which, under other aesthetics, would be discarded for their worn or irreparably damaged appearance and elevates them to a position of high art: it re-values decay and forces the connoisseur of art to re-evaluate their perspective on beauty itself...In the modern sense, wabi is often paired with sabi, which is a qualitative principle of feeling that refers to the specific quality of the emotions of the artist or the perceiver that arise in response to imagery.

...in the Shinto conception, those things which most accurately reflect the natural order, that is constant flux, are the most valued. In this sense, a cracked and faded porcelain vase, an iron kettle rusted from use or a sword whose chipped edge shows its age are considered the highest forms of art. It is through the contemplation of these objects, that the appreciator of sabi art begins to sense the ebb and flow of nature...

...under wabi, beauty can never fade: it only grow deeper with the passing of time and the accretion of subtle qualities of impermanence that serve to deepen the beauty of the object by reminding us, through the feeling of sabi, of the evanescence of all life, that we should savor each moment as it comes, rather than longing for it to last forever.

Therefore the "imperfect" tea cup, the changing landscape of a garden, and the sculptures constantly affected by weather are all wabi art. Their beauty is in their ever-changing uniqueness. (Images taken from Kevin Taylor's commentary on John Flower's paper.)

I find these thoughts to be extremely fascinating, for several reasons. I have written many times about the appreciation of place and time that is so essential if we are to make any meaningful attempts at sustainability and combating ecological degradation. I believe that the arguments for an such an appreciation of art and object can easily be translated to our surroundings, our most mundane possessions. If we appreciate what we have, we will not want more. If we do not want more, we refuse to tolerate harm being done to the Earth and its people in the name of production, industrialisation, and materialism.

 

(Nick, Farid, Cara, David and I made our own wabi sabi art. =))

Why do we choose not to be surrounded by beauty?

Ralph Williams, in his last lecture at the University, spoke of beauty. He said that something is beautiful when two conditions are met - 1) you never want that thing to die (or go away), and 2) you want to tell other people about it. "Look at this flower!" "Look at that tree of a thousand colours!" You want your bed to be made of them, and you want to be showered in that beauty. But how many of us would say that the structures we construct for bodies and our minds, and the places we choose to spend our lives in are beautiful? If you take a drive along any highway or thoroughfare, especially in the US, the roads are engulfed by objects of humanity that are truly not beautiful - box stores and strip malls, flashy neon lights and billboards, and advertisements for personal injury lawyers with cheesy pick up lines of sorts. These objects are square, drab, plastic and ungraceful. Indeed, these structures are built for our "convenience." These structures are not constructed for our appreciation and pleasure. Just take a look at the buildings on North Campus, or the hallway of GG Brown.

 
How many of us would say that the trash we create is beautiful? Would I want to show people the trash I was responsible for? No! That's why we enclose the trash in containers that are opaque. We want our trash to die (or go away). If you look at a pile of trash, or a wrapper torn to reveal the granola bar inside, would anyone say that the wrapper is beautiful? The contrast between this wrapper resting on dewy grass with a crunchy leaf bearing witness could not be more stark.

Is this Styrofoam container with Panda Express inside of it beautiful?

 

What about this plastic bag? 

 

We must remember that the landscapes we inhabit were not square and full of plastic before they were bulldozed and modified. These tracts were beautiful and vast, and lives were lived here, in beauty. I don't think anyone could describe anything that happens or exists in nature as ugly. Indeed, something may be devoid of life and barren, but maybe lonely or uncompromising would be adjectives we would use. Do we have to give up beauty to live in today's world? Our understanding of what it means to exist in this world and our observations of it are defined by what we create as people, rather than what is defined by nature. And for all of our efforts to replicate nature, we will never come close to making anything physical as beautiful as a prairie or a tree. If we did want to incorporate more beauty in the objects and spaces we create, how would that affect the things we choose to throw away, like trash?


Here are some words from Lia Purpura's piece, There Are Things Awry Here, from Orion.

"The flags are frozen. They're fifty feet high but don't move in wind and they carry no sentiment, like "these we hoist high over our small town/farm/ranch to keep alive spirit, memory, fervor..." The flags have names: Ryan's, Outback, Hooters, IHOP, Waffle House. Wal-Mart on a far - I'd like to say hill but that's out of the question, the hill's been dozed, subdued into rise."

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What was here, that a body moved through it?

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Back in my room I can't shake the sensation (despite my dandelion in a plastic cup, curtains wide open, basket of apples to naturalize things). A strangeness, an insistence is hovering. The strangeness makes me say aloud to myself - something had to be here, something had been.

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Real land is never sad in its vastness, lost in its solitude. Left alone, cycles dress and undress it, chill-and-warm so it peaks, hardens, slides, swells. Real land hosts - voles, foxes, cicadas. Fires, moss, thunder. Rolls or gets steep. Sinks,sops, and sprouts. But this land didn't read. It babbled the way useless things babble - fuzzy bees with felt smiles, bejeweled and baubley occasional plaques, ConGRADulation mugs/frames/figurines. Capped, crusted, contained, so laden with stuff - how can it breathe?

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Here, near the Cobb, is the land where Mac wrote, in Fins and Feathers, a little piece called "Our London":

I remember the sun setting over the last rugged corner of Britain in a blaze of crimson magnificence, that we saw when the ship sailed in August. I remember seeing the lights of Toronto start to blink from a small island on Lake Ontario. But best of all—I remember London.

Though I am many thousands of miles away, I see her constantly, not as she stands now, bruised and battered, but as she was when I spent my adolescent initiation within her walls; and I am sorry that I was not able to appreciate her then as I do now. For in those days, Regent Street just signified to me the roads that led from Piccadilly Circus to Oxford Street. Charing Cross was just a station that served my purpose in going south. The same applied to Fleet Street, Cheapside and Soho, and a host of other fine places . . .

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I knew in this vacancy something asserted. Something strange—that is, real—and insistent was here. The land didn’t mean to be torn and tar covered, wasn’t meant to sprout stock farmers, farm women, and ranchers. The land asked to be considered, and seriously. The land wanted to speak—past the bunkers of rolled insulation, past the earth-eating backhoes and yellow concoction my farmer (okay, working stiff, bare hands in the poison, then wiping his nose) force-fed the grass. Here, the land must have been green by the runways. Some of the big trees still here must have seen it. Yes, it must’ve been lush once, before hotels started turf wars along Marriott/Hilton lines, and thick vines choked the trees, and the tractors came and the hot blacktop poured, so the SKUs of Big K—hundreds of thousands—might take root and flourish.  

Experiencing beauty, and the trash borne of it

Trash is borne out of, and is a byproduct of, our desire to control what we experience. Humans are the only animal species I can think of that want to control what happens to them. We build our homes such that air conditioning will keep the air temperature at 70 degrees Fahrenheit year round, we set our alarms to wake us up at predetermined times, and we cook food to our tastes. One consequence of this is that we've lost our abilities to cope with situations we were able to cope with in the past - living off of what we find, for example. But our ability to control what we experience has also led us to places where humans cannot survive, and yet are incredibly beautiful places - the depths of oceans, space, and the peaks of mountains. These places instill in us a sense of wonder and amazement, but to a degree only if someone knows about it, experiences it, and shares the experience. I didn't know about Bahamian blue holes until I read about them, but once I realised what they were, I thought they were beautiful, and it would be a wonderful experience to see them in person. Unfortunately, the only way we can control what we experience is to have something, a man-made product with us. Furthermore, these products, once they have served their purposes, become excess baggage on our voyages. What we do in the end is taint these pristine environments with our presence by leaving behind what is essentially trash.

For example, we have turned Mount Everest into the world's highest garbage dump. There are more than 100 tons of trash lying on Mount Everest. "The government of Nepal has taken steps toward protecting Mt. Everest. Thanks to a 1992 law, if climbers leave any nonbiodegradable trash such as plastic containers on the mountain, they lose a $4,000 pre-expedition deposit. A Sherpa incentive program, instituted in 1994, pays Sherpas for every discarded oxygen bottle they retrieve from the mountain. Glass bottles were banned on Everest in 1998."

But also think about the Clif bar you take on your trip into the woods, or the canister of propane you carry to make some soup while camping, or the band-aid you keep just in case you cut yourself rock-climbing. In our quest to observe beauty, we taint it.