Wabi-sabi - Finding Beauty in Humility and Imperfection

I wanted to make my little experimental re-entry into blog posts authentic by writing about my current immersions informed of course through my longer-term interests and investments . At this moment I am immersed in my running practice, and finding new ways to feel connected to the beauty the of world I am a part of. Currently Crispin Sartwell has been serving as a source of inspiration in this process. This post will draw on the 5th chapter of his  'Six Names of Beauty' which explores  beauty from the complex hard to translate  Japanese concept  wabi-sabi.

Wabi-Sabi - Humility, Imperfection

This is going to need some elaboration. Here is list of some of the terms Sartwell associates with the two aspects:

 Wabi -poverty, rough, humble, bare, imperfect, asymmetric. world affirming

Wabi as an aesthetic is a connection to the world in its imperfection, a way of seeing imperfection as itself embodying beauty (1)

Sabi - loneliness, solitude, stillness, meditative depression

Sabi is a quality of stillness and solitude, a melancholy that is one of the basic human responses to and sources of beauty. (2)

Thus, wabi-sabi is an aesthetic of poverty and loneliness, imperfection and austerity, affirmation and melancholy. Wabi-sabi is the beauty of the withered, weathered, tarnished, scarred, intimate, coarse, earthly, evanescent, tentative, ephemeral. As Leonard Koren says: “the closer things get to nonexistence, the more exquisite and evocative they become.” (3)

In the chapter the tradition of the Japanese tea ceremony is discussed in the context of a radical change in the tradition spurred by the reknown sixteenth century tea master Sen no Rikyu. The ceremony which had previously been practiced by the wealthy with the finest most expensive porcelain bowls came instead to be characterized by a spare, unadorned aesthetic. It's symbol would become the the Kizaemon tea bowl. Here is Sartwell quoting Japanese philosopher Soetsu Yanagi describing the Kizaemon:

The clay has been dug from the hill at the back of the house; the glaze was made with the ash from the hearth; the potter’s wheel was irregular…. The work had been fast; the turning was rough, done with dirty hands; the throwing slipshod; the glaze had run over the foot.” But, he adds, the Kizaemon tea bowl is plain, unagitated, uncalculated, harmless, straightforward, natural, innocent, humble, modest. “More than anything else,” writes Yanagi, “this pot is healthy. Made for a purpose. Made to do work.” (4)

Paradoxically the symbol of the ordinary would be honored so as to become priceless. The symbol was elevated for its lack of self-consciousness yet this abstract fixation would render the Kizaemon as an object of self-importance. Here is how Sartwell describes the dilemma:

Connoisseurs such as Rikyu and Yanagi long most for the quieting of self- consciousness, surely also the goal (or the goallessness) of Zen. But self- consciousness is at its most intense in persons of Yanagi’s stripe: an aesthete who continually submits his experiences to a canon of taste of his own articulation, and who regards himself as a repository of his culture. The self- consciousness of the aesthete is itself a form of pain or even disease: there is no release from the interior monologue that judges all things and thus sets one apart from all things. We might say of such people that they are tortured by taste. (5)

There is an adage from economics that also describes this curious yet pervasive process known as Goodhart's law:

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure (6)

In a broader context I see Goodhart's law in relation to social world as a mirror to how I see the law of thermodynamics (entropy ) acting in physical world; ubiquitous, all embracing, constantly eroding that which is coherent while simultaneously serving as its source. The law can be traced to 1975, but I would suggest the larger phenomenon - losing contact with the genuine through symbolic fixation - as that which the original Taoist philosophers aimed to correct.

Lucinda Williams -

Reading the section on wabi-sabi I immediately thought of the music of Lucinda Williams and specifically her later album 'Down There Where the Spirit Meets the Bone'. Although 'Six Names of Beauty' was written prior to 'Down There Where the Spirit Meets the Bone' Sartwell does mention her earlier album considered by many to be a masterpiece 'Car Wheels on a Gravel Road' as an example of wabi-sabi in reference to zen gravel gardens. By the time of this later album Williams voice is an embodiment of the gravel she previously sang about yet a stark beauty seeps out from the cracks in the pebbles.

 Compassion from 'Down There Where the Spirit Meets the Bone' - a poem written by her father

Nina Simone  -

No one could summon the sublime, meditative, melancholy, like Nina. Vulnerable, painful, yet life affirming beauty

Black is the Color of my True Love's Hair

Thelonious Monk -

Asymmetrical Beauty - Round Midnight

 The Enduring and Complex Beauty of a Tree

Trees are also a common object of beauty for Sartwell. There is a lovely discussion of the beauty of trees undressed of their leaves against a winter sky revealing an image of the underlying complexity laid bare. Also covered is the art of the Bonsai in which the medium of the art is life itself in microcosm:

A bonsai master shapes a tree with the utmost care, and, in fact, such a tree may be cultivated by generations of masters. And so it endures, though it also changes and grows at each moment of its existence. It is a living representation or capturing of life as well as an expression of the will to work with life and never against it, always moving with the “ki,” or flow of energy of the tree but also with the ideal of the master. (7)

 The Wabi-Sabi of Endurance Running

The concept of wabi-sabi is instructive to me as an aging endurance runner. In my first post in the series I painted a picture of what I hope to access in part through my running practice, and this picture imagined a convergence of what is true, good and beautiful. In my last post I described how beauty can emerge on a run, but the wabi-sabi concept better applies to the enduring process of the practice with all of its life constraining and life affirming realities.

As we have seen ( and heard ) the beauty of wabi-sabi resides partly in its simple, non-scheming, and unforced presentation of the real. Yet there is also a sense that hints at something deeper, something more complex lying behind the unadorned exterior that contributes much of the beauty. It is not that the wabi-sabi presentation intends to deceive, but instead that our conventional perceptive capacities are limited and superficially focused. One obvious way an endurance running practice fits this description lies in the way its physiological adaptations manifest. Compared to weight lifting for example the adaptations are to a large extent hidden. There is not much in the way of visible external enhancements, yet within the cardiovascular ( increased capillary density ) and central nervous ( hippocampal neuroplasticity ) systems new pathways and connections are among the adaptive creations. Even going down to the cellular level adaptions from running include more and higher quality mithochondria providing the power for a robust capacity to respond to world.

Power as a metaphor has far-reaching implications in western culture that are built upon a conception of humanity as separate from the natural environment. We define freedom in the sense of using our will to overcome the burdens that the natural world hurls our way. This idea of overcoming and controlling the world is in opposition to the concept of world affirmation I have been speaking to. If we are embedded in the world as part of the world we make ourselves the enemy by focusing our power on controlling it. This is power as force, power as coercion, and this explains our power symbols ( money, technology, big oil, militarism, bulky muscles, etc...). In my experience, I sense freedom not through forceful overcoming, but more often when I build capacities to accept the world as it is and work within it,  with and not against it.

What would it mean to embody 'the will to work with life and never against it', in the context of affirming and accepting without artifice what is true about the world.This is not an easy question to address. It might be easy to fall into the trap of Goodhart's law hypostatizing one side of the dilemma or the other. This could entail an affirmation of the will to endure, along with an unconscious denial of the inevitable physical decline. Such a move would not be world affirming, but instead creates a world separate from oneself and in need of overcoming. I see this this type of self affirmation as ultimately world denying. Running away from worldly truth is not a viable alternative, and an attempt to create your own truth purely out of will is sure to shorten the time one can experience the joys and benefits of endurance running. On the other hand affirming and accepting what is true in the world need not lead one to disengage from vigorous activity and become a couch potato. My plan is to adjust with the changes consistent with the way Lucinda Williams changed her music over time or with the way a deciduous tree adjusts to winter maintaining awareness of the beauty that I am embedded within.




1-5,7.  Sartwell, Crispin. Six Names of Beauty (pp. 83-89). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.

 6.        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law