Showing posts with label wabi-sabi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label wabi-sabi. Show all posts

Unfinished Finish

The non sequitur operates less like the lone tender shoot in a vase than a klang.

The struggle of the tree to overcome the relentless forces of the environment can be found in its every fibre. Its fight for life, staged over the centuries, is clear in the grains and the knots, in the branches that have striven to catch the energy from the sun and the roots that have sought food and stability in the soil. There are trees with gnarly barks and unique shapes that represent some of nature's most engaging sculptures, for they are the perfection of imperfection.
Andrew Juniper
Wabi Sabi: the Japanese Art of Impermanence

The "perfection of imperfection" phrase is a blight. A meaningless paradox (which is perhaps the source of its meaning).

perfection: etymology - from the Latin - to complete

As such the paradox rests at the terminus of the paragraph, an apt situation. However the completion theme is discordant because of the invocation of the cycle of nature prior to its concluding appearance:
The tree grows from a seed and will eventually, move the course of a few hundred years, reach the end of its life and then return to the soil where its decay will sustain other trees. The struggle of the tree [...]
Apotheosis of the aesthetic object doesn't quite work in this setting. Perfection and completion remain but way stations. Of interest, passing.

And so for day 2174
25.11.2012

Imperfections

Leonard Koren. "Exquisite Decay" Utne Reader Sept.-Oct. 2001. p. 52

All things are imperfect. Nothing that exists is without imperfections. When we look closely at things, we see the flaws. The sharp edge of a razor blade, when it is magnified, reveals pits, chips, and variegations, And as things begin to break down and approach the primordial state, they become even less perfect, more irregular, and perhaps more lovely.
Note the hesitation "perhaps more lovely." The passage about imperfection is sandwiched between "All things are impermanent" and "All things are incomplete." Transitory becoming. Beauty is passing but also returning. Maybe.

The excerpt published in the Utne Reader is taken from the book Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers.

And so for day 987
26.08.2009