Honestly Ruined (Taking Pleasure In Entropy & Wabi-Sabi)
Honestly Ruined (Taking Pleasure In Entropy & Wabi-Sabi)
DAILY ENLIGHTENMENT PROMPT
Crumbling-Concrete-by-Sea:
rust eats metal, time eats flesh-
honestly ruined.
I won't lie. I don’t mind a clean, neatly ordered city, where everything is curated to create an optimal, pleasurable human experience. It’s normal to like convenience and beauty, all animals appreciate moments of minimal survival input. As an ongoing, day-to-day lifestyle, I’m not so sure. It’s important to ask why the environment is so well crafted. What is the intention? If it’s for economic purposes, for instance in a tourist setting, then it’s managed to make visitors feel comfortable so that they will part with their money. If it’s for its own sake, like a Zen Buddhist garden or a sacred site where there is an effort to reflect a divine or inner state, then maybe it’s okay, but if it’s part of a culture of mental rigidity, where rules have to be absolutely followed for the greater good, then that’s problematic too. I suspect that the rule is: the more strict a culture is in regulating the rules and habits of its people and environment, the more strange and warped the behind-the-scenes collective shadow is.
The reality is that we exist in a material world that is constantly breaking down, getting dirty, worn out and that an extraordinary amount of effort is required to counteract this natural progression. After a certain age, the human body and mind go the same way.
My own preference is for places that are slightly, honestly ruined. A place with beautiful art and architecture where the residents haven't quite managed to keep time and entropy at bay. It's a statement of truth, an acknowledgment of living with time instead of living in denial of it.
I emigrated to Australia with my parents as a very young boy in the 70s and in my first year in primary school my parents separated for a short time.
On one of the scheduled weekends with my father, he took me to a ruined building in the inner city (this was long before all of the modern development and the housing crises that Australia faces now). The place had once been a squash court and we played some handball and he tried to teach me how to hit a squash ball. It was a Sunday, the city was empty. There was no noise, no interruption and for the first time in my life I felt that entire world outside that place had somehow been frozen in time and that my dad and I had all the time in the world to play and talk and figure the world out.
I like to think that it was my first taste of honest entropy. There was a rightness to the cracked walls of the squash court, the peeling paint and the feeling of its inevitable destruction.
Later in life I learned about the Japanese principle of wabi-sabi.
In traditional Japanese aesthetics, wabi-sabi (侘び寂び) is a world view centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection. The aesthetic is sometimes described as one of appreciating beauty that is "imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete" in nature. It is prevalent in many forms of Japanese art.
Just now I searched on the internet for photos to help illustrate wabi-sabi and found an influx of hygge-wabi sabi fusion images. Hygge (pronounced hyoo-guh) is the idea of cozy living in a cold environment and not the same as wabi-sabi at all.
It's not the same as minimalism or simplicity either. The beauty of an ageing body is wabi-sabi. A rusted children’s swing. An old car, unrestored, with faded paint.
Wabi-sabi is a composite of two interrelated aesthetic concepts, wabi (侘) and sabi (寂). According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, wabi may be translated as "subdued, austere beauty," while sabi means "rustic patina." Wabi-sabi is derived from the Buddhist teaching of the three marks of existence (三法印, sanbōin), specifically impermanence (無常, mujō), suffering (苦, ku) and emptiness or absence of self-nature (空, kū).
Characteristics of wabi-sabi aesthetics and principles include asymmetry, roughness, simplicity, economy, austerity, modesty, intimacy, and the appreciation of both natural objects and the forces of nature.
In Japanese architecture you can build-in wabi-sabi. Knowing that varnish will wear and paint will fade, you can select timbers and paints that will create a worn patina that is considered beautiful and desirable. Or allow moss or plants to grow into a stone wall, to allow nature’s transience to have a voice in human construction.
I see these same Buddhist ideas of accepting impermanence and suffering and an absence of forcing the environment in old European villages. Maintenance in accordance with time, no hurry to fix everything immediately, but also no sloth that would allow the village to crumble. As long as there are people living vibrantly within the village, it will survive with dignity.
In our own lives we can keep a balance with our immediate environment. An immaculate house is good but not if it comes at the expense of human contact, rest and meditation. Better a healthy body-mind and a slightly worn, lived-in house. Remember to work with entropy, not against it because ultimately, we can’t win. We’re only marking time on earth, keeping the seats warm for the next generation. Balance is everything.
Bonus Images: Wabi-sabi
