Wabi-sabi, Ichi-go Ichi-e?

Wabi-sabi (侘寂), "One Time Only" (一期一会)?

1.

This is a text partly about an aesthetic both “not in the Japanese dictionary” and one said to be “tentative and ephemeral” (Koren: 2013): wabi-sabi (侘寂). It is said also to be of Zen (禅, contemplation) and so, the Tao (道, the way; of speech and beyond language); and harmony, wa (和); these too. In religion, and with the ki (気, the flow of life; chi), landscape is a place of event and itself a symbol which immanently locates the divine: Olympus, Jerusalem, Mecca; Mount Fuji (富士山, Fujisan). Zen can not be understood in words. It is furyu monji (不立文字, not expressed in words or writing), like Sufism (Arab. الصوفية‎, taṣawwuf) in Islam.

2.

In his essay, ‘What is wabi-sabi’, the architect, Tadao Ando (安藤忠雄, 2004) describes wabi-sabi like an “old memory” of the good old hometown, (懐かしい 故郷, natsukashī furusato) and notes the two words are a kind of word play, a dajare (駄洒落), like ping pong. Wabi-sabi is the essence of the tea ceremony, he says: the ritual, values, the choice of tea, the floral and visual decoration of the room, the qualities of the tea bowls, the utensils, the pertinent skills; the accompanying foods; the implicit social hierarchies and roles; these histories and techniques; the setting itself; and an austerity, a reverence for the antique; histories and customs. An austere joy. A tranquillity.

"To truly understand tea, you must also study poetry, art, literature, architecture, legacy, and history. Tea practitioners are accomplished in the arts of flowers, fine cuisine, and-perhaps most important-etiquette (sarei). And the four principles of tea — harmony (wa), respect (kei), purity (sei), and tranquillity (jaku) - could of course be the means to any good life." — Ando (ibid.).

Wa ( 和 , harmony) is also a word for Japan. Like much here, it's complex; and precise semantics are slippery. — I spent 90 days in Japan, from September to December 2001, mostly in Okayama (on Honshu, midway between Osaka and Hiroshima).

3.

Our investigation is to do with an aisthesia and a respect for and sensitivity to the idea of property, capital, and of ideological behaviours: mono no aware (物の哀れ), a pathos in the impermanence of things; mottainai (勿体無い): everything has value, is 'sacred'; 'waste nothing'. Japan has the lowest crime rates in the industrialised world and criminological trends almost consistently opposite those of the West, (Leonardsen: 2013). Millie Creighton (1992, 40-56) writes about how the Japanese depāto (デパート, department store) modifies behaviour across society and is both an aesthetic and social reinforcement. (One can take this further, and I have my own independent observations; in being brief, however), Tsutomi (2013) identifies strong patriarchal social and community values here, the daikokubashira (大黒柱), literally "the central pillar", the (corporate) father figure, the support to the household, the family and community; with a counterpart in the amae (甘え), a mother-child relationship, of indulgence, a childlike desire to be loved, (Doi: 1985, xv); in business: a shared loyalty and trust, (Genzenberger: 1994, 195). There are additional distinctions (aggregates), of interior feelings and desires, honne (本音), motive; and exterior, personal conduct and self-presentation, tatemae (建前), what is shown, (Doi: 1985, 25-42). Similarly: giri (義理), self-sacrifice, obligation, loyalty; and ninjo (人情), sympathy, empathy, friendship with others, (Russell: 1995, 116-118). Conceptual personae? An overview to the idea of "face"? These dualisms?

4.

For someone delivering service in Japanese, which encodes social relations using formal linguistic registers in spoken speech, on completion of service that person delivers both thanks and humility for being of use, (ありがとうございます, arigatōgozaimasu); keigo (敬語), polite language. Ando says wabi-sabi is not a visual aesthetic but a state of mind: a complex of sensory experience and pleasure, taste and eye, ear and touch. A scroll of calligraphy on a wall is a visual work, the kakemono (掛物, a hanging calligraphic wall ornament), a shodō (書道, a writing). Something phenomenonological? Let's try also to remember the simplicity of the room, this imaginary room; wabi-sabi in its ceremony: the bare tatami mats, the low tables; the placement and ritual of display. Neuroaesthetic? Rhizomatic?

'[M]aking everything the same is easy; letting everything be itself, with other things, is hard.’ — Attributed to Mark Weiser, Xerox PARC, (Galloway: 2007, 155).

These concepts opposite have parallels in a modern Scandinavian notion of Da. Janteloven — The Law of (the town of) Jante — another term, like wabi-sabi, also not really translatable: all the same, humility is a key. In the light of Nazi history, the German term, G. Volksgemeinschaft, of shared communal values — can not really be said to be correspond, today, either. (Nor the G. Sehnsucht, an inconsolable desire for meaning, with wabi-sabi). — But these are (Northern) European notions of community also engendered with the aisthesia we are discussing.

5.

I visited the Standard Festival on Naoshima in 2001, (直島, Naoshima), 'gentle natured island', named after the rustic values noted by the deposed Emperor Sutoku (崇徳天皇, 1119-1164) of the people and landscape there, (Setouchi: 2013). Ando (安藤忠雄) has 7 'buildings' now on the island's south and the Benesse Art Foundation and the Seto Inland Sea cultural project is drawing increasing attention, (Williams: 2011). Here, his Chichu Art Museum (2004), (地中美術館, Chichū Bijutsukan, — 地中, chichū, underground) is constructed inside a hill. The broader intention agreed in 1985 with the island mayor and the late Tetsuhiko Fukutake (福武徹彦) who established the present Benesse Holdings, Inc. (and so, the foundation) is to create a place for contemplation and culture in a natural landscape, part of a national park, and encompassing existing historical buildings with contemporary art. (The Museum famously accommodates a small boutique hotel allowing guests private access to its collection). Among the villages, buildings otherwise disused (partly through urban flight and a corresponding “deindustrialisation”) are repurposed to cultural functions, as at the Standard. Not so much “art village” or “museum and collection” but something of a distinctive hospitality?

'Our vision has been to create a physically and mentally rejuvenating haven where you may find yourself musing on the true meaning of "living well" (which is what the word Benesse was coined to mean), and at the same time, a place where art is not experienced by studying set attitudes but appreciated on your own terms, as another opportunity to ponder living well.' — (Fukutake: 2013, online)

‘Now, the term 'art' might be starting to describe that space in society for experimentation, questioning and discovery that religion, science and philosophy have occupied sporadically in former times. It has become an active space rather than one of passive observation. Therefore the institutions to foster it have to be part-community centre, part-laboratory and part-academy, with less need for the established showroom function.’ — Charles Esche, 2001. Quoted in (Doherty: 2004).

6.

To supply some further background to our subject, a little more grounding, the poet Bashō (Matsuo Bashō, 芭蕉松尾), 1644 – 1694, a teacher, lived a secluded life, solitary, a wabizumai (侘住い), a life of Zen and poetry, dreary; literally "humble home"; wabishii (侘しい, lonely, without comfort). Oppositely, an aristocrat, Tadeko Jōō, (武野 紹鴎), 1502-1555, was the first proponent of wabi (侘, humble), also a rhetorical, literary expression of 'apology', as an aesthetic of the tea ceremony. The austere style practiced by Jōō (紹鴎) and his student and successor, Sen no Rikyū (千利休), 1522 - 1591, is known as wabi-cha (侘茶 — cha is tea). So, the humility has an edge, and Jōō's sensibility is also one of a poet. Sen (1998, 146) notes pre-Edo (before 1603 and shogunate rule from Tokyo), the term wabi-suki (侘数寄) describes a 'primitive' (bucolic) style, — suki (数寄), an artistic inclination, taste, refinement; preference; (also, archaic, tools); of Southern Kyoto. — Sabi (寂) is a patina, antique appearance. There is a further concept (and contradiction) to add in this, the ma (間), the interval, the pause, a space, intuition, (personality), the betweenness; time, (Odin: 1996, 59): the Deleuzian "becoming-". And this tea ceremony, a kind of “art performance” (Koren: 2013, note 1) is said to encompass and originate our aesthetic: from mountain-styled huts (pavilions) in (private) urban gardens, accessed down landscaped paths, those codes of hospitality; what Koren says is part of an “aesthetic realism”.

7.

Patrick Lafcadio Hearn (1897, 49-51), 1850 – 1904, aka Koizumi Yakumo (小泉 八雲), writes of the beauty in the palace gardens of Kyoto, how — “a thousand years”, Hearn says, — nature itself in its ageing magnifies the original plans, augments the original. Karesansui (枯山水) / zen niwa (禅庭) are Zen gardens, by definition places of retreat and peace; contemplation. There is a seasonality to that. And we are trying to trace an aesthetic, wabi-sabi, which is both ancient and preserved with the modern. Something also pastoral. It is of imperfection, the inbetweenness, a suspension of completion, a ricorso, the ma (間). A reiteration of Zen and those values encoded? A shinbutsu-shūgō (神仏習合), a combination of Shinto (神道, Shin-Tao, an animism; the way of the spirits) and Zen? The Past in the Present? And a matrix (Ettinger: 2006) in that strict definition, — L., a womb, a place of nurture? The art of the imperfect(able) is said to be the idea. Like Malraux's anti-aesthetics (Lyotard: 1999)? An antiphilosophy, (Groys: 2012)? One need not be a connoisseur? It is an aisthesia which takes place across Bergson's ineffable, unutterable time (1946, 159-162); part social reification and display, part “transcendental (a priori) field”, (Deleuze: 2001, 25-33).

The Tokonoma ( 床之間 ) is a (domestic) wall recess allowing a hanging scroll and an antique object; originally also for religious statuary. Frank Lloyd Wright adopted this feature (Nute: 2000, 77; notes 41,42). For some, this recessed space is where wabi-sabi objects are displayed, (assemblages).

The symbol for ki ( 気 , the flow of life, chi) is of the breath in cold air above a bowl of rice.

At the principal shrine, “house of relicts”, in Shinto, to Amaterasu at Ise, two buildings, the Gekū ( 外宮 , Outer Shrine) and Naikū ( 内宮 , Inner Shrine) are rebuilt every twenty years, (in 2013 for the 62nd time), in timber, each time to original specification.

For Hardt and Negri (2000, 411), the production of the posse‚ of the multitude, the people, is what must be reappropriated through militant self-organised self-valorization.

8.

Let's note the Latin and the Greek: L. bella, (beautiful, well); Gr. κάλλος, (kallos, beautiful, good), Gr. όμορφος, (omorphos, beautiful, with shape). And the Confucian concepts of Ren (C. 仁, Humanity) and Yi (C. 義, Righteousness, Justice). In Greek, ‘perfection’, ‘perfectness’ (perfectus, Latin: per, through / completed; facere, to do) is from another linguistic root, Gr. τελειοτης, teleiotēs, of having come to an end, achieved an end. And in Greek, (it is an unusual word), there is also a religious concept inherent: of absolute moral and intellectual attainment. Zen is of the Buddha and the Tao (道). These are religious and philosophical ideologies. Zen is concerned with the impermanence of things, with inconstancy, enlightenment. The Tao is concerned with fundamental truth, beyond language. (In Islamic art, artists make intentional mistakes because only God is perfect). So, this question, what is wabi-sabi? It must capture a spiritual essence? Map the Dharma? Nirvana? The Skandhas? Language speaks? I said before, I have made my own observations.

9.

And? The schizoanalysis? Of course this must needs be, this text, a sketch of ideologies but we have made some purchase on the aesthetic, one said to be indescribable. Discussing dissident Soviet practices of the exchange of ideas as an example of art engaging service, play, action and gift, Ekaterina Degot (2011) notes an art of resistance distinct from Western materialist practices: that art need not be an object. This could be said to be what is happening here, an approach which rhymes with recent political notions of “soft power” and debates on ownership in post-industrial and digital cultures; how these rearticulate museological relationships and roles, the “epistemological turn”, (Watermeyer: 2012). But what can you do? Wabi-sabi is a matrix of aesthetics, history and culture; politics. Artisanal and ritualistic. An ascetic, adjunct wealth. You can see it in the bare brick and distressed venetian plaster walls of trendy restaurants and bars, in fashion boutiques, in any city in the world. It is not only Japanese. The “stripped-back” look, the 'functional'; sanded floors; a less-is-more approach to display. Something of a Moroccan riad (Arab. رياض‎, lit. a garden), of an old museum and a collection, what these encompass. The “Authentic” as a kind of conceptual bricolage. An assemblage. Public and private. Slightly distressed, a little wear and tear. Flawed and perfect. Original. Haptic. Readymade. A minimalism. Shipshape. And like the nagajuban (長襦袢, a removable lining for traditional clothes), capable of being more detailed and complex and of finer quality than any exterior might reveal. Zen (禅). So, we got somewhere, (with no talk about Arte Povera, Buddhist temples or Ronin). Honto, (本当, really).

'… art based on non-alienated, nonprofessional, free activity and dialectical wholeness, rather than on the making of “art pieces,” calls not just for different forms. It also calls for different discourses and criteria. If we truly want to resist rather than just create the pieces of resistance—the mere signs of resistance—we must reconsider our own cognitive and rhetorical apparatus.' — (Degot: ibid.)

J. 達磨 da'ma; Skt. धर्म), Dharma. — The Nature of things.

J. 涅槃 nehan; Skt. निर्वाण, Nirvāṇa.— Peace through liberation from the psychological and physiological.

J. 五蘊 , go'un; Skt. स्कन्ध, Skandha. — Human personality as aggregate instances of experience.

“What would critique do if it could be associated with more, not with less, with multiplication, not subtraction.” —(Latour: 2004, 248)..

In Sufism, the Arab. فناء ‎ fanā is a form of rapture taking form beyond language.

“There is therefore a critique of language in the form of bricolage, and it has even been possible to say that bricolage is the critical language itself.” — (Derrida: 1978, 285)

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