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March 26, 2003Tremble before the power of wabi...
I learned a new word this evening, and I’m anxious to share it with others. While new words are always exciting, I’m especially jazzed about today’s word because it’s the term for a definition that I’d already admired and with which I’d empathized, but had no easy label with which to cart it around. It’s as if somebody affixed a sturdy handle to a favorite briefcase which, up until now, I’d had to lug around with both arms.
“What’s the damn word, already?” you’re probably shouting.
The word is wabi (rhymes with “Bobby”), a Japanese term for the flawed detail—or the presence of the flawed detail—that creates a more elegant whole by its presence. I’ve been intrigued by this concept ever since I heard about the Persian rug-makers who, believing that only Allah’s efforts should/could end in perfection, would deliberately add a mistake to their wares. Personally, I don’t think that wabi has to be a mistake made at the moment of the object’s creation; the unavoidable ravages of time will suffice just as well. If you think that something is cooler for having been previously owned, that it has more personality for having been around the block a few times, then you, too, are a proponent of wabi. I would apply the concept of wabi to people, also. Why else would anybody find beauty in a well-placed birthmark, or feel like a certain old person’s face tells a particularly evocative story?
I bought a wooden mask recently from a thrift store that specializes in the sort of vintage items one wouldn’t necessarily spot down at the local Goodwill. It’s asymmetrical, the victim of a few minor injuries, and quite obviously handcrafted—the Guatemalan artist carved his name onto the back. This thing is just dripping with wabi. I appreciate its imperfections and idiosyncrasies. It wouldn’t be nearly so neat if it were perfectly symmetrical, mint condition, and mass-produced.
In honor of wabi, I'm going to end this journal entry with an incomplete
Posted by patrick at March 26, 2003 12:38 AM
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