Winter aesthetics

Sadness and sorrow are universal, but cultures express themselves in different ways. Some cultures observe death and passing with formality, impassivity, steeliness, others wail and cry loudly, with weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Japanese aesthetics hones precise tools for better articulating these emotions. “Mono no aware” bids us to an evocation of sadness and sorrow in a refined consciousness of impermanence and transience. This places sorrow and passing within a lifelong continuum. The phrase “mono no aware” means,literally, “the poignancy of things.” It attaches beauty to the object at the very moment of its dissipation, its loss. The sentiment perfectly captures the nature of the object or being, the nature of what is happening or becoming, in time. Importantly, mono no aware intends primarily to engage the deep participation of the onlooker.

While this sentiment is comprehensive, we can apply more specifics. Wabi captures the uniqueness of the object, eliciting a striking poignancy that presents the object as solitary, unique, not reproducible, and therefore never to be seen again. Sabi completes this sense in confirming the physical appearance of the object or being, such that the natural condition of it confirms its very impermanence, a feedback to wabi, and both together expressing the condition that evokes poignancy.

Together, or presented together, wabi and wabi define the physical parameters of an object, exhausting characteristics, tactile features, dimension, and the like. But of itself, these enumerations do not equal beauty. That is a third element, shibumi, which arises from the physical as well as the environmental context, the discovery, encounter, or unfolding of the object that stirs poignancy. Beauty stirs poignancy, not the beauty of the onlooker’s subjectivity but the beauty of nature as expressed by the totality of the object and its context. The observer may have to work to discern shibumi, for shibumi assumes a mind already disposed to quiet and silence, arrested now by an unfolding or beholding that an insensitive person will miss completely. The notion of the onlooker feeling like the artist or creator of this object, setting, or scene before them is the beginning of an aesthetic identification that can blossom into a spiritual experience.

The sense of beauty is not merely based on the pleasure derived from considering the object. In the West, aesthetics points to beauty, but evokes a different sense of poignancy, perhaps not poignancy at all but often begrudging resentment, covetousness, or arousal that stirs desire mistaken as identification. What matters in this ignorant scheme is the self. What matters is that the object satisfies the subjective criteria that the onlooker has created, often an acquisitive reaction, closed to nature.

Winter is deep. Snow is thick on the ground.The poignancy of things may be illustrated in an example:

Black-capped chickadees are simple little birds, small, charming, short-lived. They do not migrate but stay the winter, however frigid. Now they are busy pursuing winter paces. Having discovered sunflower seeds in two yard feeders, the chickadees fly back and forth, even on the coldest mornings. Here the beauty is to be identified in the simple appearance of the black, white, and gray little birds, in their dogged flights and feedings, in the persistence of their valiant work under great adversity, their ignorance of or indifference to fate, in the shortness of their beautiful lives.

Another reference to birds can be mentioned here. It is aural, not tactile, not visual: the Zen-like poem of the late poet-singer Leonard Cohen titled “Listen to the Hummingbird.” Here are the lyrics:

Listen to the hummingbird
Whose wings you cannot see.
Listen to the hummingbird
Don’t listen to me.

Listen to the butterfly
Whose days but number three.
Listen to the butterfly
Don’t listen to me.

Listen to the mind of God
Which doesn’t need to be.
Listen to the mind of God
Don’t listen to me.

Listen to the hummingbird
Whose wings you cannot see.
Listen to the hummingbird
Don’t listen to me.

The poignancy expressed in the poem rests in the silence of the hummingbird, the silence of the butterfly, and the silence of the mind of God. It is to the silence of each that the poet directs us, not to the sound, the song, the noise, not to the obtrusiveness of his own words, song, or outpouring. The poignancy is deepened by the fact that the singer knows that these are, essentially, his last words, his final expression. We are bidden to not listen to the poet but turn directly to the experience of the objects, which means to the poignancy of the things.