Wabi-Sabi
By John Thursday • Dec 7th, 2009 • Category: Erotic Philosophy by John Thursday, FeaturesI’ve been reading a wonderful book called “Wabi-Sabi: For Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers”, by Leonard Koren. Wabi-sabi is a Japanese phrase that is, as often happens, completely undefinable.
It is a phrase that denotes a certain design aesthetic: natural, understated, raw, flawed, like a piece of driftwood on the beach. It also refers to a way of life, appreciating the overlooked, being unpretentious, valuing the imperfection in all things, like continuing to wear a darned sweater.
But for my purposes today I would like to talk about the metaphysical basis of Wabi-sabi. The author puts it this way.
“Everything is either devolving towards, or evolving from, nothingness.”
In this world view the universe is in constant motion. We are either moving toward nothingness or away from it. Put another way, we are either moving towards potential or away from it.
When I read this it struck a chord. Our sexual lives are very Wabi-sabi.
An orgasm is rather like nothingness. It is all encompassing. When you are there it is impossible to do anything, to think anything. All that exists is the orgasm. In being total it also equates to nothing.
There is no world. There is no partner. There is barely even a you. In that moment there is just the orgasm: just force, and life, and emptiness.
And we find ourselves either moving towards the orgasm or away from it, either toward this nothingness or away from it.
When I was young I used to wish I could live in a state of orgasm. That’s why I spent most of the hours of my young life trying to get back to it. And back to it. And back to it. But life is actually lived in the flow moving either towards it or away from it.
We move towards our sexual encounter. We anticipate it. We imagine what it will be like. We prepare ourselves. We kiss and hug and caress and bite. We move slow. We move fast. You bang your knee on the bed frame. You try and roll her on top but her arm gets stuck beneath you.
Then it’s over. You’ve past through the nothingness and are on the other side. Your mind is clear. Your body slack. Colors are bright. You feel tenderness. You feel cold. You wonder what you will do that’s not sex.
My brother says that in the five minutes post orgasm a man can solve all the world’s problems.
It is difficult to try and remember an orgasm. There is a sense of the rush, the burst, the…what would you call it? But try and recall the lead up, or the time after, it is that flow that is the stuff of life.
The most Wabi-sabi moment is not the orgasm. That would evoke a sense of completion, a moment of perfection. The goal is attained. But in Wabi-sabi there is no concept of completion. There is simply moving towards or away.
The essence of Wabi-sabi is found on either side of the orgasm. It is found in the moments of subsiding and inception.
The subsiding moment in sex is the moment when you tip over the edge. It’s that moment when you know you are going to have an orgasm, you’ve tipped, but you haven’t come yet. You are on the precipice of returning to nothingness. An inflection point, as my friend LeVan might say.
The inception moment in sex is when your orgasm is done. The shuddering is over. You take your first conscious breath, another inflection point. You are returning from nothingness.
When we are young we fail to understand this and so we rush to orgasm –again – and again. All the while rushing through these moments.
When we are older, if we are lucky, we come to appreciate them. We rock back and forth, approaching the moment of subsiding over and again. When we have finished we relish the moment of inception. Life flows back into us and we are amazingly aware of evolving away from the nothingness. Anything is possible.
The orgasm itself, the nothingness, it is alive. Without the context of the orgasm we could never know the subsiding towards it or the inception from it. Without the nothingness of orgasm we could never know the beauty of Wabi-sabi.
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and yet, what if wabi sabi is less about orgasm, pre- or post-, and more about the half-hard penis in its state of transit from rest to insistence; and the dilating iris of incipient excitement; the imperfectly shaved pubis mons; the curve of a slightly slack belly.
http://www.peterboersma.com/images/wabi-sabi-as-ux-design-approach-for-web20.gif
the perfection of imperfection, the moments not of insight but of striving and wiping sweat off a determined brow. Once there was a girl with mousy brown hair, hazel eyes and legs more stumpy than statuesque. yet her freckles were of the perfect size and shape and pattern. her skin was part raw silk and part velvet. And there were moments when that was exactly right in its glorious ordinariness.