Howard Rheingold has written of how, in Japanese culture, the presence of the flaw intensifies the depth of an object’s beauty. The crack in a vase might be prized as a beautiful signature-moment in which the spirit of the emerging object and the humane heartfulness of the artist criss-crossed. The presence of the flaw personalizes and deepens the beauty and character of a thing. The Japanese have a special word to describe this: ‘wabi’. Indeed, this personalization of time as beauty also finds expression in the word ‘shibui’, the beauty of ageing. Rather than being a fall away from beauty, ageing can be the revelation of beauty, the time when the inherent radiance becomes visible.
The shape of each soul is different. An individual is a carefully fashioned, unique world. The shape of the flaw that each person carries is also different. The flaw is the special shape of personal limitation; angled at a unique awkwardness to the world, it makes our difficulty and challenge in the world different from that of others. When we stop seeing the flaw as a disappointment and exception to an otherwise laudable life, we begin to glimpse the awkward light and hidden wisdom that the flaw holds. As we look deeper, we begin to realize that the flaw might be the first window into a world of difference that we rarely notice. Maud Gonne was an animating force in Yeats’s inspiration; in his poem ‘Broken Dreams’, he writes:
You are more beautiful than any one,
And yet your body had a flaw:
Your small hands were not beautiful . . .
Leave unchanged
The hands that I have kissed,
For old sake’s sake.
T
HE
M
IRROR IN THE
U
NKNOWN
Whoever cannot seek
the unforeseen sees nothing,
for the known way
is an impasse.
HERACLITUS
THE FLAW SEEMS TO BE THE POINT OF FIXED OR CONSTANT vulnerability, the place where the hope of order is fractured. The revelation of someone’s flaw startles and fascinates the social world for it is usually viewed as a helpless, fateful exception to an otherwise ordered life. Yet when viewed against the mystery of the strange and unknown world within, the flaw invites our understanding and compassion. Amidst the infinite diversity of creation, no thing stands out like the human being. Nothing else here is quite as surprising and strange. Because we belong to the human fold we become prisoners of our own familiarity. There is nothing in the world as intense as a human person: each one of us is inevitably and helplessly intense. An individual is a creature in whom difference has come alive. In him difference is everything. Unlike a stone or a tree, it is as if the individual has an inner mirror where he can gather and glimpse himself. This inner mirror is cast at an angle to the mind. It is a small mirror which for the most part remains blurred. When the inner mirror clears, it is but for a millisecond. No-one achieves a full, direct view of himself, only the merest glimpse as swift as a thought. Yet this glimpse grounds everything about your life and illuminates your work, friendships, destiny and identity. All are secretly dependent on that concealed splinter of mirror. It makes everything that happens to you yours; without it, you would simply be an empty receptacle for experiences. You would have no home within you, no place where your life gathered, no source and no centre. The loss of the mirror would reduce you to a sequence of perception, an assembly of qualities. Its absence would make you anonymous.
T
HE
U
NKNOWN
D
WELLS IN
R
ECESSES
OF THE
H
UMAN
H
EART
THE DEPTH AND SUBSTANCE OF OUR TALK ABOUT OURSELVES AND who we are is feeble. Listening to much of the language of contemporary psychology and religion, you could not be blamed for imagining that some analyst had actually managed to turn the mind inside out and had decoded it. Most talk about the self disappoints because it presents not the deep, autonomous and unknown inner world, but cipher figures that are easily recognizable as members of some psychological syndrome. Psychology tends to over-identify the flaw with deficiency. The unknown is not simply out there, outside us. The unknown dwells in the recesses of the human heart and becomes especially explicit in our flaws; consequently the true language of the self is hesitant, shadowed and poetic. There is no direct, analytical description of a soul. Even all the epic poetics of a language would not be large or deft enough to embrace the mystery of one human soul. ‘I Am Not I’ by Jiménez expresses this clearly:
I A
M
N
OT
I
I am not I.
I am this one
Walking beside me whom I do not see,
Whom at times I manage to visit,
And whom at other times I forget;
The one who remains silent when I talk,
The one who forgives, sweet, when I hate,
The one who takes a walk where I am not,
The one who will remain standing when I die.
(translated by Robert Bly)
I
F
O
THERS
C
OULD
S
EE INTO
Y
OU
?
THE IMAGINATION SENSES THE COMPLEX DEPTHS THAT LIE concealed beneath the surface persona. From this perspective, it becomes clear that in many of our interactions with others, we are barely there. One becomes deeply aware of this in time of trouble. Though racked by emotional torment, you can still continue to function. Sometimes indeed this very façade is what enables us to endure and overcome troubles. Shakespeare wrote: ‘There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face’. It is a wonderful grace to be shielded and covered from the world, especially in difficult times.
Imagine how impossible it would be if the inner life were visible. When you came into the office, everyone would look up and be able to read exactly what was in your heart as though your skin were transparent. If our inner wounds were visible to the curious eyes of strangers, we would never achieve healing. Put simply, if interiority were directly visible, society as we know it would be impossible. The conventions we observe would lose their authority and confrontations with others would become the norm. People-watching would take on a new and disturbing significance. Gossip would emerge from the nether region of surmise and exaggeration to achieve the status of fact. The standard of the normal person could never be employed again. Without the restraint of body-covering, raw individuality would leak into the social matrix from every corner. Were the threshold between the inner and outer world to disappear, the life of each person would become a permanent, external theatre and the façade of the exterior would become very fragile. This breakdown would call a new kind of society into being. No facts about yourself and none of your thoughts or feelings could be concealed. Yet the meaning of what was now visible could be complex and hidden. Such transparency would be terrifying – an inner life lived out in the open before everyone’s eyes. In such a world the idea of friendship would certainly be different. Perhaps this transparent world is where the pre-born and the dead live.