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Extra Credit 017 - Wabi Sabi and Weird Fiction (Patreon)

Published:
2023-11-30 19:03:42
Edited:
2023-12-01 23:47:30
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

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Content

Weird fiction deals with imperfect, unfinished narratives that expose the impermanence of all things, which are core tenants of the Japanese philosophy Wabi Sabi.

Comments

Jason Thompson

Awwww! That ending was so sweet. Thanks guys. 🙏

MonsterTalk

I just know I'm going to get confused and tell people loudly and drunkenly at some future party that Cabo Wabo is a somber Japanese design philosophy.

Rasmus Juul

Hey, so many thanks to you two for brining this up and reminding me. It is so easy for me to always grinding on my self for not doing enough and not doing good enough. Especially during these long winter months. It is time to kick back and be a little more wabi shabby 😇

Sweatin' to the Great Oldies

Many thanks for the discussion, gentlemen. Let me suggest two very popular images that, I think, get at wabi-sabi without blending too far into Buddhist impermanence. 1) A full moon is beautiful. Wabi-sabi is when there is a full moon on a cloudy night. You can see the light of the moon through the clouds, but not the moon itself. Sometimes the clouds part a bit and you can see some of the moon - but not all of the moon. It is achingly beautiful. (and, I suppose, is similar to the sense many folks have that partially clad burlesque dancers are far sexier than buck-naked models) 2) A new silver bowl is beautiful. Wabi-sabi is when you let the silver tarnish. Allow the metal to lose its luster. Appreciate your memory of it - or (if you're encountering it for the first time) appreciate the vision you have of it in its original state. Go a step farther and collect snow in the tarnished silver bowl. That perfect white on the tarnished silver. The juxtaposition of natural, seasonal frozen water and wrought, mined metal. Make beautiful things and let them go. (which, I suppose, is what I've done as a father far more than as an artist)

Ben A

This was a very thoughtful and excellent discussion! I agree with you both that it is damaging to be precious about work. Too often I know people who chase the perfect at the cost of what one enjoys and what is good enough. As an academic, I constantly tell my graduate students that research papers, theses, and dissertations are abandoned, not finished. To go a step further, I'd argue that wabi sabi is also at the heart of science as a creative endeavor; scientific research only progresses because it is always incomplete way of knowing the world, and every "answer" comes with many new questions we never thought to ask before. This is why I often get tired of the quest, for example, to have a unified theory of physics that unites relativity and quantum mechanics, as if having that theory will be the ultimate resolution. Any reconciliation between these ideas will only spur more questions. It's not that we shouldn't pursue that research, or any other research because it never reaches a full resolution (that would be nihilism), but we should not do it because we believe that some perfect answer lies at the end of that road. This is a long way to write that there is never a perfect end, like the fact you note our lives are inherently incomplete and a brief part of a longer history/narrative. You guys said this perfectly at the end: wabi sabi as a perspective tells us that we should enjoy the now, to be present, to be inquisitive, and to recognize the imperfections and incompleteness not as flaws but as what makes the universe interesting. (After all, much of Buddhism is about focusing on the moment and trying to shed oneself of desire.)

Richard Horsman

One thing I love is there’s a spectrum of imperfection, and everyone has their line. Like some of the things I love collapse under their own weight. The story “The House of Sounds” is a great example. It’s a glorious mess that I enjoyed immensely, but others (including you guys, if memory serves) bounced off of. The film Skinamarink is another recent example. It has a design conceit that makes it purposefully slow and hard to tell what’s going on a lot of the time. For some this captured the true feel of a childhood nightmare. For others it’s a boring blurry mess that goes on forever. It ultimately comes down to how many rules can a piece break before it’s no longer something you can engage with.

It's a Ghost.

Loved the episode, guys! About two or three minutes before you mentioned George Lucas, I was thinking, "This discussion reminds me of George Lucas." Chad, if you ever write a book about the struggles and challenges of getting movies made in Hollywood, I hope you name it "Noodled to Death." Also, I appreciated the imperfection at approximately the 24:20 mark.

Jeremy Impson

Hey! Was the overmix starting at 24:09 an intentional introduction of an error? You sly dogs.

The Shadow Patron

Thanks for the wonderful episode, you two! I've always admires the idea of Wabi Sabi, ever since I heard about it from an episode of King of the Hill. Sparing the specifics of that episode, I'll say that I've found the entire series to actually be a great study of the philosophy. I guess it's a little meta, but after the credits, over the production company screen, they always play the weirdest line deliveries that they still used in the episode. I've always found that simultaneously hilarious and endearing. Bringing Wabi Sabi to the growing fields of Virtual Reality, Artificial Intelligence, and Robotics; I've often wondered if there's something akin to Wabi Sabi that is inherent to humanity and is what's responsible for the Uncanny Valley. Obviously, there are plenty of examples in Science Fiction that touch on this idea. Agent Smith saying that Humanity rejected a perfect world in the early iterations of the Matrix, is a prime example. Or in the first season of West World, Anthony Hopkins' character describes making the hosts more realistic through the implementation of "reveries;" small movements or affectations that served no real practical purpose beyond appearing less rigid or robotic, and therefore more realistic. While in direct conflict with Wabi Sabi, I've often thought that the defining characteristic of Homo Sapiens is our capacity for discontentment. Still. I've always found the work you both do to be a delightful reprieve. Thank you again, Chris and Chad!

Bugberry

The part about George Lucas' Star Wars remakes/edits got me thinking about other examples of remakes/remasters in both film and video games and how Wabi Sabi applies to those. While it's not necessarily the same as editing the original material, many remakes of films will retell the story with modern sensibilities and sometimes fix or leave out problematic elements from the original material. This isn't necessarily a bad thing but it does call into question the purpose of these remakes. Video games have other issues that stem from their lack of proper preservation. While an original film might still be available along side a remake, many video games are only playable on their original hardware or through emulators, so a remake is often the only way to experience that game. Then the question becomes how much of the original game do you preserve and how much do you improve with modern game design sensibilities. This also ties into the idea in Wabi Sabi of things being transient, but then you can't help but apply that to all forms of knowledge preservation. As someone who is studying Librarianship, this is something I feel conflicted about accepting.

Kiubez

Oh man, I didn’t realize how much I needed this conversation. I work in a creative field and I’ve recently been developing some new products for my company to sell. I have been stressing out about every tiny detail in my prototypes. Not even an hour before I listened to this episode I was complaining about how off-center some of my pieces were. My friends told me they couldn’t see it but I certainly can! Thanks for this reminder to slow down and reconsider what perfection means. And what it doesn’t mean. I always appreciate when you guys get philosophical.

Eric - Speaker in Digressions

Chris talked about philosophy as being about how to live our lives, and although I don't teach philosophy classes, I often have to teach about philosophy briefly the context of other humanities courses, and I always try to stress this point. Philosophy isn't just stoned guys at 3AM after the party ("dude, did you ever...think about the moon?"), but people trying to figure out the world and how to live in it. Or, as some (e.g., Socrates and Cicero) suggested, philosophy is about how to die. They meant some different things by that, but a common interpretation is that we should live life keeping in mind the certainty of its ending. Of course, if I think of it that way, I start to wonder if I'll finish all of this grading first.

Steve

My artistic medium is roleplaying, in particular writing and running games. There's a gaming idiom that no game survives an encounter with players, which purportedly speaks of the difficulty of writing scenarios. But for me, it's the joy. As someone running a game, I don't want to read the flavour text and have players do exactly what is expected of them. I want it to be challenging for the PCs and interesting for the players and it's very rare and unlikely that the writer of the game has written it with your players in mind. Part of the thrill for me is responding and adapting to my players in that moment. As a GM, I want to be as creative as the players. And I want to celebrate and use everyone's input, even if it goes against what is written.

Steve

You can keep the tea ceremony however. Just give me the (fairtrade) tea.

Ethan Cordray

All the Star Wars talk got me thinking: Who's the best practitioner of Wabi Sabi in those movies: Answer: Emperor Palpatine. From Phantom Menace all the way to Rise of Skywalker, he's always got grand master plans -- but they're constantly going wrong. Jedi thwarting his intrigues, Rebels blowing up his Death Stars, Darth Vader killing, him, etc. But does he ever get scared or upset? No! He simply adjusts, improvises, and builds a beautiful new plan out of the pieces of the old one. Yes, the Dark Side is truly the way of Wabi Sabi.

lazyelvis

Well, that episode really hit home. Just before listening I had been reviewing my own podcast’s past year, our second. I or a guest narrator will read a short story and my podcast partner, Bob, will add an ambient soundtrack to the narration. Occasionally I’ll add a biography or link to a resource related to the stories we cover. Overall I was happy with what we had done. Plenty of mistakes, mispronunciations, bad performances, but I was happy with most of it. We think of the podcast as 50% music and 50% narration. If my performance sucks and the story turns out to be dull there always Bob’s music . The year started off pretty rough. A friend of ours was going to read a story for us back in January but she had a sudden seizure and collapsed and died on the streets of Paris. The shock and loss hit pretty hard and it took a month or two for me at least to get back into a frame of mind to record. As hard as it was to start the podcast process up again I found it very therapeutic. Just to make something again. Since then we haven’t missed a month, even when our planned readings get derailed, which often happens. Lining up readers, for example, has been a process that both giveth and taketh. If our scheduled reader had been available back in September we wouldn’t have had to pivot into our backup plan, which was Lovecraft. I had been avoiding Lovecraft because I was afraid of the polysyllabic complexity of a lot of his writing, but I knew the stories ( as a longtime fan of this podcast ) so we took the plunge. First episode was pretty rough but the next two were some of our best. Oddest thing was that I LOVED speaking all those dark operatic descriptions, the over-the-top adjectives, the eldritch and archaic word forms out loud! Can’t wait to do it again. Highly recommend it as a new way to appreciate Lovecraft. You guys might want to consider it yourselves if you ever get nostalgic for recording some Lovecraft. A Fifer and Lackey reading of “From Beyond” or “Cool Air” for instance. We also had to reschedule in November because we couldn’t afford the copyright on an Alfred Bester story we had hoped to do, and, after several narrator changes and additions, we ended up doing some Saki. We had a cast of five, so sort of a theater piece and a lot of fun to do. As far as direct Wabi Sabi goes, I’ve decided to really lean into my mispronunciations. They are Legion. Also developing a drinking game based on overall frequency.