Following the previous posts on imperfection as beauty and mistakes as negative beauty, there is one more bit of nuance nearly as indistinguishable from the focus of those two posts as the focuses of those posts are from each other. (Confusing and somewhat redundant, no? Bear with me.)
That “bit of nuance” is this: Realizing that both mistakes and imperfections hold potential and create space for beauty does not mean one should always accept them for what they are.
May I show you a wood carving I fell in love with months ago?…a carving sadly neither of my workmanship nor within my possession, but a beautiful and intriguing carving nonetheless.
Behold a beautiful, thoughtful Chinese lady crafted by hand from a gnarly bit of wood:
A close-up:
Are not the details of the face so minutely and delicately formed — so perfect and smooth? And then your eyes travel down her robe… There, while you glimpse the grace and power hidden within her folds and take note of bits of smoothness and fluidity along the ruffles, the knobbly roughness of the wood announces itself with shameless audacity.
To highlight this, notice how the woman’s gentle expression deepens the contrast between the smooth carvedness given to it by its creator and the harsh natural contours of this piece of wood.
(Ah, see where I was about to do here? — I could spin out an entire musing over how this carving represents a human soul that not only has accepted chaos and imperfection, but both embodies and transcends them with a thoughtful tranquillity born of an internal, joyful confidence and a humble, outward curiosity. But I doubt the woodcarver meant this work in this way or to this level, so I shall not elaborate on this further.)
That harmony between the stubborn gnarly parts of the wood and the parts that did end up being carved away or into particular forms is what draws me the most to this piece.
The woodcarver could have decided this piece of wood was too difficult to work with, and picked up a more compliant block; they could have attempted to carve away all the gnarliness by force to create something smooth and flawless; they could have taken those imperfections and tried to work around them as if those knobs were obstacles to a beautiful creation.
But they chose not to do any of that.
Instead, they took stock of what those difficult and imperfect parts of the wood were, considered what they wanted to bring out of it, then found a way to carve something that stayed true to the vision of the lady in their mind and also to the nature of the piece of wood in their hand. Neither had to be sacrificed for the other, neither took precedence or significance over the other, neither was ignored and compromised upon — do you not see how raw and powerful her robe looks, made up of that very knobbiness?
And yet it is not as if the imperfections are left untouched. There is no crack in the carving’s authenticity and honesty, no attempt at a subtle delusion to manipulate the viewer into believing the stubborn parts of the wood beautiful left just as they were. If you look closely, you can glimpse the hand of the woodcarver even on the knobs themselves — the gentle sanding and polishing of this corner, the carefully gouged fold that dips in between those two knots — the tiny details that demonstrate skilled hands working in harmony with an compassionate soul.
The happy balance in our approach to imperfections — whether of our own making or of that which is beyond our control — lies, I think, somewhere close to the essence of this carving.