The Best Buddhist Writing 2010 - Melvin McLeod [35]
After the black dawn, the white dawn arrives laced with pink fire. Dawn light brings a clarity that’s missing from noon glare or smoggy sunset, however pretty their filters. Sitting on a rusty wrought-iron chair, I turn my thoughts to the beauty of rust, which dissects metal so meticulously, creating freeform bronzes, brown bubbling sandwiches, gritty red icons, supine statuettes, ragged perforations, flaking black-orange memorials to time. We underestimate rust, which may well have sponsored all of life on Earth. In the explicit light, rust declares its past.
Some think it’s easy for life to emerge, for primitive cells like bacteria to form anywhere in the universe. For instance, in the deep ocean trenches, several miles below the sunlit waves, hyperthermophiles bloom—hardy bacteria that breathe iron and thrive in water hot enough to sterilize surgery tools. Hugging the scalding vents, they reproduce in boiling water and can abide at 266 degrees Fahrenheit where minerals abound. Of the many heat-loving microbes haunting the deep ocean, Geobacter metallireducens can even generate its own electricity.
All you really need is rocks and water, and everything else happens by itself. When iron sulfide (rust) from Earth’s hot core meets cold water, the shock creates honeycombed chimneys where the first living cells could have grown. Subject oxygen and carbon dioxide—so plentiful on the young Earth—to heat and high pressure, with rust as a catalyst, and a metabolism naturally ensues. The earliest microbes would have left those cradles to colonize the land. We still carry some of that primordial iron in our cells today. Rust is a very slow fire, and like fire it releases energy as it devours. It also gains in size, prying apart steel in a process known as “iron smacking.” Iron corrodes especially fast when exposed to an electrolyte like water, and, for better and worse, the human body is awash with an electrolyte broth.
“Rust, I bow to you,” I say silently, not wanting to disturb the birds that have begun to pipe, trill, and bark, chasing each other at speed across the sky. My rusty, weathered chair is rich with the fetching poverty the Japanese call wabi sabi.
Wabi originally meant living miserably alone in nature, far from human society, and feeling gloomy, bleak, comfortless. And sabi, whose beauty comes from the patina of age, originally meant “chill,” “lean,” “withered.” But the phrase wabi sabi changed in the sixteenth century, when the hermit’s life of chosen isolation in the woods seemed to offer a spiritual richness society lacked, and the words came to mean an intimacy with nature and delight in the rustic details of daily life. The hermit’s eye turned toward the minute, the crude, the cracked, the incomplete, those objects with interesting crevices—especially if something were rusted, weathered, or worn, revealing the passage of time. It’s a nice felicity that the Japanese word for rust is also pronounced sabi, returning us once more to the rusty origins of life and the rust at the heart of the word “rustic.” Partly as a rebellion against the glory of the decorative arts, wabi sabi favored the purity of humble forms, but unlike European modernism’s ideal of smooth, streamlined, futuristic creations, wabi sabi valued the organic, imperfect, faded nature of earthy things that were handmade one at a time, not mass produced, and all the more appealing when worn through loving use. Wabi sabi relies on intuitive, right-here right-now observation, without any glance toward the future or even the idea of progress.
A pastoral aesthetic, wabi sabi not only accepts nature as unruly and uncontrollable, it welcomes nature’s rule, beyond the scope of any technology we can create, however sleek and obedient. So, wabi sabi embraces the idea of corrosion, decay to the point of disintegration, and ambiguity, in warm fluid shapes and quietly resonating earth tones. Poetry, too, can be wabi sabi, if it arouses serene melancholy, an acceptance of reality at its most exquisitely mundane, a reality in which