What makes men and women interesting is the humanity they harbor and distill. And humanity is always imperfect. The imperfections of handmade things with their charm and beauty. As art. Yes, the beauty of imperfection. The passage of time and its arbitrariness in the geography of faces and bodies. Behind every wrinkle or every deterioration there is a joy or a desolation, a fossilized pain or a confession of the lived. A notarial act. Perhaps that is why in every dusky woman or in every purple and gray-haired man the beauty of a past party is born.
An event to come. A serene marital experience or the scars of a loss. The silent testimony of something that happened embedded in furrowed brows. The beauty of the present, the attractive imperfection. The vital dusk in every fold, the wear and varnish of time. Serenity in the face of the compulsive propaganda of the perfect and the multinational beauty of faces, bodies and skins without literature. And almost no biography. As if they had all experienced similar circumstances. For this reason, if something is perfect, it is because it was made by a machine or by the despondent – ??soulless – of what they now call AI. Or for a horrible Photoshop creating depersonalizations and complexes.
Wabi-sabi, in Japanese difficult to translate, comes to put, in a clear philosophical evidence, the enjoyment of the present, the humble simplicity, the beauty of imperfection. Patina and temporal wear and tear in the human being as an argument for beauty. The groove of time and the acceptance of the transitory. The praise of deterioration. The old mirrored porcelain, chipped in the skin of the old. The beauty of imperfection when existence is already written on the body plowed by life. The eroticism of the third age. With its notches and chakras. And emotions
It is nothing new: today’s world has an excessive concern for aesthetics and for prolonging the times of the certainly exquisite youth. A concern that Dostoevsky already spoke of when he pointed it out as a first sign of personal impotence, or insecurity. We are finite and if we were perfect we might not accept it either. Sure, or almost sure.
