With Ryofu's program this week for his last act as President of this eClub, comparing some elements of The Way of Tea to the principles of Rotary, one aspect kept rattling around in my mind: what is "imperfect beauty?" In my own art work, my painting, I certainly practice that concept: never allowing my colors to come directly out of the tube and almost always doing everything that I can to show the process of painting, allowing the previous colors to bleed through the later colors. My paintings are a history of the process as well as an image. That aspect of "imperfect beauty" I understand but what I do not is "If we do not experience perfect beauty, and live in the imperfection of this world all the time, how do I (we) know that it is "imperfect" since "perfect" has never been part of my (our) being." Even the Greeks knew how to love the Venus de Milo (when it was brought up from the sea without arms.)

In the West, we live mostly in an "or" culture: something is "perfect" or it is not. The gray areas in between are seldom explored. I guess that is why I started to study Indian, Chinese and Japanese concepts of reality (since they are "and" cultures.) Sometime, the cultures overlap. There was a profound sadness on reading the end of the last Lord of the Rings book because when "evil" was conquered, "good" (the elves and all magical creatures) had to leave, and humans were left to build their own world. I was left outside Tolkien's world. Before that time, these three areas (an "and" society) blended together, struggled together, to lead us through an adventure. The endless circle of the "Ring" was destroyed, and divisions were the outcome (we descended into an "or" world.) In India, there are two realms, two halves of the egg of the world, the real and the unreal and it is important to note that we never know where the line is drawn between them. In the West, the line is always attempted to be drawn: good vs evil, right vs wrong, conservative vs liberal, up vs down (therefore we almost never try to fly, except when we are called the Wright (maybe a misspelling of "right") Brothers who were scientific artists), etc.

I know that "imperfect beauty" exists. Today, I washed the car at a car wash, and the rain started just as I drove out. I enjoy my own imperfections because it proves to me that I am human and vulnerable. I love skies with dark clouds and call a mist-filled start to my day, "My Chinese Morning." I like the imperfection of the world. I paint it in all my work but......still, I wonder, how can I see "imperfection" if I have never, in my 76 years of living, encountered a truly "perfect moment?"

When I was going to Dartmouth College, Robert Frost was the "poet in residence." I was reading, "The Road Not Taken," from a Westerner's point of view (at that time, I had not encountered any other way of seeing the world.) I took this road, not that, and "it has made all the difference." So one day, I asked Mr. Frost, "What does this poem mean? You are the poet." He said, "I do not know. I make a poem with holes in it so that you can put yourself into it." Later, I understood what he meant. My children have a lot of holes that they fill with themselves.

Maybe that is what "imperfect beauty" is: the poem, the work of art, the world as we see it, is what it is: "perfect" but we must interact with it, putting ourselves into it, and that makes "imperfect beauty." And that is not all: Nature interacts and changes the world just as we think that we understand it. Does that make sense to you all who also ask these kinds of questions?  Read my story about my friend who would always throw his last ball into the gutter so that he would never bowl a 300 game (in another section of this forum, Head Fakes.) He told me that he did not wish to have a"perfect" score since then he would have nothing more to learn. That took me a while to accept too.

As the king said in The King and I, "It is a puzzlement!"

Joe

Hi Joe,

Nice post! Ryofu's piece made me think of the nature of the teaching I do - my goal to get students to 'master' vocabulary, grammar, kanji, situations. I believe (hope?) that my real goal is to get them to take delight in seeing what they are capable of doing, and to realize the difference between that and giving up (in small and large ways).

I also enjoyed the thoughts on The Road Not Taken. On my nonprofit's website, there is a video of one professor's take on the piece, and I would be interested in your (and anyone else's) thoughts on it. Find it at:

http://www.nextvista.org/2006/09/10/traveling-robert-frosts-the-road-not-taken/

Rushton

Rotary Club of Santa Clara
still jet-lagged from my trip to Bahrain

Dear Rushton:

Sorry, I should have answered your forum entry before I wrote you privately about your coming trip to Japan. As I said there, I used to take a similar trip with students each summer for six years when I was chairman of the Fine Arts at the University of Guam. I went to your website and listened to the Arkansas teacher discussing Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken. It is a poem that has interested me and haunted me for most of my life. Let me tell you the end of the story when I asked Frost about it when I attended Dartmouth College as an English major.

Yes, he did tell me: "I create poems with holes in them so that you (which meant anyone) can put yourself into it" but I did not tell you what he advised me to do next. He said, "Read the poem aloud, over and over again. Listen to the sound of the words. Listen to the meanings that come from the sounds." That little piece of wisdom took me ten years to master, reciting the poem from memory to my students each year (yet only breaking through the listening aspect after those ten years.) Here is what I finally heard at the end of the poem (which carries most of the meaning): "I shall be telling this with a sigh...Somewhere ages and ages hence....Two roads diverged in a wood...And I, I took the road less traveled by.... And that has made all the difference." Yes, it is a summation of the meaning but it is not just a mental explanation. It is an experiencial, life-changing work of genuis.

The last stanza of the poem is an ABA form, like how a child sees the world. A mother asks her son where he is going. He replies, almost in a whisper, "Outside." "What will you be doing?" "Nothing," he whispers. "Who will you be playing with?" Even quieter,he says, "No one." Then he goes outside, runs and loudly screams in the neighborhood with his friends. When he returns, his mother asks, "Where did you go?" He is quiet again, "No where." "What did you do?" "Nothing." "Who did you play with?" "No one!" It is quiet, quiet, quiet, loud, loud, loud, and back to quiet, quiet, quiet. We all do this. We go into something we do not understand quietly, slowly, then as we understand it we get bolder, and finally when we realize that it more complicated than we first envisioned, we return to our quieter contemplative state.

If one really listens to the last stanza of the poem, it is "S" sounds: "shall, this, sigh, somewhere, ages, ages, hence, roads"....then short Anglo-Savon sounds: "...in a wood. And I,I took the road...." It is comforting to hear again the "S" sounds: "LESS traveled by, and that HAS made all the DIFFERENCE." It is a poem, yes, about decisions and a journey (we are making it as we read the poem) but it most of all is about universals, like ABA. It is for me about: Quiet, innocent childhood to young, boisterous adulthood to quiet old age, contemplation and contentment. What the female teacher in the piece, attempting to explain some mysteries in the world, explaining the poem too much, forgets is the voice that must be used in reciting the poem. It should be quiet at the beginning, like a child telling a story of a journey into a dark woods, boisterous at some point when he matured and the sounds tell him to use that voice, and quiet again as he is leaving the poem (the dark places) for the reallty of his senior years of living (where hopefully there is some light.) Frost knew what he was doing in the construction of this poem. As he also told me one day, "The poem sometimes writes itself. The poet is just a conduit for the meanings. The words and the sounds have their own life, their own journey." Intellect, explaining the possible academic meanings, is but one aspect of poetry. A greater aspect is deeper understanding that brings in the physical and emotional meanings. You have to read each poem aloud to understand that aspect of this or any poem. "Om" is only a word until it is repeated over and over again by hundreds of monks in a temple built to bounce back the sound. On paper, The Road Not Taken is an exercise in a classroom; ALOUD, it is a lesson for life.

You asked. I told what I have found. As Robert Frost might say, "Reading my poetry aloud makes all the difference."

Joe