PSYCHOSCAPES: Were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty

This birch tree is special to me. It was just a mere sapling back in 1977 when I was building my house. Marauding kids, footloose for the summer, snuck by and peeled off a large swatch of its bark, prompting me to feel so sorry for it that I did not cut it down, despite the fact it was perilously close to my foundation.

The birch tree survived and prospered over the last roughly 50 years, while we, enduring our share of shady campaigns. have become old war buddies, The scars on our trunks from calamity and surgery are marks of our character, proving we have lived through dark, stormy nights of the soul, not just a succession of sunny but eventless days.

I took this photograph, literally swooning in the recent record-setting heat. As I composed this picture, a quote by the iconoclast Junichirō Tanizaki flashed through my mind like a bolt of lightning, “Were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty,”^⁠1

Tanizaki was a Japanese writer and a follower of the Tao. I had read this quote before, but its significance never sunk in until, perhaps because of my susceptible state, I was able to witness this swirl of shadow and light in real-time through my viewfinder. As Tanizaki sees it, “beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates.”^⁠2

Somehow, taking this photograph under these unique circumstances, short-circuited my normal Western way of seeing things: The tree was no longer a logical concept: a straight, vertical line with a bushy top. Instead, I saw only gyrating patterns of black and white.

No, I hadn’t suffered terminal heatstroke. Instead, under the influence of Tanizaki, I had fallen into the mysterious realm of the Tao; I had moved beyond language and thought into the constantly shifting patterns of the present moment. Alan Watts, the well-known interpreter of Eastern philosophy for Western audiences in the 1960s, called these shifting patterns “wriggly.”

He said that the whole world in the present moment is “a great wiggly affair. Clouds are wiggly, waters are wiggly, plants are wiggly, mountains are wiggly, people are wiggly. But people are always trying to straighten things out.” But it can’t be done. The only solution is to surrender to the wriggly.”^⁠3

Indeed, for Tanizaki, the world was profoundly wriggly and full of ambiguity. For him, seeing imperfection as perfection was a fundamental way of being in the world. Shadows were essential. He criticized the progressive Westerner who was obsessed with always improving his lot: “His quest for a brighter light never ceases, he spares no pains to eradicate the minutest shadow.”^⁠4

Shadows are certainly being eradicated today in our hyper-polarized country. It’s reached such an extreme today that any subject debated has only two separate sides: black or white. Shadows are banned. Nuanced arguments are dismissed as the meanderings of the weak and the indecisive.

Tanizaki understood that the remedy was to stay in the present moment in the realm of ever-shifting shadows where nothing is permanent and nothing lasts. It’s a mistake to take our Western way of life so seriously, like immortal building blocks that will never change. We could do worse than start reading the romantic poet Percy Shelley again, who displayed the wisdom of an Eastern guru;

Worlds on worlds are rolling ever

From creation to decay.

Like the bubbles on a river

Sparkling, bursting, bore away

xxx

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