Free Form vs. Rulebound: How Fair Needs Foul
When I understand that this glass is already broken, every moment with it is precious.
—Buddhist teaching
My interest in behavior that is impromptu and free form means that strict, rulebound social behavior interests me almost as much. Even more interesting is when the two come together, fighting for dominance: will the perfect rightness or the just-as-perfect disruption of perfection win the day?
Rule-bound culture sets off disruptive behavior like a pavé of fine diamonds sets off a lapis stone laced with flaws.
Yeats saw this tension between perfection and imperfection in his poem “Lapis Lazuli”:
Every discoloration of the stone,
Every accidental crack or dent,
Seems a water-course or an avalanche,
Or lofty slope where it still snows
Though doubtless plum or cherry-branch
Sweetens the little half-way house
Those Chinamen climb towards, and I
Delight to imagine them seated there;
There, on the mountain and the sky,
On all the tragic scene they stare.
One asks for mournful melodies;
Accomplished fingers begin to play.
Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes,
Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.
Note that Yeats’s rhyme scheme echoes Yeats’ understanding of the lapis’ perfectly imperfect flaws. The scheme is perfect, (ABABCDCD), but the rhymes are often “slant” rather than exact: (e.g., “melodies”/“eyes”). Form and content are one. This is Yeats at the top of his game examining a sculptor at the top of their game, both performing a meticulously prepared art.
In “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop,” Yeats’s Crazy Jane, as if commenting on lapis’ perfect imperfections, tells the Bishop that,
“Fair and foul are near of kin,
And fair needs foul.”
Jane is “crazy” in the way Kamala’s laugh is “crazy.” Then Yeats takes the dark union about as far as one can, in lines that shocked me as an adolescent. The poet-aristocrat comments:
Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.’“Crazy Jane and the Bishop”
Seeing one of life’s crowns — love — juxtaposed with literally its bottom, Yeats throws his lot in with Crazy Jane. Like the Bishop we may seek spiritual perfection, but we are human and imperfection always tags along. Why not make the best of it?
So Leonard Cohen thought too. In “Anthem” on the 1992 album The Future he sings,
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything.
That’s how the light gets in.
Rarely one to comment on his songs, Cohen once expanded on these lines:
This situation [life] does not admit of solution of perfection. This is not the place where you make things perfect, neither in your marriage, nor in your work, nor anything, nor your love of God, nor your love of family or country. The thing is imperfect.
And worse, there is a crack in everything that you can put together: Physical objects, mental objects, constructions of any kind. But that’s where the light gets in, and that’s where the resurrection is and that’s where the return, that’s where the repentance is. It is with the confrontation, with the brokenness of things.
Perfection vs. Imperfection in Japanese Culture
Cohen was ordained as a Zen Buddhist monk. His themes permeate Japanese culture.
In perhaps Matsuo Basho’s most famous 17th century haiku, the wandering poet free of the city’s chaos stumbles upon the perfect stillness of a pond, an invitation to embrace meditative calm and transcendent peace. But then, a disruption:
Into the ancient pond
A frog jumps
Water’s sound!Translated by D.T. Suzuki
Who has the upper hand here as Basho seeks to avoid the noise of the city: the perfect stillness of the pond, or the frog that disturbs its silence?
The answer: none, or both. They both do their thing, and we are invited like Basho to embrace the change and impermanence of all we see and experience. Adherence to traditional syllabic line form (5-7-5) formally embraces the silence, which is abruptly interrupted by a surprise. Plop! Somehow something is out of joint. Disruption always comes to disturb perfection. Count on it.
Basho is awake to the minuscule anomaly, one frog’s plop in a large pond. This suggests he’s in the meditative mind he sought, awake to every event and gesture. That’s where the light gets in.
The Bioevolutionary Roots of the Tension: Hot and Cold Cognition
These forces — perfect form vs. free-form that disrupts perfected form — constantly play out in Japanese culture. And in ours.
The balancing act expresses the constant battle in our brains between what neuroscientists call Cold and Hot Cognition. The prefrontal cortex framing the present moment with an eye cast on the past seeks to do what’s just right based on what has been right. The walls of civic discourse are reinforced: we did it right then, and so we do it right now.
But the limbic and reptilian brain — Hot Cognition — charged with protecting our asses from dangerous predators, is keen to notice anomalies, things out of place, things tradition hasn’t prepared us for. Like that tiger coming through the bamboo break. Cold Cognition enjoys its déjeuner sur l’herbe. Why not? There are no tigers around here. It knows that because there were none yesterday. Hot Cognition, ready to acknowledge what’s wrong right now, has the tools needed not just to survive, but to go on to build a stronger bamboo wall, one that keeps out surprise invaders.
Driven by Cold Cognition alone, we become the tiger’s next meal. The clash between Hot and Cold Cognition is part of our evolutionary baggage. We thrive best when they work together. The tension between improvisation and perfect art explores how the battle can go wrong, and how sometimes to get it right.
Kintsugi, Wabi Sabi
Japanese culture loves perfection, the care and symmetry that declares itself just right. But it also cultivates imperfection. We saw it in Basho’s haiku. We see it also in the tradition of kintsugi, the art of making repair of broken things visible.
You see it in its commitment to wabi sabi, “the Japanese art,” writes architect Tadao Ando, “of finding beauty in imperfection and profundity in nature, of accepting the natural cycle of growth, decay, and death. It's simple, slow, and uncluttered — and it reveres authenticity above all.” Wabi-sabi is imaged by the ensō, a circle that is drawn in one continuous brushstroke, inevitably imperfect.
Seven Samurai
Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece Seven Samurai is drenched in the same oppositions: traditional/disruptive, perfect/imperfect. What it takes to be a trustworthy samurai,” explains Yasuko Sato, “is the central question that film viewers are encouraged to ponder as the story unfolds.” What the quest for authenticity takes is both foul and fair.
The tension between following a tradition and creating a new one is baked into Kurosawa’s cake. The samurai are actually rōnin, samurai who have lost their shogun masters and so have no authoritative rule book or purpose to follow. In the film’s opening sequence, the venerable samurai leader Kambei (Takashi Shimura) shaves his head: the loss of the topknot commonly suggests loss of samurai status. Rōnin must make their own way by their own lights. It was of course the very issue Japanese culture faced after the war, when Emperor Hirohito renounced his divine authority. The Japanese suddenly had to learn what the French existentialists had known for decades: that existence precedes essence, that one must confect one’s own authority in the quest for authenticity.
On the fair side — the side of tradition and perfected form — stands the taciturn master swordsman Kyūzō (Seiji Miyaguchi) who takes out many of the bandits the Seven face to defend the peasant village. Kambei says of him that “he is man interested only in testing the limits of his skill.” Kyūzō finds authority in the way of the samurai, The Code of Bushido which embraced seven rules: Righteousness, Loyalty, Honor, Respect, Honesty, Courage, and Consistency.
Ever fair, Kyūzō dies in the end at the hands of a gun-wielding bandit, exquisite tradition falling to something new under the sun that tradition did not prepare him for: firearms. So much for the value of righteousness and consistency.
On the foul side stands rough and ready Kikuchiyo, played by the charismatic Toshirō Mifune, a farmer’s son pretending to be a samurai. Mifune is a comic relief character but, rough-hewn, the most relatable. The last samurai to join the group, Kikuchiyo is unkempt and always scratching an itch. He functions as Trickster, always at the ready, catalyst for much of the action. If Star Wars is Lucas’s Seven Samurai — and it is — Hans Solo (Harrison Ford) is Kikuchiyo. Kikuchiyo is without tradition: he is revealed to be a fraud as a samurai but one who proves himself in combat. Free of tradition’s rule book, he makes his own way. Through existence he forges his essence.
To achieve his masterpiece Kurosawa himself let go of tradition. He once said that “it’s like I’m following someone or something’s command. It’s like I hear a voice from the heavens. I guess all of us are possessed by something.” Seven Samurai is an improvisation meticulously prepared. One of the masterpieces of world film.
The leader Kambei wears a circular emblem on the front and back of his clothing. The circle points to the ideal of harmony that Japanese culture aspires to and that Kambei is master of. It alludes to the yin yang symbol: two swirling half circles that represent the constant ebb and flow of male and female forces. But unlike yin yang, Kambei’s symbol is more a hurricane, imaging the way fair and foul swirl around one another in a constant dance.
Sunny (on Apple Plus)
“Tradition exists for a reason,” says the mother-in-law in the intriguing but creepy Japanese-American series Sunny (2024) starring Rashida Jones as Suzie who loses her brilliant husband and child in a mysterious plane crash. Much of the show’s “creepiness” comes from the mother-in-law and people like her who seem to know more than they say about her son Masa’s death. Ritual politeness here sometimes is drenched in falsity. Ritual can give expression to emotions and ideas beyond expression. In ancient Noh theater, ritual masks express the deep nature of each character.
“I am so sorry for your loss,” carries the weight of tradition. Mourners accept such gestures because they say, I really don’t know what to say before the inexpressible and unknowable, death. But in everyday life, ritual equally can also mask feelings. I’m sorry for your loss, but I’m not going to tell you what a cad he was to me.
In Sunny, the most authentic “person” is the series’ eponymous domestic robot. Everyone else struggles to find their authentic self. True, Sunny is often snide and quick with a riposte that deploys metaphor or irony to say things indirectly—AI at its most fun and engaging. But metaphor and irony point from one thing to another. Among humans, ritual can express the inexpressible, but it can also mask what can’t be expressed for social or personal reasons. Sometimes the ritual masks don’t point to but point away from, that is, hide. Sometimes Trickster is a con man.
Masa’s funeral is fraught with inauthenticities. Masa created the domestic robots that have become essential to Kyoto society; one of them killed a human which his corporation covers up. The yakuza wanted Masa’s code to create killer bot hitmen. Did the yakuza bring the plane down to get it? The daughter of the head yakuza attends the funeral, disrupting the hallowed ritual. She seeks the code in order to inherit her father’s yakuza throne.
Japanese society is highly structured. Aboveboard, Japanese culture has the smoothness of their exquisite silk. Ritual — knowing just what to do when — smooths the way. But below, roil dark forces. Japanese porn is notoriously dark and taboo. Suffering from a strict tradition of 80-hour work weeks, after a hard day’s work for the Japanese corporations, “salarymen” stumble home nightly stupefyingly drunk. So much for the “fairness” of ritual and tradition.
Beneath the smooth silk the culture is tangled most foully by the yakuza (Japanese mafia) who follow their own strict codes of conduct, that like Kurosawa’s bandits, result in following none of society’s codes. Fair and foul: the yakuza call themselves ninkyō dantai (“chivalrous organizations”) suggesting they are heir to the samurai tradition; the Japanese police and the media (by request of the police) call them bōryokudan (“violent groups”) — the understatement of the century. In the current series HBO Tokyo Vice, based on a true story, the yakuza pressure the newspaper of record to report all deaths as accidents. “There are no murders in Tokyo” is journalistic policy, all the news not fit to print. The newspaper’s stonewalling, gaslighting, and masking are all the work of dark Trickster forces: murder most foul. A not-so-innocent young American journalist comes to challenge all that at the newspaper, which drives the plot.
Democracy, Fair and Foul
Fair and foul. Here in America, the tension between the proper way to do things and the invaluable disruptions that inevitably follow is how our democracy churns forward, a meticulously prepared art. The constitution, along with social and political norms, show the way, greasing the skids and smoothing the roads of our democratic enterprise. Meanwhile unlicensed greed and the quest for power, as in Kurosawa’s masterpiece, are also baked in the cake. Our challenge every day is to decide through which crack, foul or fair, the best light gets in?
