Wabi-Sabi Guitar

[MC5C]

Very interesting thread, beautiful organic guitar. I only read it yesterday, and so have been thinking about wabi, sabi, and how they relate to my practice of building.

Wabi seems to be the appreciation of simplistic aesthetic. Shape, form, utility of purpose, lack of contrivance, honesty of crafting. So cleaning the glue squeeze-out aligns with honesty and lack of contrivance - to leave it would be to create a flaw where none needed to exist. So for me a guitar made of honest wood, crafted with all of the excellence of the maker, simplistically executed, completely fit for purpose can indeed be "wabi". Binding with simple wood protects and strengthens the joint of the top and side and so in in line with wabi. Purfling serves to enhance and decorate with no structural purpose, so is less wabi, perhaps more "western" than Zen.

Sabi is, as I read about it and thought about it, a completely different thing. I don't quite grasp how they are so commonly tied together, but in a way "wabi" could be a slice in time of "sabi", a lifetime flow of a thing from birth to death. I don't think a new thing, a freshly built guitar, can really be "sabi" except in the embrace of the birth as well as the life and the eventual death. 20 or 50 years from now the guitar will have become "sabi", but not yet. Willie Nelson's "Trigger" has been mentioned and leaps to mind as "sabi" in a guitar, but I have many instruments that qualify. A road-worn 1946 Epiphone comes to mind.

It's funny. Every time I select a piece of wood and start to work with it I ask myself "I wonder what's inside of this?". If I find less than catastrophic imperfections, they get built into the thing. So I have knots, pin-holes, little curls of reversed grain and they contribute their imperfection to the finished whole. Maybe a little "Zen" without thinking about it?