The Philosophy of Stripes

I don't really pay that much attention to fashion. Occasionally I check in with the Sartorialist to see what beautiful people he's found lately in this or that corner of Paris, Rome, or Tokyo. And every week I watch Bill Cunningham's On the Street, though really more for a chance to hear him say the word "maavelous" and listen to his obvious enthusiasm for getting paid to go around town taking pictures than for any fashion trends he may be spotting out there.

In his video this week, Wistful, Bill waxes poetic on the rich colors of the Manhattan spring, showing us both Japanese wisteria (fuji) and azalea (tsutsuji). He then likens the incipient fashion of bold, vertical stripes in women's clothes this season to the dripping wisteria. My first reactions was "Oh, that's maavelous Bill — but a bit of a stretch."

But then yesterday, I happened to pick up a striped book in the bookstore called, strangely, The Structure of Iki, which pretty much confirmed what good old Bill was saying:

.... (V)ertical stripes appear to the eyes as parallel lines more easily than horizontal ones. The fact that our eyes are lined up horizontally right and left makes it easier for us to follow the parallel lines set up by a design of vertical stripes running side by side, so that a design that embodies the fundamental parallel relationship horizontally appears to the right and left of one another. Somewhat more effort is required to perceive horizontal stripes, where the fundamental of the parallel relationship is defined vertically by the two lines — one below the other. In other words, because our eyes are placed horizontally, spatial relationships of objects can generally be more clearly expressed when they are oriented horizontally. Thus, in the case of parallel vertical lines our eyes clearly perceive the discrete opposition of the two lines. The opposite is true of parallel horizontal stripes. There, our eyes perceive the side to side successive continuity of a line. 

(I guess that phenomenon explains why I'm not so partial to French sailor shirts.)

The author then goes on to liken vertical stripes to light rain brought down by gravity or willow branches hanging down; conversely, he likens horizontal stripes to the heaviness of geologic strata. He sums up by saying: "horizontal stripes make an object look wider by directing our gaze side to side. Vertical stripes do the opposite, narrowing objects by directing our gaze up and down."

He does make some exceptions to this general rule; for example, a horizontally striped sash in tandem with a vertically striped kimono; or horizontal straps on sandals to offset a vertically running wood grain or lacquer.

Anyway, I'll have to write another post on the concept of iki — the author himself argues that it's not directly translatable into other languages, though smart, stylish, or chic are the approximations my dictionary gives.

The text, which originally appeared in the philosophy magazine Shisō (Thought) in 1930, has been translated by Hiroshi Nara and is nicely presented on facing pages in Japanese and English. I'm not sure of its availability outside of Japan as it appears that Kodansha International has gone extinct. Anyway, here's a link to Nara's web page at Pitt.

I'll try sharing some more nuggets from the book in the coming days — the notes are especially fascinating and informative.

As always, thanks for reading.

Whither Materiality

Chatting with one of my students yesterday, a middle manager in his forties, I learned from him that his company was preparing for a Shinto blessing of a new filtration system at one of their chemical plants.

Not only would they give thanks to the old system for its having served them well for the past forty or fifty years, but they would welcome in the new one with the hopes that it would serve equally admirably for at least as long.

While to some this act might seem deeply superstitious, a superfluous gesture hide-bound in tradition, to me it touches on a deep, metaphysical question.

To wit, Do machines have souls? (Japanese, or at least those who are adherents of Shinto, would probably not word it this way, instead taking it for granted that materials possess ki, a kind of essence or spirit.)

Well, do they, do machines have souls? That was the subject of last week's Car Talk episode (start at 28:00) wherein a caller from Davis, California wanted to know that if by swapping out the engine on his 1990 Isuzu Trooper he would be losing the car's soul.

There was, of course, some good-natured bantering on the question, but the consensus seemed to be that if indeed cars had souls, they would most certainly be located in the engine, so that the swap would most definitely result in the loss of the car's soul. Worse, by putting in a new engine, the caller was at risk of gaining an entirely new and potentially whimsical or dastardly one. (The guys seemed to be conflating soul with personality here, but so be it, they're comedians, not philosophers or semioticians.)

I'm not sure what someone like the late American physicist Richard Feynman would have done with these arguments, but I suspect he would have simply stowed the question in the category of things we don't know anything about. I don't think he would have said de facto that machines or objects don't possess spirit, just that until someone "proves" that they do, we'll have to be content with not knowing.

"Start out understanding religion by saying everything (we know) is possibly wrong."

Everything we think we know is possibly wrong.

And "I don't feel frightened by not knowing things."

I don't feel frightened by not knowing things.