Читать книгу The Art of Setting Stones - Marc Peter Keane - Страница 7

North of Kyoto, low mountains extend in ranks that continue uninterrupted to the sea. Except for narrow strips of open flatland in the valleys, cleared sometime in the distant past for rice fields and hamlets, the mountains are covered by thick coniferous forests and in places an older, primordial vegetation. The passing wind filters down through the leafy canopy and there, amid endless shadows, it moistens and cools, grows heavy, and begins to flow ever so slowly down the mountainsides toward the valleys below, slipping gently through scattered bracken and piles of fallen branches edged with moss.

At the base of one of those mountains, lying in the path of such a cooling breeze, is a small walled garden. The breeze enters, carrying in the scent of the forest and at times a fine mist that makes its flow perceptible—just barely and for a brief moment. Then the mist dissolves and only the trembling of slender bamboo leaves reveals the currents in the air. Nearing the house, the air slows and meanders in random spirals, pooling above the moss, among the trunks of the garden trees. In cycles it gusts, subsides, then grows stronger again, and though the rhythm of these subtle surges is neither uniform nor constant, somehow they suggest a quiet breathing.

In the garden, just beyond reach of where I sit on the veranda, is a round camellia tree covered with large, oval flower buds, pointed and green, protruding above a bed of dark, glossy leaves. The buds are fat like silkworm cocoons ready to burst, and one in particular seems right on the verge of opening, the dark-green sheath that wraps the flower eased open just enough to reveal a glimpse of pink within. It intrigues me and I wait patiently for the moment it will open, hoping I’ll be watching when it does. It’s not the flower I’m interested in, although I’m sure it will be beautiful. No, it’s the moment that I await, the instant of opening, when the bud, fed to satisfaction on the nectar of the tree, will suddenly transform and blossom.

For the past two days I have been staying with a poet who lives here on the outskirts of Kyoto. The garden is to the rear of his old wooden house, just where the slope of the mountain levels to the valley floor. A quiet place, the garden has more in common with the mellow rhythms of the forest than the urgency of the nearby city, and the earthen wall that surrounds it is only partially successful at dividing it from the woods beyond. The breeze, of course, ignores all such borders; a large camphor tree and a stand of tall bamboo arch over the garden from outside the wall, casting pools of shade that foster a velvet moss; a small brook winds under the wall and murmurs quietly past me, half-hidden by azaleas and tufts of ferns.

Suddenly the sound of clattering plates comes from the next room. My host, Yukio, now in his mid-seventies, must be getting up and about. He’s a character, endearingly old-fashioned. More often than not he strolls about in wooden sandals and kimono, sporting a dapper, wide-brimmed linen hat in the turn-of-the-century Taisho style. Like his clothes, his house is traditionally appointed, except for the veranda where I now sit and on which he has set two low rattan chairs and a small table. He enjoys nothing more than entertaining his guests there, within arm’s reach of the garden.

Called an engawa, the veranda is less than a meter wide, floored with long, slim planks of fine-grained wood now smooth and dark from years of use. It serves as both a corridor connecting the rooms of the house and as a place from which to enjoy the garden. Sitting here alone today, sipping pale green tea, I watch the morning light fall softly over the budding camellia, reflecting on when I last saw the garden—how then, as now, it seemed to capture a moment of time.

It was December last, at the funeral for Yukio’s wife, Chizuru. A cold day, but not bitterly so, perhaps only because the house was so full of guests kneeling shoulder to shoulder on the tatami, facing an altar that had been set up for the funeral at the front of the room. A black-and-white photo of Chizuru taken some years earlier was set in the center, surrounded by flowers and delicate gilded ornaments. By the altar, a priest knelt reciting sutras, accompanying his rhythmic chants by striking a hollow wooden gong, a sound that both mesmerized and awakened. From my seat at the back of the room, I watched him over rows of black mourning suits, each drawn in a loose curve across a somber back.

In front of the altar was a low table on which was set a small ceramic urn half-filled with fine ash and a few glowing embers. The guests each added three pinches of powdered incense as they took turns to approach the altar to pray, and as the powder fell onto the glowing coals, wisps of pale smoke rose quickly and disappeared. The woody scent pervaded the house: sweet, pungent, somewhat medicinal, recalling ancient temple halls and the darkly gilded Buddhas hidden amid their perpetual shadows.

Off to the right, past the mourners, beyond the veranda, the garden lay covered by a layer of new snow. The sun was muted by dark gray clouds, the garden shadowless, and so it appeared no more real than an ink painting—flat and layered, having depth but no volume. I rose to take my turn at the altar, gave incense and prayer, then turned to see Chizuru in her coffin, pausing briefly for a last look at her white face shrouded in crisp linen. Returning to my place on the tatami, I glanced outside and was struck by how the garden, too, seemed exceptionally pale and peaceful. I thought it couldn’t have been a more beautiful time for her funeral, and that Chizuru, as an artist, would have agreed.

The tall bamboos beyond the garden wall were bent over under the weight of the snow, lending the garden an air of sadness. There was, as well, a sense of closure in the garden that seemed appropriate. All the leaves were gone from the maples, and the bushclovers, which had just a short while earlier filled the garden with their soft autumn colors, were now cut back to the point where only stiff clusters of barren stems stuck out from beneath the cover of snow. Gone, too, were the bell crickets whose metallic chirping had echoed in the garden on cool autumn nights, their husks now silent, cold, and brittle beneath the garden’s white mantle.

As I watched, it began to snow, large flakes descending more slowly than gravity should allow, floating straight down out of a gray windless sky and gathering on the ground without making a sound. The snow fell earthward in endless lines; yet from where I sat inside, it felt instead as if we were rising, the room and garden together ascending through icy clouds to heaven.

The winter garden and the funeral were perfectly aligned, a time of ending. Yet Chizuru believed fervently in reincarnation, the continuation of souls beyond death in another time and space. It was something we had talked about late into the night on more than one occasion, with me usually playing devil’s advocate, prodding the conversation forward with my disbelief. Watching the frozen garden, I began to feel differently. Couldn’t it be, even as the garden remained dormant beneath the snow awaiting the warmth of spring—as the buds of next year’s growth, even then in coldest winter, set themselves in incalculable numbers; as the sap that would fuel that growth, gathered and pooled in deep-rooted reserves—that Chizuru’s soul was somewhere, in a time or a space intangible, gathering and pooling in preparation for a Spring unknown to us? If the cycles of time that are inherent in the garden are simply an expression of fundamental principles of nature, and if those same principles are expressed in all of nature’s myriad forms, then why not in life itself?

On the day of her funeral there was a small photo of Chizuru in the entry hall, a sepia print, somewhat faded at the edges. It showed her dressed in a loose summer yukata, pregnant with her first child, sitting on the engawa, her legs dangling over the edge into the garden. She seemed so young in the picture, as did the garden. The photo must have been taken just after she married Yukio and they built the house, and I realized in seeing it that Chizuru’s life for the last fifty years had been intertwined with this house—had been in time with this garden. I remember Yukio telling me that he had planted a tree each time one of his children was born: a pine for his eldest son, a plum for the first girl; the others I don’t recall. The children are grown now, as are the trees. I wonder what they think when they look into the garden and see a living marker of their time on earth? When I was young, perhaps just one or two, my father stuck a willow twig in the ground in our backyard, and it took root. By the time I was old enough to climb, the willow was big enough to hold me, and by the time I got too old for those things, the willow had grown too big to climb anyway. For my part, that willow has always seemed both a marker of time and a childhood friend.

The camellia bud remains unopened, so I look about the garden for other changes. There’s something about the garden today that makes it appear unusually solid, voluptuous, and tangible, not the two-dimensional thing it was during Chizuru’s funeral. The pines are lush with dark needles, the moss deep and verdant, hummocked into miniature hills; even the shadows of the gray, lichened stones hug the ground like patches of thick, dark carpet. It rained heavily yesterday, and the neatly trimmed plants have swelled luxuriantly. There is also something about the rain-washed air, a clarity of light and shadow, that makes the garden seem more three-dimensional.

Into that solidity, a plum tree casts its spent blossoms. It had been flowering brilliantly for a few days but yesterday’s rain and today’s warmth have pushed the flowers toward the verge of decay. The tiny fibrous tendrils that tie the petals to their stems have loosened to the point where the slightest breeze detaches them. Each time the wind gusts, a puff of pink-white dots gushes like confetti, floats briefly on the current of air, drifts, then pools neatly on the moss around the bases of trees and the garden rocks. Such a short time between when the new buds open and when the flowers fall. They never even seem to fade but simply cast off into the wind—so utterly carefree. If the pines and stones are solid, then the cascades of plum blossoms are liquid, and when they scatter, the garden seems more river than terra firma.

Time, too, is liquid. It flows like the brook that murmurs in from the forest and, like that brook, it moves continuously but not consistently. As the brook sometimes eddies and gathers in slowly spiraling pools that still to the point of silence, so too there is a time that passes slowly, in a measured, unhastened way. And as there are places where water surges forward, slipping fast and smooth in dark, glassy sheets between rounded boulders or stumbling white and ragged over rocky stretches, so too is there a kind of time that hurries along, passes all too quickly, and is gone.

The sun, having risen above the grove of bamboo, angles into the veranda and warms my legs, illuminating the page of a book that lies open on the table. The book is a Japanese commentary on the I Ching, an ancient Chinese classic that delves into the mysteries of the physical world. The I Ching has been called the Book of Changes, a name that reveals the central theme of the text: change is no more than the outward manifestation of time. Time itself cannot be perceived as an entity; instead, it is understood in the form of changes in the physical world that mark its passage, the way trembling leaves reveal a passing breeze. I have brought the commentary with me in hope that it will prove useful as a guide to change, and thus to time, in the garden. The sunlight highlights a section of the text I have been mulling over that contains two words, hen and fuhen, mutability and permanence, which express the dual nature of time.

The wind scatters more pink across the dark green moss. Plum blossoms—the consummate symbol of mutability in Japan. My favorite, though, is another, what the Japanese call shinryoku, the new green of spring. The transience of new leaves is not as noticeable as plum blossoms because, unlike the flowers, the leaves do not fall to mark the end of their youth. They remain on the tree and age; but with no less clarity, there is a time when their newness passes. At first a tender translucent green, incandescent as lapis lazuli, their color deepens and mellows as the leaves turn hard and protective. Like the porcelain clarity of a baby’s skin that turns opaque with time, the leaves lose their virginal hue; their moment is gone. When the maple leaves come out in another month or so there will be a brief time—a week or a day, perhaps no more than an hour—when the color of the garden verges on electric; after that it will just be green.

The breeze lofts again; a tiny bug that has been fluttering in the bushes near the veranda drifts over toward me. It alights briefly on the table then flits away, one of those lithe spring apparitions whose winged life spans only a few days—so short-lived it must view plum blossoms as eternal while we mourn their brevity. The cadence of time is not fixed by any timepiece, but rather is based on the perceptions of the observer. The touchstone against which we measure time is the human condition—the length of our life span, the number of our waking hours, the meter of our breaths and heartbeats. I imagine there are some rhythms in the garden so quick, so minute in their fluctuation, that they remain beyond the limit of our perception, the way infrared light does. And then there are rhythms, like those of plum blossoms, that we can perceive but because in comparison to our lives are so brief we term them ephemeral, evanescent. Plum blossoms and new green leaves; bamboo growing in a week-long panic from shoot to tree; a haze of moss-green that appears on the ground only briefly just after a rain and then disappears; the scent of kinmokusei blossoms that give but a week’s pleasure. But there are also changes that are not brief.

And so, like a river that flows at different speeds, there are many different currents of time within the garden. If plum blossoms and new leaves signify brevity, then the depth of time, as can only be revealed at a slower meter, is manifest elsewhere: in the patina of old clay walls, soft-green edging on their weathered brown scars; in the luster of granite paving stones polished smooth by the touch of passing feet; in the thick trunk and massive crown of the camphor tree that records the passage of centuries.

The wind picks up momentarily and my eye is caught by supple waving branches: a young silk tree at the east side of the garden. In Japan it is called the “sleeping tree,” nemunoki, because of the way its fernlike leaves fold up each evening, closing for the night as if going to sleep. At dawn the morning light urges them open again. The silk tree reminds me that the cadence of time in the garden is not just linear—not just a matter of being slow or fast—it is also cyclical. It shows in the leaves of the silk tree; in myriad shadows that play across the mossy floor of the garden from west to east, and repeat, patterned anew, each day; in unfolding seasons that eventually recur. The I Ching commentaries make an interesting comment on seasons: although they appear to be the epitome of change—one replacing the other ad infinitum—by annually returning to the point from which they started, they also express consistency. Change and continuity, it is written, are not mutually exclusive.

But even though the regenerative aspect of time expresses consistency or permanence, in the garden the close of each cycle also reveals new aspects—the plants are larger, the earthen walls a little more weathered, the ground somewhat mossier. The year returns in a cycle, spring to spring, fall to fall, but it is not exactly the same garden that greets the return.

Some day I would like to map that flow of time. I would draw it in fine gold lines on a large sheet of dark indigo paper the way the ancients used to write their sutras, one line for each thing in the garden: pine, maple, rock, brook, garden wall. Each would trace a spiral path, circling back upon itself to reflect the cyclical changes of the seasons, but also moving forward across the page expressing the changes inherent in linear time. A map of time in the garden would develop that way: dizzy spirals, thousands of them, twisted around each other, intersecting, falling away, regrouping—in the end, mazelike scribbles, incomprehensible but to the mind of God.

Although cycles of time can express permanence, in the garden the clearest symbol of eternity is the rock, an image of the mountain. Stones have been seen as icons of mountains since ancient times, like those that were used to represent Mount Sumeru, which the Buddhist and Hindu religions propose to be the center of the universe. Sumeru is described in legend as being immobile, unchanging, the one fixed element in the Great Flux. Rocks are of course not immutable; they change, but at a pace so slow that, when compared to our lives, they do seem eternal. In Yukio’s garden there is one rock set apart, somewhat higher than the others, loosely pyramidal, with outward sloping sides. It too is a symbol of an eternal mountain, a reference against which to measure oneself. It doesn’t matter that it is not actually eternal, because it is simply an icon representing an ideal, a belief in something that cannot be . . . that which is without time.

These patterns of time are in the garden and yet they are also in the wild. Plum trees flower there just as readily, streams cross meadows with as many twists and bends, and granite mountains dwarf any garden rock. The difference between the wild and a garden is that the images of time in the garden are there because we put them there. In the same way we capture a moment of time when we write a poem or brush ink to paper, we plant a plum in the garden to revel in the beauty inherent in the brevity of life, or we set a rock there to give ourselves a glimmer of hope that there may be in this transient world things that are eternal. Although wild nature has the potential to convey the same meanings, gardens do so more succinctly. To some degree this may be because gardens are often physically closer to our lives and thus more accessible, but the eloquence of the garden also stems from the fact that it is not wild, that in having been created by human hands, it is more like us, more reflective of our mentality.

A faint woody scent comes on the breeze. Yukio has been tending the small altar in the next room and must have lit some incense. Smelling it, I recall Chizuru’s funeral, when everything was clothed in white and the garden harbored the very moment of a death in the silence of its own sleep—so different from the garden today, flush with new life. Looking back at the camellia, I see that the flower has opened. I missed it, but I’m not surprised. These moments are elusive.

The soft, pink flower pushes outward, bathed in sunlight, and I recall a day long ago, a moment not dissimilar. Coming home from work, my young son ran to greet me out of the shadows of our house. As he stepped out into the warm afternoon light, I saw to my surprise an older child than I anticipated. Just a flash—the strength with which he held his head, the tautness of the skin around his eyes. I found myself facing a boy, not a baby, and simply couldn’t remember when that change had happened. The boy, like the flower—it is not the process of their changing but the realization of their having changed that impresses the mind because it is in that moment we sense time most clearly.

Yukio calls from the next room. I close the book on the table and sip the last drops from my cup, taking a few tea leaves with it. They taste green, like grass. I should go see what he wants, but I linger at the garden’s side. The breeze lifts and falls in a sigh, nudging the plum blossoms that lie in drifts like pink dunes against the garden stones. The brevity of blossoms, the timelessness of stones—perhaps we enjoy nature’s rhythms in our gardens because they remind us of the rhythms of our own lives. In the corners of the garden that are most fragile and most constant; in the vast, complex wheel of the seasons; in just one small, nascent blossom—there is a poem of time in which we read our histories and sense by that our futures.