Читать книгу The Art of Setting Stones - Marc Peter Keane - Страница 8

I have been sitting in this old temple for over an hour, looking out at the garden from a room that is a model of planar geometry expressed in subtle shades of sepia: clay-plastered walls sectioned neatly by posts and beams, modular tatami mats, and grid-patterned paper doors. In contrast, the garden is a verdant transcendence of mathematics. It’s early spring; the world seems to tremble, everything emergent, being born anew. The camellias off to the side of the garden are full blown, dropping not petal by petal but in their entirety, clumping like clotted blood around the base of the trees.

In the garden there is a pond, neatly tucked between the temple and the hillside beyond. It reminds me of a pearl of water caught in the hollow of a lotus leaf, glistening like liquid mercury—pure as the soul of Buddha. A dense forest encompasses the rear of the pond, hiding it in shadow, but off to the right the trees become more sparse, giving way to a moss-covered yard in which stands an old prayer hall, weathered and noble. The trees in the yard, with more space between them than those in the forest, have filled out majestically and carry their crowns high above the moss. From where I sit, inside the temple hall, the vertical lines of the posts along the veranda echo the straight, brown, cedar trunks in the yard beyond. Two forests: one live, one lumbered.

Through the trees that ring the pond the sky shows in moving patches of blue and white. Clouds passing overhead let sunlight through intermittently, at times strong then fading, rising again, and as the landscape brightens and dulls it seems to twist and bend, expanding and contracting into pools of light and shadow. Now the sun is out and a soft light filters down through layers of translucent new maple leaves to the smooth surface of the pond, reflecting a cool pale green on the trees and boulders at the water’s edge. Waves of light ripple off the water, shimmer up the stones, the trunks and branches of the trees, rising in endless waves as if returning to the sun. A small brown warbler, an uguisu, flits back and forth among the branches, restless with nervous energy.

Everything about this place seems to belong here. The water that slips out from the shadows of the forested hillside at the back of the pond and pools before running on to the river below. The temple that sits so comfortably by the pond, shaded by the spreading cover of old trees. The gravel path leading out to the prayer hall, meandering to avoid tree roots as it winds through the carpet of moss. All of these seem not to be separate elements fitted together in one place, but rather elements that are very much of the place. Born of it, nurtured by it, at one with it. Complete.

What keeps recurring in my mind, and what has kept me here in this chilly hall for the last hour, is the question of where the mountain ends and where the garden begins. What here is natural and what man-made? Surely the path through the moss was built, and the gray granite lantern in the shadows of the maples by the back of the pond was set there, no doubt about that. But what about the smooth boulder the lantern rests on, or the maple that arches gracefully above it, or the pond itself? Were these set out by design or have they always been here? The whole appears seamlessly connected—mountain, pond, mossy yard, and temple, too—and somewhere in that unity I feel lies the mystery of the garden.

The desire to understand that integrity has set me hunting for the boundaries of the garden, but it occurs to me now that, as is so often the case, the difficulty in finding the answer is that the question is all wrong. What I am puzzling over is not what is natural and what man-made, but “What is nature?” Concealed in that question is the essence of the garden.

What is nature? If common usage of the word is taken as its definition, nature would be that which occurs without the impetus of the human hand or exists free from its control. After all, we consider the words “natural” and “man-made” to be opposites, defining each other in the negative. Yet, the moment we accept that definition, we separate ourselves from nature, placing ourselves outside looking in, which we are not. However much we may wish to set ourselves apart by defining a hierarchy of living things, with us conveniently on top, there is no separation. We are integral to the whole.

There are some rare moments in our lives when that unity appears so clearly it stuns as it pleases, like the first gulp of air after a long dive. I felt it in Canada one night canoeing on a pond after a thunderstorm. The air was crystalline, cleansed by the rain. Shards of lightning crackled off in the distance as the last black clouds eased over toward the horizon, and in the ensuing calm an ocean of stars flowed out into an ink-black sky and cast themselves across the glassy surface of the water. Stars above, stars below, and a boy gliding silently through them, paddling through the universe. I have felt it floating motionless on the surface of the warm sea off Hawaii, bobbing gently, each breath in synchrony with the rhythms of the surf as if the waves were breathing for me. I feel like it might happen here and now, and just the thought sends shivers along the skin of my back.

I have felt the unity, but not often; those moments are rare and magical. And I also see that people do things that suggest we are separate from nature, “unnatural” things that appear to make us different from other species. We murder our own kind, wage cruel and calculated wars. But if cold-bloodedness is proof of our unnaturalism, consider for a moment the callous acts of some other species. Lions are known to consume their own offspring, inexplicably, still wet and clinging at the moment of birth. Dominant males among social primates will kill the young of others to free their mothers for their own seed. Female praying mantises devour their mates while copulating, crunching away from head on down, even as the remains of the hapless males continue to pump away at procreation. If we look objectively at the world, without beginning our inquiry with the predetermined bias of a man/nature division, the question that immediately comes to mind is: “Are we so different?”

A break in the clouds momentarily highlights the valley beyond the prayer hall. From end to end it is filled with boxlike houses and a maze of powerlines. Not a single tree in sight. The light fades again and the valley recedes, leaving me with an image of ugliness, cold and suddenly sad. Perhaps just this sort of wanton destruction of the environment for selfish purposes is the deciding factor that sets us apart from the rest of the ecosystem. We harvest more than we return, cauterize our rivers with concrete, despoil our land with toxic waste. But even as I think this I am reminded of North American beavers, flooding entire valleys to build their homes and in the process drowning neighbors by the thousands in their earthy burrows. Trees, too, die by the acre, their roots submerged and suffocated. The beavers, who build their houses of these trees, fell them and then use the very pond that killed them to float the trunks where they wish. Admirably efficient selfishness. Are we so different? We kill for selfish purposes; we lay our own backyard to waste.

The little brown warbler has been flitting between the trees in the forest. It flies out of the trees into the streaked light by the pond, hides briefly in a hedge by the temple hall, then back to the forest, quick across the water, lost in the shadows and gone. The uguisu sees no boundary: forest canopy and garden hedge are equally home. I watch as it emerges again and crosses over to the old prayer hall, which sits well above the ground on a platform of stone, its roof held high by twelve massive wooden columns. A sense of pride is expressed in its erect posture, and one of grace in the upward sweeping lines of the roof, supported by a wondrously complex puzzle of interlocking wooden brackets. The temple eloquently expresses the spiritual desires of the priest who commissioned it; the harmonic balance of the whole remains as a tribute to human achievement.

So perhaps it is not our destructive capacity so much as our noble acts, our higher achievements in science and art, like the graceful prayer hall, that separate us from the rest of nature. But are we really that advanced? Does our architecture in any way but size, for instance, surpass the gossamer, crystalline webs of spiders? The microscopic intricacy of their silken threads, which apparently are actually sheathed cables of pleated keratin, is well beyond the present capabilities of human science to explain let alone reproduce, and although arachnids may not be adept at a wide range of skills, when it comes to construction detailing, their genius is downright humbling. One such creature, all black and yellow and needle legs, inhabits my front garden. Somehow, in the space between the fir tree and the huge gardenia that frame the entry walk, she finds just the right twigs to anchor her threads, and though I don’t imagine she can see well enough to design the whole from afar, nonetheless, her master planning is impeccable.

Despite prolific examples like these of the overwhelming complexity of the organic world, we still tend to pride ourselves that the sophistication of our technology shows us to be not just one of the multitude of species, but in a class by ourselves. And yet, what if we compare human achievement with that of other species; for instance, compare a nuclear reactor with a leaf—both producers of energy. By applying the greatest concentration of intellect and capital currently available we can build reactors and make them work, barely. Can anyone build a leaf? Music is another of our great accomplishments, but surely none of the astounding variety of instruments we have invented emits a sound more moving and potent than the dulcet call of the little brown uguisu, darting now among the trees—a melodious blur. Are we so different? We build, we sing.

At the end of the room is a tokonoma, a small alcove in which artwork is displayed. Its floor is a single panel of beautifully grained wood; the walls are clay. Shadows gather about the back of the recessed space but a soft light from the garden casts across the front, illuminating a rough earthenware vase in which stands a single stem of tree peony. The twisted, gray branch is tipped with a feathery red bud the size of a quail egg, already beginning to open. A row of more peonies grows along the veranda, echoing the single bud in the room, hundreds of russet spots that flit this way and that as if dabbed onto the stems in quick strokes. The changing light shifts within the bare branches catching the uguisu flitting within. It darts back out, across the pond into the trees above the waterfalls disappearing suddenly upon entering the shadows as if switched off. Peonies in vases, peonies in ground; forests of pillars and forests of trees. Inside and out stitched together with gossamer threads of intimation and mood. Art, architecture, garden, mountain—the whole conversing, interrelated if not indivisible.

Of course the world is divisible, and so much the better. What strange slurry would result if all the parts dissolved one into the other? We cannot do so, we should not, even though some species almost have, like the lichen that patterns the garden stones with circular gray blooms. I could go over and touch them, peer down at the thin flaky disks with magnifier in hand and still never see the odd truth: that lichen is not a single, separate thing, but two—algae and fungus—living together so closely as to be indiscernible. Blue-green algae offers carbohydrates to the fungal host; the fungus in return provides shelter, a solid structure the algae doesn’t have. It’s a relationship that works, famously. The two have lasted together, in one form or another, since the early Devonian period, four hundred million years ago. But symbiotic relationships this immediate are rare, and so much the better. We have our own forms for a reason.

We are integral to nature, not outside looking in, but neither are we intended to be wholly unified, lying close with lion and sheep in a pastoral valley. That’s too cozy. In some ways we are symbiotic—like lichen though not as rarefied—living with other species in relationships based on mutual dependency and support. Yet we are also predators, and at times parasites, taking from our environment without returning the favor. We prey on some, share with others; give a little, take a little. Whether this is a good thing or not all comes down to a question of balance, and balance is where we fail: we are not as extreme in our symbiotism as lichen, but we push parasitism to the limit.

Para means “beside” and site “food”; the original meaning of the word was “one who eats at another’s table.” Some parasites are just annoying guests who grab from your table, like the spider mites in your hair, so minuscule you’re not even aware of them. Others cause serious injury to their host, some fatally. The stunning thing in all of this is that some parasites actually die with the host they kill. Can it be so? That life can be ingrained with such reckless abandon? When a parasite unwittingly destroys itself with its host it really should be called an “autosite” because it’s feeding at its own table, on itself, and therein lies the fundamental debate. We need not ask if we are part of nature or not; we’ve been dealt in from the start. And it’s not a question of whether or not we should fall into a perfect symbiosis with all of nature, like hands entwined in prayer. That is as unattainable as it is undesirable. The question is, are we autosites, parasitic to the point that we are eating away at ourselves? We may not be lichen, but are we locusts?

Locusts turn out to be simply grasshoppers under stress. Crowded beyond a certain genetically triggered limit, they clump and mass on the dusty savannah, restless, clattering madly while they metamorphose into their migratory form. Their mandibles grow, wings expand, and body color heightens to the delirious. Exhilarated by their own energy, they swarm, darkening the sky. Spreading across the land in numbers that have been calculated in the billions they consume everything in their path until, having recklessly eradicated their own source of life, they die, en masse.

We probably reached our inbred limit long ago; its hard to tell, we don’t color like locusts, but our ancestors have been migratory for the last million years. And delirious. We spread out and, about ten thousand years ago, we too started really darkening the land, consuming everything in our path. The old story.

It won’t matter a tick to nature if we blow it. In fact, like locusts, even if we do self-destruct, we’ll more than likely rebound in time, in some form or other. Total and absolute self-annihilation is unlikely, but that’s not a real selling point for wanton recklessness. Who wants to be among the unlucky ninety-nine percent?

We live in a perpetual repetition of life and death—consuming and being consumed—a basic truth as applicable to subatomic particles as it is to galaxies. Hindus call it samsara; to Japanese it’s rinne, the Great Wheel turning. Scientists calculate the sums of the parts and call it ecology; ecological visionaries synthesize those sums into Gaia, a self-regulating living entity that covers and interpenetrates the entire planet.

I look into the garden and see fragile edges blurring into a mountain. The sunlight is strong; the moss boundless. Time coats everything. Lost in this country temple, lost here in thought, lost in a dream of another time and place, I feel that if I sit any longer I too will succumb to the patina and be rooted in this hall forever, facing the pond and courtyard with its sunlight that never lights the scene the same way twice.

I look outside again and something happens, at once strange and wonderful. I take a deep breath to enjoy the scent of the forest and the universe inhales with me. Suddenly, and with great force, the air expands. The shimmering forest on the other side of the pond snaps into focus, each flickering leaf a story, its countless watery cells rushing as audibly as the waterfall. The tatami runs cool and smooth beneath my fingers. A sweet scent beckons, barely apprehensible. Witchhazel flowers, this late in the season? The uguisu cries, sharp and utterly clear like a Noh master’s drum. Not a thing has changed, not a drop, not a photon, and yet I am new. Now not on the floor—part of it. Not in the temple—I am the temple, and I am immensely old; I have been here forever. I am the mountain and the pond, I know the air and the water and the trees by name. I am them. The uguisu flies over, settles lightly in my branches and sings.

I wish this feeling would last for eternity. I flow within the garden, filling the space between the trees and temple like air, listening to the echoes of stories that linger there. The mountain begets the temple, its ancient trees becoming the wooden frame, its clay earth the sepia walls. The pond water speaks of oceans it had passed through, of rising in vortices through electric thunderheads, of settling down as mist caressing the forest nearby. And sudden beams of sunlight flash a complex language; a sermon of combustion and fusion, booming like the voice of God.

The sliding door behind me opens with a sharp clap. I am awakened to the enormity of what I have been feeling, but in the moment of realization the feeling is gone—vaporous morning dew rising off garden moss. The tatami remain cool to the touch. The maples in the garden are still verdant, swaying back and forth in the gentle breeze like kelp in ocean waves. The uguisu is gone without trace. An elderly couple who just entered the room sit quietly in the corner opposite me. Did they notice that I was on fire, burning in unison with the universe? Did they see the warbler flitting through my branches, chirping in my ear?

In some way it remains with me, the unity, the instant of being whole, not separated into nature or man but simply alive. Complete in the moment. Still tingling, I feel anew the indivisibility of nature; that we cannot separate ourselves from the rest of the natural world by any of our acts. Rather we come to see that those acts are simply our nature. We do them because we are capable of them; they are inherent in us. We kill and ruin not because we are unnatural but because it is within our nature to do so. Likewise, we cannot elevate ourselves above nature on any testimonial to the refinement of our character. We design and create not because we are supranatural, but simply because those qualities also are in our nature. We do all these things as naturally as the uguisu flies and sings.

It is in our nature to build and to create, as much as it is to be wild and brute. When the wild calls, I will run through the mountains and sweat, give blood to leeches that cling to grasses by clear streams. But when struck by the muse to create, I will make a garden, be an artist in nature, for gardens reveal to us what is best in our nature. The garden is a place for the gentle builder and humble artist to call their home, a place for them, and all those who visit thereafter, to find their way back to a unified world where there are no boundaries. No point where the garden ends and the mountain begins.