The Art of Setting Stones. Marc Peter Keane
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.
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