The Art of Setting Stones. Marc Peter Keane
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.
BOUNDARIES
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