The Art of Setting Stones. Marc Peter Keane
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.
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