After, we came home and it was still distressingly early. I worked on some collaged Christmas cards instead of embroidery because my embroidery hand is all messed up from too much embroidery. (It--my hand--gets all balky and hurty if I try to squeeze anything.) I finished the cards and could see the whole afternoon stretching ahead of me without some weird little crafty thing to do, so I asked Dave if he might want to peel himself away from Teh Internets and go to the aquarium.
Don't ask why I suggested the aquarium. I've only been there once, several years ago, and it was a huge disappointment. See, the last time I went, Dave and I had just returned from visiting the Monterey Bay Aquarium. After the aquarium in Monterey, the very oceans themselves are a let down--and I say that having been out in my very own wetsuit on the Great Barrier Reef--in the part of the GBR that is closed to everyone but scientists doing research, mind you, so that it's teeming with reef sharks and sea turtles and eels and octopuses and...and what I'm trying to say is that, on the scale of aquarium excitement, the aquarium in my little desert town is roughly equivalent to a little plastic wading pool sprinkled with a handful of sand dollars.
But no matter. We went.
Here is a photo that Dave took of one of my favorite creatures, a crystal jellyfish.
Dave's most favorite creature was a lumpy little albino sea turtle. (We didn't get a picture unfortunately.)
And here's a thing: Walking around the aquarium made me long for the days of public outings in Japan, where people use their indoor voices to have conversations and where the natural inclination that children have to be loud and animated in public is swiftly and appropriately stifled by their keepers. Today's obnoxious Americans and their ear-splitting, rangy spawn annoyed me mightily. (I would have made a divine old, spinsterish librarian, don't you think? Instead it looks like I'm headed for crazy old cat lady territory--which is kind of awesome, too, actually.)
After we left the aquarium, we went right next door to the botanic garden where our ticket stubs granted us free entry.
The Garden
Kelly First has been urging me to go and check out one of the newest parts of the garden, a Japanese-style addition. When I was in Japan, I visited several famous gardens, not just in Tokyo but in Hiroshima, Kyoto, and Okayama, too. The gardens in Japan were magnificent even to me, a botany-ignorant non-gardener.
So how about our little Japanese garden? How did it stack up to the gardens of Japan? Well, here are my impressions of the Japanese-style garden here in my little city:
-The bones of the garden are nice. The designer, Toru Tanaka, left many of the native trees and plants intact while adding quintessential Japanese-garden elements. The cottonwood trees especially blend very beautifully with the well-manicured Japanese pines.
-The stone bridges? Are pure Japan.
I took that photo today; my Docs perched on this stone bridge:
By way of comparison, here is a photo I took in Japan, of a stone bridge in Korakuen in Okayama:
-The water feature in our garden is very nice, but far too large, too ostentatious. There was little, if any, ostentation in the gardens I visited in Japan.
-The big, gray plastic trashcans that dotted the path were a huge turnoff. (I did, of course, miss the vending machines. Yes, there were vending machines *everywhere* in Japan, even in the gardens.)
-I really felt that there needed to be some effort to explain what things are. (Not just in the Japanese garden, but in all the gardens. Even the barest amount of signage would help. The plant labeling is nice, but there is nothing--nothing--nothing to explain beyond the plant labeling. It's a huge educational misfire. The gardens are filled with teachable moments left unteached. Or something. Something?)
For example: What is the significance of the gate in a Japanese garden? Well, if there were a sign, you'd know that passing through a gate like this is a kind of purification ritual. You're moving from the "polluted" state into a more pure state, into nature. The biggest temple gardens have three gates, to represent different levels of purification. It reflects the importance of "outer circle" and "inner circle" in Japanese culture. But as there's no sign to explain, uh, isn't that a pretty Japanese gate?
-And I want to make two points with this photo of our little garden:
First, the lanterns are too new. It's a nitpicky point, yes, but that was what I thought when I looked at the lanterns. Those came right out of Home Depot's garden center, no? Second, forget the lantern in that photo and compare that photo to the following photo of a tiny maple grove in Korakuen, Okayama:
Notice anything about the two photos? No? Look again. Forget the lantern. Forget the trees.
Can you see the difference now? Not yet?
Let me tell you that I visited both gardens (Korakuen and the garden here) in late fall/early winter. Look again. See how clean the ground is in the Korakuen photo? That was taken soon after those maple trees dropped their leaves. Do you see a single fallen maple leaf? No, you don't. In that first photo, you see nothing but fallen cottonwood leaves. I'd guess that to a Japanese, that first photo looks more like a junkyard than a garden.
Let me offer two things:
The first thing is a quote from Hayao Miyazaki, the famous Japanese filmmaker, who, speaking of his wife's hobby said, "She's not a gardener, she's a facist." Miyazaki knew that at the heart of every Japanese gardener is an ironclad, iron-willed facist. Japanese gardeners do not tolerate messiness of any kind, in any form. The second thing is from a student of mine who was the daughter of a Buddhist monk. When Dave and I went to visit her family's temple in Tokyo, we toured the garden. She apologized for the leaves on the ground. "My father," she said, "hasn't cleaned today." She knew that a leaf doesn't hit the ground in Japan that it isn't picked up, preferably within the hour. It is something to be apologized for, this business of letting fallen leaves remain on the ground.
So a path like this, unraked and strewn with fallen leaves? Is a disgrace. I mean it. I would be as embarrassed to bring a friend from Japan to this garden as I would to bring a guest into my dirty, dirty house.
Seems crazy, no? The adherence to that kind of mindset, I mean. It seems all uptight and unnecessary, doesn't it? But in fact, the adherence to that kind of mindset is what makes a garden a Japanese garden. It's not the plants. It's not a bunch of stone lanterns. The most famous Japanese Zen gardens don't even have plants. They don't have lanterns and charming little bridges over water features. They don't even have water features. So what is it that makes a Japanese garden Japanese? It's the cleanliness, the discipline, the austerity.
The austere cleanliness of gardens in Japan is absolutely necessary. The exactitude of that austerity serves to make Japanese gardens bracingly, almost soul-scathingly exquisite. The discipline of that austerity intensifies the wild abundance of nature, refines it into a feeling, into a poem that shows you that nature can, paradoxically, never be tamed. That austerity is the finest line that can be drawn between something natural and something man-made. Ah, I'm not even coming close to explaining what I mean. So let me tell you this: The photograph above, the one of the bare-branched maple trees at Korakuen? I came home from Okayama to Tokyo, downloaded that photo onto my computer and, without thinking, gave it the title: Why I Came.
I called it that because the moment I saw that ground, those trees, that garden, I knew the reason I came to Japan. Of that moment I could say: I came to see this. To experience this and only this. To be present and aware in this moment. The feeling was laid bare by the knife-like austerity of that garden.
I didn't know it until I saw it, but the moment I saw it, it was very clear even to me, a botany-ignorant non-gardener.
The ability to evoke that feeling is what makes a garden a Japanese garden. Our little garden is a nice garden with some Japanese things in it. Can you see the difference now?
No comments:
Post a Comment