An old woman goes by, very tiny, dressed in purple, with her head shaved, certainly a nun; she is wizened and bent almost double. Many old women in Japan are hunchbacked and twisted as if related to the dwarf trees cultivated in pots according to the ancient art of bonsai.
Even the shape of the tall trees is the result of careful pruning. Here are two gardeners pruning pine-trees, climbing up on triangular steps which have a bamboo supporting pole. It seems as if they are fleecing every branch-top with their fingers, leaving only a horizontal tuft, so that the tree’s crown spreads out like an umbrella.
The majority of the gardeners are women. A team of them advances along the path, dressed in what must be the traditional working outfit: blue trousers, a grey blouse, a kerchief on their head. They are low in stature beneath great bundles of dry leaves and baskets of branches and are armed with rakes and pruning hooks; it is impossible to say if they are young or old, but they are already knotted and contorted, as though adapting to the environment.
There is one thing I seem to be starting to understand here in Kyoto: something I’ve learned through the gardens more than through the temples and palaces. The construction of a nature that can be mastered by the mind so that the mind can in turn receive a sense of rhythm and proportion from nature: that is how one could define the intention that has led to the layout of these gardens. Everything here has to seem spontaneous and for that reason everything is calculated: the relationships between the colours of the leaves in the various seasons, between the masses of vegetation depending on their different times of growth, the harmonious irregularities, the paths that climb up and descend, the pools, the bridges.
The little lakes are an element in the garden that is just as important as the vegetation. There are usually two of them, one of flowing water, the other a still pool, which create two different landscapes, to tone in with two different states of mind. The Sento garden has two waterfalls as well: a male and female waterfall (Odaki and Medaki), the first high over the rocks, the second one murmuring as it rushes between steps made of little stones in a gap in the lawn.
The lawns have moss rather than grass. There is a moss that is made up of actual little plants a few centimetres high; in Japanese it is called cedar-moss because these little plants resemble minuscule conifers. (There is a temple in Kyoto whose garden is entirely covered in moss: you can count a hundred different kinds of moss there; or at least thirty, if you use more rigorous classifications. But with this temple of moss one enters a different world: it is as if one were entering a Nordic park soaked with rain. Actually every characterization that is too extreme takes us away from the true spirit of Japanese gardens, where no element ever takes precedence over another.)
Every aspect of the garden is designed to arouse admiration, but using only the simplest means: these are all familiar plants—no seeking after sensational effects. Flowers are almost absent; there are a few white and red camellias; it is autumn, and it is the leaves that supply the colour; but flowering plants are also absent; in spring it will be the fruit trees that will blossom.
Hillocks, rocks, slopes multiply the landscape. Groups of plants are arranged according to their mutual proportions in order to create illusions of perspective: backdrops of trees which seem to be distant are actually nearby; views of rises or descents suggest spaces that are not actually there. The Japanese passion for the small that provides the illusion of the big comes out also in the composition of the landscape.
I am being accompanied on my visit to Kyoto by a Japanese student who is a passionate reader of poetry and a poet himself: he reads Italian very well and speaks it a little too. But conversation is difficult because both of us would like to say things that are either too precise or too nuanced, and instead all we manage is to come up with statements that are either too generic or too peremptory.
The young man explains that, before being frequented by Emperors, these places were popular with famous poets, who are now commemorated by plaques and little temples amidst the trees. Following the line of my reflections, it occurs to me that poetry and gardens generate each other in turn: the gardens were created as illustrations for poems and the poems were composed as a commentary on the gardens. But I come to think of this more from my love of symmetry in my thoughts than because I am really convinced of it: or rather, I find it very plausible that one can make the equivalent of a poem with the way one arranges trees, but I suspect that real trees are of little or no use for writing a poem about trees.
Suddenly I see, standing out above the red, rust-coloured and yellow trees beyond the lake, the bare branches of a single tree that has lost its leaves. Amidst that blaze of colours those black, dead branches make a funereal contrast. A flock of birds flies past, and amidst all the other trees around they home straight in on the bare tree, swoop down on to its branches, landing there one by one, black against the sky, enjoying the November sunshine.
I think: right then, the landscape has given me the subject for a poem; if I knew Japanese, all I would need to do is describe this scene in three lines consisting of seventeen syllables in total, and I would have composed a haiku. I try conveying this idea to the young poet. He does not seem convinced. A sure sign that haikus are composed in a different way. Or that it makes no sense to expect a landscape to dictate poems to you, because a poem is made of ideas and words and syllables, whereas a landscape is composed of leaves and colours and light.
The rooms of the imperial palace, constantly destroyed and rebuilt over the course of the ten centuries that the Court resided at Kyoto, can be seen from the outside, through the open sliding doors, like a theatre stage. One mat that is higher than the others on the floor marks the place reserved for the Emperor. The Japanese house, the royal palace included, is a series of empty rooms and corridors, with mats instead of furniture, no chairs, beds or tables: a place where no one ever stands or sits, where people only crouch or are on their knees, with few objects placed on the ground or on low stools or in niches, such as a vase with a few branches in it, or a painted screen.
All trace of life seems to have been removed from this model house; there is none of the heavy weight of existences that materializes in our furnishings and impregnates all our Western rooms. Visiting the Court palaces in Kyoto or those of the great feudal landowners, one finds oneself wondering whether this aesthetic and moral ideal of the bare and unadorned was achievable only at the peak of authority and wealth, and whether it presupposed other houses chock-full of people and tools and junk and rubbish, with the smell of frying, sweat, sleep, houses full of bad moods, people rushing, places where people shelled peas, sliced fish, darned socks, washed sheets, emptied bed-pans.
These Kyoto villas, whether they were inhabited by sovereigns still in power or by those who were retired, convey the idea that it is possible to live in a world separate from what constitutes the real world, sheltered from the catastrophes and incongruities of history, a place which reflects the landscape of the wise man’s mind, free from all passions and neuroses.
Crossing over the Six-Slab Bridge, made of curved slabs of stone, and going along a path amidst the multi-coloured foliage of the dwarf-bamboo plants, I try to imagine myself as one of the former Emperors of an empire that was at the mercy of the whims and devastation carried out by the lawless landowners, perhaps cheerfully resigned to concentrating on the one operation that is still possible for him: contemplating and guarding the image of how the world should be.
Deep in these thoughts, I had wandered away from the group of visitors, when out from behind a hedge popped a custodian with a walkie-talkie who sent me back to the ranks. Wandering around the garden on your own is not allowed. Blending with the swar
m of tourists who open their camera lenses at every panoramic view, I can no longer create the distance necessary for contemplation. The garden becomes an indecipherable calligram.
‘Do you like all this?’ asked my student. ‘I cannot help thinking that this perfection and harmony cost so much misery to millions of people over the centuries.’
‘But isn’t the cost of culture always this?’ I object. Creating a space and time for reflection and imagination and study presupposes an accumulation of wealth, and behind every accumulation of wealth there are obscure lives subject to labour and sacrifices and oppression without any hope. Every project or image that allows us to reach out towards another way of being outside the injustice that surrounds us carries the mark of the injustice without which it could not have been conceived.
‘It is up to us to see this garden as “the space from another history”, born from our desire for history to obey other rules,’ I say, remembering I had recently read an introduction to Petrarch’s Canzoniere by Andrea Zanzotto in which this idea is applied to Petrarch’s poems. ‘We should see it as a project for finding a different space and time, a proof that the total domination of sound and fury can be challenged . . .’
The group has reached a bed of smoothed, round stones, bright grey and dark grey in colour, which continue beneath the green water of the little lake as though revelling in its transparency.
‘These stones,’ the guide was explaining, ‘were brought here three centuries ago from every part of Japan. The Emperor rewarded whoever brought him a bag of stones with a bag of rice.’
The student shakes his head and looks bitter. We seem to see the queue of peasants conjured up by those words bent double under their bags of stones, snaking across the little bridges and paths. They deposit the loads they have carried from distant regions in front of the Emperor, who examines the stones one by one, places one in the water, another one on the side of the lake, and rejects many others. Meanwhile the attendants busy themselves round the scales: on one dish there are the stones, on the other rice . . .
The Wooden Temple
In Japan that which is a product of art does not hide or modify the natural elements from which it is made. This is a constant feature of the Japanese spirit which their gardens help us to understand. In buildings and traditional objects, as also in their cuisine, the materials from which these things are made are always recognizable. Japanese cooking is a composition of natural ingredients but one that is aimed primarily at a visual effect, and these elements reach the table retaining their original appearance to a large extent, without having undergone the metamorphoses of Western cuisine, where a dish becomes more a work of art the more unrecognizable its ingredients are.
In their gardens the various elements are put together according to criteria of harmony and criteria of meaning. The only difference is that these vegetal equivalents of words change shape and colour over the course of the year and even more so over the course of years: these complete or partial changes were factored in when the garden-poem was planned. Then the plants die and are replaced by others that are similar and are laid out in the same places: as the centuries go by the garden is continually remade but always remains the same.
And this is another constant highlighted by these gardens: in Japan antiquity does not have its ideal material in stone as in the West, where an object or building is considered ancient only if it is conserved in its substance. Here we are in the universe of wood: what is ancient here is that which perpetuates its design through the continual destruction and renovation of its perishable elements. This holds for gardens as it does for temples, palaces, villas and pavilions, all of which are in wood, all destroyed many times by the flames of fire, many times covered in mould and rotten or reduced to dust by woodworm, but refashioned piece by piece every time. The roofs made of layers of pressed cypress bark are remade every sixty years, as are the trunks forming pilasters and beams, the walls made of planks, the bamboo ceilings, the floors covered in mats (the omnipresent tatami mats, which act as a unit of measurement of interior surfaces).
During the visit to Kyoto’s centuries-old buildings the guide points out how often they take care to replace this or that piece of the construction: the fragility of its parts emphasizes all the more the antiquity of the whole. Dynasties, human lives, the fibres of tree-trunks rise and fall, but what lasts is the ideal shape of the building, and it does not matter if every piece of its structural support has been removed and replaced countless times, and the most recent replacements smell of newly planed wood. In the same way the garden remains the garden designed 500 years ago by a poet-architect, even though every plant follows the course of the seasons, rains, frosts, wind; similarly the lines of a poem are handed down over time while the paper of the pages on which the lines are systematically written disappears into dust.
The wooden temple marks the junction of two dimensions of time: but in order to understand it we need to remove from our minds phrases such as ‘being and becoming’, because if everything is reduced to the language of philosophy from the world which we have started out from, it was not worthwhile coming all this way on my journey. What the wooden temple can teach us is this: in order to enter into the dimension of continuous, single and infinite time the only way is to go through its opposite, the perpetuity of the vegetal, the fragmented and ramified time of that which is replaced, is disseminated, buds, dries up or wastes away.
Rather than the temples full of statues with their high, pagoda-like structures, I am attracted more by the low constructions and interiors furnished only with mats, which are usually secular buildings, villas or pavilions, but also sometimes temples or sanctuaries that invite one to abstract meditation, to disembodied concentration. Such is the temple called the Silver Pavilion, a supple wooden construction on two floors beside a small lake, with just one statue (of Kannon, the female incarnation of the Buddha) in a space for Zen meditation called the Hall of Emptied Mind. Such also is the temple called Manju-in, which an incompetent like myself would swear is Zen but actually is not: this is a temple which seems like a villa, with many low rooms, almost empty, with their tatami, the ikebana vases (which at this time of year contain pine boughs and camellias, bird-of-paradise flowers and camellias, and other autumn combinations), and a few unobtrusive statues, and many small gardens all around.
The wooden temple reaches its perfection the more the space that welcomes you is bare and unadorned, because all that matters is the material in which it is built and the ease with which one can undo it and reassemble it exactly as it had been before, in order to prove that all the bits of the universe can fall one after the other but there is something that remains.
The Thousand Gardens
A path made of irregular stone slabs snakes its way around the full length of the imperial villa of Katsura. As opposed to the other gardens in Kyoto made for static contemplation, here inner harmony is reached by following the path step by step and reviewing each image that your sight perceives. If elsewhere a path is only a means to an end and it is the places it leads to that speak to the mind, here the footpath is the raison d’être of the garden, the main theme of its discourse, the sentence that gives meaning to its every word.
But what meanings? The path on this side of the gate is made of smooth stones but on the other side it is made of rough ones: is this meant to be the contrast between civilization and nature? On the other side the path splits into a straight branch and a twisted one; the former comes to a dead end, while the latter continues: is this a lesson about how one should move in the world? Every interpretation leaves one dissatisfied: if there is a message, it is the one we grasp in sensations and things, without translating them in
to words.
These stones are embedded in moss, and are flat, separate from each other and set at the right distance so that the person walking always finds one under his foot at each step taken; and it is precisely because they correspond to the measure of our footsteps that the stones actually dictate the movements of the person walking, force us into a calm, uniform pace, determining both the route and its halts.
Each stone corresponds to a footstep, and at each step there is a landscape that has been studied down to the last detail, as in a painting. The garden has been so set out that at each step one’s gaze meets different perspectives, a different harmony in the distances that separate the bush, the lantern, the maple tree, the hump-backed bridge, the stream. As one moves along the route, the scenery changes totally many times, from thick foliage to a clearing dotted with rocks, from the lake with the waterfall to the lake of standing water; and each scenario in turn is broken down into views that take shape as soon as one moves: the garden multiplies into endless gardens.
The human mind has a mysterious mechanism whereby we are convinced that that particular stone is always the same stone, even though its image—at the slightest movement of our gaze—changes shape, dimensions, colour, outlines. Every single or limited fragment of the universe breaks up into an infinite multiplicity: all you have to do is go round this low stone lantern and it turns into an infinity of stone lanterns; this fret-worked polyhedron of stone, marked with lichens, becomes doubled and quadrupled and sextupled, turning into a totally different object depending on which side you look at it from, on whether you are approaching or leaving it.