On Images: The Poetic Garden

This week I attended a lecture on the aesthetics of Japanese gardening, and although I was in an auditorium with some eighty-five other adults, I found myself back in the classroom partaking of a ritual well known to me from my years at Uni as a student of Art History: the slide show, as it was called then. Back in the day, I used to have nightmares about slide shows, because examinations consisted of identifying images with their accompanying dates, and I slept through many nights of getting all the dates wrong. This lecturer was as much interested in the sound as in the image, and very little interested in the date, a new and fresh approach.

            In Christianity, the sound that accompanies the image is usually the Word, which is for many accompanied by fear, though also in many cases by consolation. But who can fear the sound of a small waterfall, 10 cm drop I’m told, plashing into the stream in the garden at the Katsura Remote Palace? In addition to the landscape of the eye, a soundscape inhabits the world alongside it. And in sound and sight, the seasons come into play, the young season across the old, and the resting season hidden with the new. There’s the sound of the preacher’s grandchildren, feet of the future clattering over the church floorboards across his voice explicating the Word.

            Sound speaks of change, and as all worldly matters are subject to constant change, sound is particularly apt to a Buddhist perception of the garden. Images might seek to stop time, or at least to prevent it from deteriorating so quickly: a photograph fixes a moment in time, while an icon enters the viewer into a timeless realm, where the sacred story is not subject to change. It gives a taste of eternity as a changeless dimension.

            Although we still hold to the symbolism of the unchanging sun, we know the sun is subject to its own storms and mutable in its own way. All gardens acknowledge the seasons, each leaf and colour unrepeatable yet consonant with the pattern of repeating life. The Japanese garden, though, is inspired by the moon, moon reflecting the hidden presence of sun through its tour across the evening sky, and altering colours and textures from their apparentness in the solar day.

            This changed perception of colour and texture on plant and pavement and stone is meant to give rise to poetry. The garden is a poetry-writing garden. Every drop of the seasons and every splash of moonlight on the earthly realm may be noted as a reflection of truth. And this poetry is meant to be shared, as people gather in groups to admire the evanescence of the garden’s elements.

            What if our worship was a poem, taking into account seasons, sun, moon, bridges, doorways, silences, sounds? What if every one of us had to write one? Life as a poem: life in the garden.