SKETCHES

Haiku and the Like

by
Ciaran Murray

Fumiko Daido: Plums at UraTakao

 

for Fumi

between shadow
and shadow
a pathway of light

 

Varanasi Vrindavan Varied Vignettes

Varanasi (Tim Graham / Alamy)

 

sweeper aims duststorm
at tourguide’s fancy suit:
caste resentment of centuries

play of appearances
casts dust
in our eyes

as if not seeing
the venal priesthood
the pilgrims are radiant

woman on winding stair
showers pilgrims below her with rosepetals
seeing only Krishna

children play cricket
amid the broken headstones
of the English cemetery

all history
and literature:
the lingam in the yoni

when the flame-robed priest
of Shiva chants
I am present at the dawn of the world

 

Vision Volume Void

Bodh Gayā (Gwen Graser / Alamy)

 

Takao

 

butterflies?
– shimmering spaces
in the leaves at dawn

horses coursing
across my blind:
bamboos in the breeze

woodland shade:
annihilating all that’s made
to verde que te quiero verde

the millwheel
sings unceasingly
its ballad of vanished love

in the Shingon temple
the drum beats hollow:
shiki fu i kū

 

Kyoto

 

leaves on fire at Ōhara:
stubbled ricefields
in pallid sunlight

maples act out seasons
to bamboo backdrop:
Kōtōin

Ryōanji:
echo
of the unsaid

 

Bodh Gayā

circumambulating: hūm
ōm manipadme hūm
ōm manipadme

notes

Takao (高尾): sacred mountain on the outskirts of Tokyo.
verde: ‘Annihilating all that’s made / To a green thought in a green shade’ (Andrew Marvell, ‘The Garden’); ‘green how I long for you green’ (Federico García Lorca, ‘Romance Sonámbulo’, ‘Sleepwalking Ballad’, tr. present author).
millwheel: ‘In einem kühle Grunde /Da geht ein Mühlerad, / Mein‘ Liebste ist verschwunden, / Die dort gewohnt hat‘: ‘In a cool valley a millwheel turns; my lover who lived there has left’ (Joseph von Eichendorff, ‘Das zerbrochene Ringlein’, ‘The Broken Ring', tr. Leonard Forster & present author).
Shingon: Esoteric Buddhist; shiki fu i kū 色不異空, ‘volume and void are one and the same’ (Hannya Shingyō 般若心経, Heart Sutra, tr. present author).
Ōhara: village outside Kyoto famed for autumn foliage.
Kōtōin (高桐院): subtemple of Daitōkuji, Kyoto. Under another aspect: ‘The sense of “barbaric” as unregenerate nature, in contrast to the ordering of art, may...be found in’ Wallace Stevens’ “Anecdote of the Jar”’: ‘As a stone lantern will impose form on a scattering of maples in the bare yard of a Kyoto temple’ (Ports of Call: Castle Hill to the Circuit of Krishna).
Ryōanji (龍安寺): Borges, ‘in front of that rhythmic arrangement of gravel and rock...of which some aspect always seems hidden, recalled the night in Buenos Aires “when the sight of a particular moonlit street had induced a preternatural sense that time was an illusion”’ (Voyagings).
Bodh Gayā: site of the Buddha’s enlightenment.
ōm...: ‘Praise to the jewel (in the) lotus, hail!’.

Vista Vortex

Zuisenji

Kamakura

cave shadow darkens
pool surface: interplay of
void and illusion

Kōyasan

mountain stream falls
off the edge
of the infinite

above the hilltop temple
the sun
illimitable

hemmed in by painted
screens of the seasons
the doomed man steps out of time

four of the five golden Buddhas
amplify the glow
of the central and only one

vanished, vanished
utterly vanished
untraceable, lost in light

 

notes

Zuisenji: Musō Soseki (夢窓 疎石) was associated with Zuisenji (瑞泉寺) at Kamakura, as well as Tenryūji (天龍寺) and Saihōji (西芳寺) at Kyoto, and their gardens have sometimes been attributed to him. However, Yoko Kawaguchi observes: ‘That he had a love of gardens is attested by his contemporaries..., yet few facts are known about his gardening activities’ (Japanese Zen Gardens)
mountain: Kōyasan (高野山), centre of Esoteric Buddhism (Ports of Call: Dinn Ree to New Delhi).
temple: Fukuchi-in (福智院), residential temple noted for its modernist gardens by Mirei Shigemori (重森三玲)
screens: The dictator Hideyoshi’s designated heir received a sentence of ritual suicide, implemented in a room which is still shown at Kongōbuji (金剛峯寺). This temple too has a notable garden by Shigemori, the Banryūtei (蟠龍庭), its rocks suggesting dragons emerging from the clouds of the sand
Buddhas: in the Great Stupa (大塔)
vanished: The Heart or Prajñāpāramitā-hrdaya Sūtra culminates in the mantra gate gate pāragate pārasaṃgate bodhi svāhā (गते गते पारगते पारसंगते बोधि स्वाहा); in Sino-Japanese gyatei gyatei haragyatei harasōgyatei boji sowaka (羯諦羯諦波羅羯諦波羅僧羯諦菩提薩婆訶); rendered by Conze: ‘Gone, Gone, Gone beyond, Gone altogether beyond, O what an awakening, All Hail!’

Voyage

Zuisenji

Carlow

behind a gateway
known from childhood
an unsuspected courtyard

 

Dublin

‘why roam the world aimless?’
‘as in the old stories...?’
‘ah yes: to find lose yourself’

 

departure

the seeker plays
on a magic chessboard
the woman who is his soul

 

arrival

network
of flooded fields
in golden light

 

Daisen-in

the world has us
seeing double:
the worldtree is one

 

Zuihō-in

above the turbulent
winds and waters
the peak stands serene

 

Tōfukuji

chequerboard of forms
fading out into
unfathomed ravine

discarded pillarstones
transmuted to luminous
points of a constellation

 

Bodh Gayā

under the shade
of the Buddha’s release:
no more destinations

 

notes

Carlow: Sir William Temple, who was to write an historic account of the naturalistic Sino-Japanese garden, here translated Vergil on the joy of quiet in the countryside (Sharawadgi).
Dublin: Here Temple’s secretary, Jonathan Swift, enjoyed a close friendship with Joseph Addison: who a few years afterwards published an essay incorporating Temple’s account and advocating a similar naturalism for England (Sharawadgi).
seeker: Emma Jung & Marie-Louise von Franz, The Grail Legend.
Daisen-in (大仙院): temple in the Daitokuji (大徳寺) Zen compound of Kyoto, noted for its space of white gravel, rising in twin cones, between and behind which can be seen a tree associated with the Buddha (Kawaguchi).
Zuihō-in (瑞峯院): also in Daitokuji, its rocks and gravel shaped to a modernist rhythm by Mirei Shigemori (Kawaguchi)
Tōfukuji (東福寺): in one layout Shigemori arranged the squares of recycled paving slabs into a pattern that diminishes in density as it approaches the edge of a precipice, and in another the cylindrical blocks of foundation stones into the form of Ursa Major (Kawaguchi).

To the Realm of Osiris

Osiris, lord of resurrection (Corey Ford / Alamy)

spearman of Artemision:
viewer rigid
bronze alive

Aegean polished
ebony in-
laid with sheets of gold

Cretan
folkdance
labyrinthine

shipmates
chugging to Africa
last there wi’ Monty an’ ol’ Rommel

Alexandrian vendors
unroll their carpets
as if each held Cleopatra

of Heliopolis little
remains
but the sun

sandbags of latest war:
tranquil
mask of Tutankhamun

all that is living
inside Great Pyramid:
sense of entombment

below the line of awareness sails
Osiris
sun in the night

 

Carlow Contrapositions

Carlow: reflections

white bogcotton quivers on
jetblack marsh:
haunt of Vergil’s muse

car lashed by gale:
swaying trees broken clouds
primeval

behind ceaseless downpour
light fluctuates:
doing and dream

thin film of water
makes street deep
as tall

dustmote in sunbeam
through skylight of storeroom
long since demolished

 

Glimpses

View from Mount Kompira, Takao

the shaman’s drum
gives voice
to the world-tree

some words
worth
a thousand pictures

mantra, dear Faust
both word
and deed

Eckhart’s void
a space
for indwelling

near-death episode:
light
that is also love

 

Wohin?

The cathedral at Frankfurt (Roman Babakin / Alamy)

Frankfurt

rose-red apse of
imperial cathedral
silent in moonlit snow

Hanover

snow shrouds
cherub on
fireblackened tombstone

Bremen

new glass vivid
in Liebfrauenkirche:
glory of Aus der Tiefe

Berlin

after the Wall
in the east unimaginable
volley of laughter

Düsseldorf

thinks himself free
till he goes past again:
schon längst...in diesem Hause

would long-estranged lover
wish to recall
what she whispered so urgently that night?

Mainz

gone into silence:
clatter of type
goodly company of printers

Bamberg

when he writes ‘self’ and ‘real’
Buddha dwells
in the punctuation

Vienna

Mozart plays from
blank page: emptiness
source of the manifest

 

Eve of Venus

Athénée Français, Tokyo

gutta præceps orbe parvo sustinet casus suos

glistening globe of
falling raindrop
holds its form a moment more

 

sic Amyclas cum tacerent perdidit silentium

depth of
quiet
doomed a city

 

quando fiam uti chelidon ut tacere desinam?

when shall I
like the homing swallow
find my destined voice?

 

Athénée Français 1972

as I wonder
what to say to her
she crosses the room

 

Karma Rekindled

Great Mosque at Córdoba (Peter Eastland / Alamy)

Beijing

through coffeehouse window
cleaners’ ropes
coil and uncoil: karma

 

Suzhou

in the shadowed courtyard
she straddles her lover
rekindling its ancient life

 

Hangzhou

behind the green gate
carving Sino-Arabic:
journey’s end from Cordoba

 

envoi

sense of meaning
acquired on the road:
you’ve got to leave home without it

 

River of Light

Milky Way (Matt Gibson / Alamy)

s       a        e        r        t        d
    e        s        r        a        e        but

Way
Milky
the
Island
Sado
over
high
s
r
a
o
s

あら海や佐渡に横たふ天の河 araumi ya sado ni yokotō ama no gawa (Bashō: R. H. Blyth, Haiku, 4 vol., Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1949-52, I, 52, 401).

Intimations of Avalon

Glastonbury (Stephen Spraggon / Alamy)

 

Cosmos from Chaos

‘Held upright’, I have recalled, ‘between sheets of glass in a museum above the wooded gorges of Luxembourg is a coin that calls up, fresh and clear, what was already ancient history when Shakespeare alluded to it: “That day he overcame the Nervii”... What ensued on that day and the days that followed was, not a polar opposition between the classical and the Celtic societies, but centuries of creative interaction...’
In keeping with the Janus heads of Roman coins, the Celtic have figures with two heads or faces. And sometimes they have three: the latter expressing a persistent religious, mythological and iconographic motif. In the Celtic context, states Miranda Green, the number three transcended all other replications... ‘A three-faced image...is unreal and therefore supranatural’.
However, there are coin images which body forth a multiplicity and a mystery transcending even these. Writes Robert Van Arsdell: ‘A hidden face on an ancient British stater has eluded numismatists for two hundred years...and it took me only seven years of owning one of them to see it. Celtic artists liked to hide faces on their artwork. They had a fine appreciation for the surreal. They loved now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t images. The art tied in with their religion. Things are not what they seem’.
On one coin you will find, between two realistic profiles back to back, and combining the single eye of each, a third face, uncanny... These miniature icons, then, suggest an entire psychological world: below the surface text a subverting subtext; and, within and intertwined with and beyond both, the inexplicable. It is as if their only law was anomaly; and then, out of apparent chaos, comes a glimpse of the mystery of things.

lifetime search
until the hidden
face emerges

 

Chaos from Cosmos

Jung recorded the dream: ‘I understood that this was the castle of the Grail, and that this evening there would be a “celebration of the Grail” here. This information seemed to be of a secret character, for a German professor among us...knew nothing about it. I talked most animatedly with him, and was impressed by his learning and sparkling intelligence. Only one thing disturbed me: he spoke constantly about a dead past and lectured very learnedly on the relationship of the British to the French sources of the Grail story. Apparently he was not conscious of the meaning of the legend, nor of its living presentness... he behaved as though he were in a classroom, lecturing to his students... He did not see the stairs or the festive glow in the hall’.

the grail everlastingly
lost
to analysis

 

Nor Ever Wind Blows Loudly

‘A librarian’, relates Borges, of a figure who might be himself, ‘wearing dark glasses asked him: “what are you looking for?”. Hladik answered: “I am looking for God”...
‘He saw a map of India as in a daze. Suddenly sure of himself, he touched one of the tiniest letters. A ubiquitous voice said to him: “The time of your labour has been granted”...
‘The guns converged on Hladik, but the men who were to kill him stood motionless. The sergeant’s arm eternised an unfinished gesture. On a paving stone of the courtyard a bee cast an unchanging shadow. The wind had ceased, as in a picture.‘

secret miracle:
yoga
tract of the timeless

 

Mirror on Mirror

Seeing Double (Yuri Arcurs / Alamy)

 

glass echoing glass
she moves
both ways

 

Moon after Moon

Full moon over forest (Olga Yastremska / Alamy)

 

windscreen under insistent buckshot of summer rain: map of the moon

moon blindingly
brilliant as if
snow had fallen there too

halfmoon a tilted boat: waves of cloud phosphorescent

 

Ithaca

Ithaca, New York

 

late afternoon
school: heavy
shadows on grass

headlights of passing
cars pick out
slant of the rain

snowfall floods
our basement room
with light

 

Story

Victor Vasarely, Caldor (Artchives / Alamy)

 

meanwhile the seconds
ticked
away

 

Legend

Mirador Cambrecita, La Palma (blickwinkel / Alamy)

 

moonlit fields
in some ancient tale:
stars in a tapestry of trees

 

Auditions for Dante

Tomb of Dante, Ravenna (Shutterstock)

 

hell on earth: staring rage
at the gladness
of others

golden oldie: devious
aggressor plays
victim

from what they ridicule
realise
what you got right

pride themselves on passing you
in a race
you have not run

unknowing that pilgrimage
impetus to grace of I
am that I am

 

Echoings

Moon over Greek islands (Shutterstock)

 

house that echoed
cries of lovers:
sigh of the sea

 

‘We do not know’, writes Maurice Baring, ‘which was Sappho’s last poem, but there is no sadder poem than the single line:

 

ἠράμαν μὲν ἔγω σέθεν, Ἄτθι, πάλαι ποτά
I loved thee once, Atthis, long ago.

 

‘As Swinburne takes six lines to translate these words, I will not quote his translation. It takes him six words to say “long ago”, namely, “long since in old time overpast”’ –

I loved thee, – hark, one tenderer note than all – Atthis, of old time, once – one long low fall, Sighing – one long low lovely loveless call, Dying – one pause in song so flamelike fast – Atthis, long since in old time overpast.

– ‘Yet his lines, to do him justice, do convey the spirit of the original.

‘I will quote instead eight lines written as it were to the tune of Sappho’s lines, by Miss Elizabeth Belloc:

Ah, once I loved thee, Atthis, long ago.
The fields around the farm are silent now,
Where in the windless evenings of the spring
We heard Menalcas singing at the plough.

Ah, once I loved thee, Atthis, long ago.
I shall not see thy face, nor touch thy hands.
The empty house looks seaward: far away
The loud seas echo on the level sands.’

Maurice Baring, Have You Anything to Declare?: A Note Book with Commentaries (London: Heinemann,1936), p. 141; Algernon Charles Swinburne, ‘On the Cliffs’, ll. 325-30.

 

wondering where she
may be who shared this
sunset at Kotri

 

My driver looked up at the imposing silhouette of Fort St. George, centre of British administration in the former Madras... Inside the adjacent church are affecting memorials to personal grief, though it is a century and a half since the officer died young, and twice as long since the wife was lost in childbirth. Anonymity, however, reigns in the nearby burial-ground. Heavily overgrown, its paths are impassible and its inscriptions inaccessible. Somewhere under all this tangle lies the poet Laurence Hope.

At Kotri, by the river, when evening’s sun is low,
The waving palm trees quiver, the golden waters glow,
The shining ripples shiver, descending to the sea.
At Kotri, by the river, she used to wait for me…

I know not where she wandered, or went in after days,
Or if her youth was squandered in Love’s more doubtful ways.
Perhaps, beside the river she died still young and fair
Perchance the grasses quiver above her slumber there.

At Kotri, by the river, maybe I too shall sleep
The sleep that lasts for ever, too deep for dreams; too deep.
Maybe among the shingle and sand of floods to be
Her dust and mine may mingle and float away to sea.

Having come across this in an anthology picked up second-hand in Kanda some twenty or so years ago, I sought out the three original volumes of her poetry, and discovered more in the same spirit.

What may have lain behind them, however, remained unknown. There was no biography. All I could find was the entry in the DNB which notes that Laurence Hope was the pseudonym of Adela Florence Nicolson, who married a military man almost twice her age; and, when he died, killed herself and was buried with him.

Later I found a reference to Thomas Hardy, who had met her, and spoke of her ‘Sapphic fervour’. Did he mean that she was lesbian, and was this the theme of ‘Kotri by the River’? I did not think so, because elsewhere she writes of possible consequences:

Another life, from our light passion lit,
To suffer like ourselves awhile and die.

The poem is heavy with post-coital tristesse:

Ah, the grey Dawn seems more than desolate,
And the past night of passion worse than waste,
Love but a useless flower, that soon or late,
Turns to a fruit with bitter aftertaste.

What Hardy referred to, then, was that intensity of erotic abandonment which makes immediate a night on the Aegean two and a half millennia ago:

deduke men a selanna
kai plēïades; mesai de
nuktes, para d’ erchet’ ōra,
egō de mona kateudō.

In the version by Elizabeth Belloc:

The night is ebbing, and I lie alone.
I hear the wind amid the orchard trees.
I lie alone. Slow move the midnight hours.
The moon is setting and the Pleiades.

 

interminable
nightwatch: bedchamber rustle
only the wind

 

Ciaran Murray, ‘Cruel Dawn’, in Voyagings: Ireland, Japan, India (Tokyo: Castle Quarter Press, 2014), pp. 283-97; Laurence Hope, ‘Kotri, by the River’, ‘The Window Overlooking the Harbour’, in The Garden of Kama and Other Love Lyrics from India (London: Heinemann, 1901), pp. 42-3, 116-18; Baring, p. 142. With gratitude to A. M. for M.B.

Current

Ryōanji (author)

 

clouds part an instant:
treeshadow outlines
manifest, vanish

 

Rarely remarked upon is the fact that when you descend from the stone layout at Ryōanji to the lake that remains from the villa the site once was, a side-path leads over a miniature bridge to an island which will hold only a handful of visitors, and on which stands a shrine to Benzaiten (弁才天), one of the deities of fortune.

The Japanese goddess has been traced to the Indian Sarasvatī, whose name appertains to pools, lakes and rivers, and in particular to the river which, in the earlier scriptures of Hinduism, is a roaring torrent, but in the later has contracted into discontinuous pools, and in the end disappears into the sand, reflecting historical reality. Moreover, the sound of the river spilled over into the flow of language – reflected in the Chinese rendering of her name as Biancaitian, goddess of the gift of expression – particularly that involved in ritual and its accompanying melodies, so that she is depicted, as Catherine Ludvik reminds us (Sarasvatī, Riverine Goddess of Knowledge), holding lute as well as book, string of beads and water-pot.

She encompasses, too, all that is implied by the stream of consciousness, from intelligence to imagination and integrity of insight.

 

invisible river
lives on
in the mind

 

And so, throughout Japan, where even her identity is fluid, as she merges with or diverges from varied other divinities – and in this very elusiveness, suggests Bernard Faure (Protectors and Predators), intimates the numinous – she continues to abide among the waters, as where the great gate looms out of the sea at Itsukushima, or at Enoshima, behind which Fuji stands sharply silhouetted at sunset. Or, again, here.

 

Ryōanji: raindarkened
rockclusters
gleam

 

Cargo

Shiva, Badami Caves (Shutterstock)

Daichiji (大池寺), outside Kyoto, has a topiary arrangement that, as Günther Nitschke (Japanese Gardens) reminds us, ‘is said to represent an enormous treasure ship carrying the “seven gods of good luck”’ (shichifukujin,七福神).
But what could a temple in the ascetic Zen tradition have to do with material abundance? Unless its treasure connotes more than the accumulation of wealth, and its luck more than the chances of the lottery.

Peter Hayes (The Supreme Experience) has suggested that the magic phrase which allows Ali Baba to open his treasure cave is an ‘imperfect remembrance’ of mantra, which provides ‘access to our own inner treasure’.

Again, in the magical lamp which not only provides Aladdin with unlimited riches, but turns him from a chronic idler to a follower of the spiritual quest, gifts him with ‘goodliness and grace’, and enables him to hear the song of birds ‘extolling the perfection of the Great Creator’ (The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night, tr. John Payne), it is difficult to imagine a more emphatic emblem of enlightenment.

Reiko Chiba (The Seven Lucky Gods of Japan) indeed declares that reflection on ‘the cargo that the treasure ship carries’ will ‘reveal these objects as subtle symbols which should never be taken at face value’.

So much for the baled-up merchandise within the enclosure of the ship. But when we investigate its passengers, we find that their functions and identities are ambiguous, overlapping, kaleidoscopically shifting.

Among them is Daikokuten (大黒天), linked with the Hindu Mahākāla or Shiva (Bernard Faure, Rage and Ravage), god of death: hardly, at first sight, a very auspicious conjunction. However, while Shiva rules the relative time, kāla, which brings dissolution, he himself is mahākāla, absolute time (Alain Daniélou, Myths and Gods of India). So it is hardly strange to find him lord of that interaction with the timeless which is yoga, or zazen (座禅).

 

treasure ship:
heavy with im-
memorial stillness

 

Continent

Hiraizumi (Shutterstock)

Hiraizumi, notes Mimi Yiengpruksawan (Hiraizumi: Buddhist Art and Regional Politics in Twelfth-Century Japan), was the fiefdom of a Fujiwara clan which, unlike its courtly namesake at Kyoto, became noted for belligerence, conquering from the indigenes of the northeast a territory comprising ‘nearly a third of the Japanese archipelago’; and in many ways ‘akin to other provincial military families of their day, most prominently the Taira and the Minamoto’, who were also caught up in the ‘dispersion of government away from Kyoto’, displacing ‘the aristocrats whom they had once served as protectors’.

At Hiraizumi, in consequence, they created ‘a city filled with art, from splendid temples and shrines to landscape gardens and palatial residences’; and at the centre of a network of trade, ‘not only in goods but also in ideas’, both within the country and encompassing the continent.

However, in 1189 Minamoto armies, uniting Japan ‘as never before in its history’ under the Kamakura shogunate, ‘ended the Hiraizumi polity and its rulers’. Mōtsuji (毛越寺) had been ‘incomparable: nothing like its twin main halls, twin meditation halls, and huge lake with rugged coastline, was known elsewhere’. But today, while the lake survives, with jutting rocks marking its peninsula and island, the temple it belonged to has long vanished.

However, there was one great exception to the general obliteration: Chūsonji (中尊寺), ‘temple of the centre’, the ‘central lord’, or ‘central divinity’: ‘a box of gold set out on a mountain slope’. Though now encased in a protective shell, it is still possible from the outside to catch a glimpse of the glory within.

Under the altar the Fujiwara rulers lie mummified: a practice identified with the peoples they ostensibly ruled. For Yiengpruksawan, this provides evidence of the multiethnic origins of Japan. But its most extensive influence may well be elsewhere; may indeed have shaped the history of another continent.

Columbus’ copy of Marco Polo’s travels, notes Björn Landström (Columbus: The Story of Don Christóbal Colón), has been preserved; and Polo claimed that the ruler of Japan had a great palace made entirely of gold. Which, suggests Masakatsu Miyazaki (‘The Legend of “Zipangu”, the Land of Gold’), may represent a rumour – characteristically inexact and exaggerated – of Chūsonji.

 

White House to Hollywood:
shimmering mirage
of a Japanese temple

 

Code

Pearl Harbor (Shutterstock)

Should you visit Pearl Harbor, you would see a white, bridge-like, memorial over the site of the USS Arizona, sunk at the commencement of the war for the Pacific. You would also see the USS Missouri, with a plaque, covered by thick glass, set into the deck at the spot where it concluded in Tokyo Bay.

Between the two, appropriately, came the battle of Midway. This was an attempt to rectify what had gone wrong at Pearl Harbor. Its architect, Isoroku Yamamoto, had studied and travelled in America, and was so impressed by its industrial capacity that he warned against war with it – so persistently that he became a target of assassination to the fanatics (‘damn fools’, muttered Yamamoto) who had hijacked the government.

And so, when war was seen as inevitable, he felt Japan’s only hope was a pre-emptive strike. But Yamamoto’s plan for Pearl Harbor was not implemented as planned (a guide who had been a schoolboy at the time told me the worst part of the experience was waiting for the follow-up that never came), the damage inflicted there was limited, and he aimed to complete the destruction at Midway, a barren atoll with an American airfield. Once he struck at this, and the American fleet responded, the Japanese fleet would be lying in wait. However, since his adversaries had broken his codes, it was they who were lying in wait (Hiroyuki Agawa, Reluctant Admiral).

The American intelligence officer Edwin Layton (And I Was There) recalls how he had viewed kabuki with the Japanese commander, played bridge with him, and sipped his whisky. When, then, a message was intercepted detailing a flight that would ‘bring him within range of our fighters’, Layton reports: ‘It was impossible for me not to feel for Admiral Yamamoto…a certain…fondness’. However, ‘I could not dismiss the fact that he was’ an ‘important foe whose death would benefit the Allied cause’, and he was shot down.

Layton attended the surrender on the Missouri, and that afternoon drove to Kamakura for a visit to the shrine of the war-god Hachiman. When Buddhism was introduced to Japan, Hachiman was linked with it as protector (Helen Hardacre, Shinto), and his eight banners (hachiman八幡) with the eightfold path – speech, action, livelihood (moral conduct); effort, mindfulness, concentration (mental discipline); views, intentions (intuitive insight) – of the new religion (Masaharu Anesaki, Japanese Religion; Kenneth Ch’en, Buddhism in China). And so, at this Shinto site, we see the lotus of Amida’s paradise (Murasaki Shikibu, Tale of Genji).

The shrine, founded by the shogun Yoritomo Minamoto, is approached over a bridge between two ponds. Writes Iso Mutsu (Kamakura: Fact and Legend): ‘These ponds owe their existence to Yoritomo’s consort Masako, and were made at the time of the great attack upon the Taira’, or Heike, whose power would be terminated by Yoritomo’s clan, the Minamoto, or Genji, at the sea-battle of Dannoura. ‘Four islands were constructed in the western pond’, ‘while the eastern sheet of water contained but three. The Japanese word san means three and also birth; while the character shi signifies death as well as the number four. The pond of birth was planted with pure white lotus flowers, but the lake of death contained red blooms only: the Minamoto flag being white, while the banner of the enemy was of scarlet hue. Hence the ponds were considered symbolic of the conquest and extermination of the Taira and the birth of the power and glory of the Minamoto’.

‘However’, Mutsu goes on, ‘another tradition attaches a milder and more merciful significance, asserting that Masako caused the western pond to be planted with red lotus flowers as a tribute to the…valour of the defeated foe’.

 

defeat and victory
are one, reveals Krishna
in freedom from animus

 

Krishna: Bhagavad Gītā 2:45.

Castle

Infrared image of the Japanese Tea Garden, San Francisco (Shutterstock)

After the American defeat in World War II, the East Coast was occupied by Germany, and the West Coast by Japan.

This is the premise of The Man in the High Castle, by Philip K. Dick: in which, among the Japanese officials prominent in San Francisco, is a Mr. Tagomi, whose office building is constructed to the ‘fabulous design’ of Japanese architecture, surrounded by a ‘karesansui landscape’.

When, on the other hand, Mr. Tagomi is transported to the San Francisco of the author’s time, he finds himself confronted by ‘hideous misshapen things on skyline’.

Dick thought of himself, not as a philosophical novelist, but a novelistic philosopher. And the philosophy of this particular novel is that of the Yi Jing (I Ching), or Book of Changes, in which realities mutate into their opposites. At the core of light is darkness; at the core of darkness is light: complementary, each whirls into the other. ‘The top-heavy’, writes Jean Cooper (Yin & Yang), ‘falls over and becomes its opposite; having been in the ascending yang and reached the top of the hill, it can go no further and can only descend into the valley, the yin’.

And in fact the victors of World War II fell out with and weakened each other in the Cold War that followed: externally by the resources this required, internally by the repressions it engendered. At the same time, the conformism that succeeded American victory was opposed, in the counterculture with which Dick was associated, by the values of the vanquished Japanese.

 

inverted
world
the one we live in

 

Co-ordinates

Katsura (Shutterstock)

The villa at Katsura (桂離宮) was a fusion of present and past. Set in an area where the fictional imperial prince who is the protagonist of The Tale of Genji had an estate, it was initiated by a factual imperial prince who was a devotee of the novel, and completed by his son.

In the pages of the Murasaki novel, writes Loraine Kuck (World of the Japanese Garden), ‘we see a group of romantic, sentimental and highly refined people for whom love and the appreciation of beauty were principal occupations’, and in whom ‘the inherent Japanese love of nature took its sunniest…and most open forms’. Indeed, the love of nature and the nature of love combined in a layout where the personality of each of the protagonist’s ladies was matched with a vista for her favourite season.

A memorable scene was where, boats having been provided for the waterways of the garden, these sequestered courtiers imagined themselves on a voyage to some enchanted isle. The grounds at Katsura are notable for a similar feature: ‘not a single wide expanse of water, but…several long vistas winding off to unseen destinations’.

Here, however, the past was modified by the present, since the lake was surrounded by a pathway: an extension of the path leading to the hut that is the locus of the tea ceremony, sadō (茶道), which had recently attained its classic form.

And which, while it embodied an approach to nature which arose from the same subtlety of apprehension, involved a very different attitude. For, while the boats bore a party of extravert, if sophisticated, courtiers to some outer, if imagined, land, the destination of the sadō pathway was within. The ‘tea ceremony’, notes Günter Nitschke (Japanese Gardens), ‘is a method of meditation’.

And the fusion of past and present that was Katsura would speak as well to the future. ‘For variation’, declares Kuck, ‘flat, angular stepping stones are sometimes used’, introducing a ‘new geometric mood’; and it was this which appealed to the modernist architect Bruno Taut on his interwar visit to Katsura. What he found there, states Arata Isozaki (Katsura: Imperial Villa), was the Mondrianesque.

A like rapprochement may be seen in the architecture. ‘Whereas’, writes Nitschke, ‘the garden was deliberately excluded from the small tea arbour, it now seems to permeate the entire building complex. The enclosed, introspective space of the tea house, dimly lit and darkly mysterious, here gives way to spaciousness and daylight’. As a result, ‘whether indoors or outdoors’, the visitor is ‘totally enveloped’ within an environment in which natural shapes are ‘played against’ geometrical.

 

Murasaki’s butterflies
quiver through Euclid’s
immutable forms

 

Classic

Hagia Sophia (Shutterstock)

The naturalist English garden, influenced by that of Japan, was, I have proposed, ‘a fundamental notation for the eighteenth century’ (Sharawadgi). Small wonder, then, that the defining English epic of that century should have reflected its values.

Gibbon’s lost paradise, as everyone knows, was the Roman Empire. ‘The period in the history of the world’, he proclaimed, ‘during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous’, was the ‘golden age’ of its benevolent emperors, when the ‘increasing splendour of the cities’ was set within ‘the beautiful face of the country, cultivated and adorned’ – inevitably – ‘like an immense garden’.

One might view this as a verbal transference of what he had experienced visually at that most Arcadian of English gardens, Stourhead, its classical temples scattered in the woodland. Here, though still a schoolboy, he was already involved with the topic which would define him, as the dinner-bell found him in the library ‘crossing the Danube with the Goths’.

And the later historian would see, waiting at the gates of the doomed capital, ‘a hardy race of barbarians, who despised life when it was separated from freedom’. Yet it was they who now embodied what had once been represented by Rome. ‘The most civilised nations of modern Europe’, he pronounced, ‘issued from the woods’ – again, the inescapable image – ‘of Germany’.

In contrast to this revivifying energy in the west, the eastern empire presented a ‘dead uniformity’ of despotism. One recalls how regularity was identified with regulation, as at Versailles (Borrowing the Illimitable), Shakkei 29:4’, and now at Hagia Sophia. Which a devotee, thought Gibbon, might be tempted to suppose ‘the residence, or even the workmanship, of the deity. Yet how dull is the artifice, how insignificant is the labour, if it be compared with the formation of the vilest insect that crawls upon the surface of the temple!’ Again, the superiority of nature to art.

A preference the historian applied also to its setting. Of the eastern emperors, he observed that the ‘coasts and islands of Asia and Europe were covered with their magnificent villas; but…the marble structure of their gardens served only to expose the riches of the lord and the labours of the architect’. This by contrast with ‘the modest art which secretly strives to hide itself and to decorate the scenery of nature’. What the English garden had learnt from the Japanese (The Secret Life of Sharawadgi, Shakkei 29:1).

Gibbon was aware that, for the individual as for society, the inevitable trajectory of nature was decline and fall: ‘We imperceptibly advance from youth to age, without observing the gradual, but incessant, change of human affairs’. In this converging with the Buddhist doctrine of universal impermanence, anitya.


 

fall leaves
leave: lightly
light falls