Chinese Gardens: On Stone II
There
are no statues in a traditional Chinese Garden (but there are ‘statues’…).
To call them statues is already a personification… but
perhaps that’s right. But a personification of who… of what…?
On
Lithomorphs and Garden design.
On
stone forms and garden design. Antithesis incorporated. Culture takes on Nature
and produces, Horticulture, Nature tamed, Ideal nature (the Nature of the
Garden, the Park or Parkland, and the Farm) as opposed to real Nature, ‘red on
tooth and claw’, overgrowing, overwhelming any structure left un-attended,
un-tended (whence the ‘Aesthetics of Ruins’) and producing ever-fecund diseases
that test human immunity. If the design is culture, represents a culture’s
philosophy (or part of a culture’s philosophy - the point of view of the
‘scholar’ – influenced by Daoism, but also Chan or Zen, and the sense of exile,
or desire for escape, from the barbarities of power…): then what of Nature
(Real Nature)? Look attentively at the Lithomorph:
does it not seem out of place? Even though incorporated, framed, appropriated,
absorbed - the terms used indicate its irreducible difference – it still stands
out, a quotation from another book, a citation from another kind of text,
incommensurable – untamed… Its gaping holes, framed and framing absences, its
mouths, its orifices, suggest so many entrances, windows into another kind of
world; indeed, unlike the rest of the garden space – though blind, it seems to
look back… the object stops us short with its gaze… The most
uncanny of feelings… Indeed if the general tenor of garden design is to
gently, invisible convince us (a ‘perlocutionary’ speech act, or message)
designed to persuade, to gently ac-culture ourselves: then the stone
‘sculpture’, the found object, the lithomorph,
imposes itself upon us, (a ‘performative’ speech act, or message) its message
is asserted, like its mysterious identity – an act of self-imposition from a
stone without a self… (but, well, in our imaginations, may it has… whence the
sense of ‘statue’, of personification). By contrast the garden space in general
is descriptive (but also performative in its gentle contours and
proportionality, in its civilizing use of wild flora, tree, bush, shrub)
descriptive of a way of life, of a civilization refined…
Antithesis incorporated? The whole contains the part –
but set apart. A quotation. A sentence from another kind of book. A book before
writing…
Sublime
and/or Beauty: again Nature (the Object) wild; Nature pacified… In Chinese art
so often combined (tamed by the Subject, made by the subject for the subject);
here included… the grain that in the shell becomes the pearl, but here rather a
pearl of meaning: ‘meaning’; something much older…
When
again faced with the fear of the more powerful, unknown, larger, vast, the
overwhelming (like the starry sky at night, or a mountain range, the ocean with
its horizon, or a storm at sea), something we cannot fully comprehend, know,
control - unlike the Beauty, or symmetries, or order, of an order of ‘Nature’,
a copy that we make of what there never was; an ideal, created in the form of a
garden, in the garden form… And so the disposition. Of
water and earth and plant life and... stone. Including that kind of stone… the
suggestive but forever un-recognisable forms of the lithomorph.
Created
out of objects (the object) by subjects for subjects, at the behest of a
subjectivity. The identity of one who may, in quiet, appreciate such a space,
the understanding recognized the space and it meaning, and so re-creates them,
the function of memory: but memory reading, reading what is written in the
garden, in its re-configuration of Nature, or space (of the Object) and so the
garden passes them on - the function of writing… The garden as a form of
writing. The memory of an identity.
Gift
for those that can read… (Otherwise commodity to be bought at the price of a
ticket…)
Echoes.
Inscriptions from the distant past. From Daoism, Nature worship (also found in Zen
painting as Buddhism also adopts Nature as a model, as Natural Law… and as its
Beyond…). And from the scholar, the self-imposed exile (also combining the
influences of Daoism and Buddhism, but redefined) as aids to the good life… As
‘types of space’… and we, inhabiting space, inhabiting the space of civilized
design, of civilising design, we walk the space, and
as we walk we are psychologically re-modeled after its
own image… As we occupy it so it occupies us; the influence of beautiful space:
but we do not occupy the space of the lithomorph; it
is separated from us by water and by walls, by its situation in a bed grass or
flowers or in rockery (stone tamed, with stone, ‘untamed;), of plants - out of
which it erupts. Or sequestered by water, in the space beyond water,
segregated… in all cases, forming a view…
It pre-occupies us.
The
shrine in the shrine; the shrine to Nature enclosed within the shrine to
Culture… One containing the other as it contains, controls, Nature… containing
the associations, the communication, the meaning, the ‘speech’ of the
lithograph, its message of representing the unrepresentable (the Beyond)… still there… still here. Nevertheless included… a
reminder… (not of the outside of the garden gate, this is not difficult to
recollect, it will recollect us as we leave: rather, the outside of the forms
we behold, their origins, their materiality) the material whose form is not the
gift of culture, but a remainder, a supplement to civilization (formed from
material by mind). A Return. Appropriated (included) but not digested (made
into One). Recognition of an exterior, an Other...
another place… an entirely Other (Object as Absolute Other). Other to ourselves
as Subject (as Culture).
Antithetical coupling, antithetical containment, just as
our self, our subjectivity, our ‘now’ must contain our desire and its uses of
the past and future; must contain the object (and the other).
The civilized self and the object without… inexhaustible
(and the subject, self, itself taken as object, also therefore bears the same
unending conversation…).
Leaving
us with… the ordered object (a space constructed by ourselves) and the
disordered subject (the self) that it is its duty to tame… to civilise… found represented by the ’other person’, the
personification, the symbol or entity, the Lithograph, ‘stone god’, the other
‘personage’ found in the garden - besides ourselves… Beside ourselves… Self
(subject) moved by Object, fashioned into an environment of Beauty, in which we
find a place for ourselves as untamed, as object of a civilizing force, in the
context of a ‘civilising space’, as subject of ‘the civilising process’ (which is why we may not enter upon its
space, the space of the lithomorph, the place of the
‘Lithomorph’, for it is ourselves, too, that is
represented here). In a mirror with the reflection removed, gaping, like the
holes in the rearing stone, perhaps representing that part of ourselves that
remains nature, like the lithomorph… For what we find
is the stone gods (the forces of Nature) waiting for that glimmer of
recognition that they are in us, are us; so it is us,
that it is we, after all, who require the stroke of the gentle hand the
civilizing presence of Nature tamed… designed by ourselves, for ourselves… to
remind us of what we want to be… (and the clay we mare made from…)
And
if the cajolements of Beauty fail, then the ‘fear and trembling’, the awe
stoked by the Sublime (which the human animal always remembers) remains…
…the writing of the Lithomorph:
the Lithomorphic as lithograph - an unreadable writing… writ on stone…
*
Copyright Peter Nesteruk, 2020