Stone Phantasmagoria
(‘statue’/apparition/quotation)…
(from ‘The Philosophy of the Garden’, book project…)
Phantasmagoria… What part of the
imagination, of the memory, of the past, is it that requires this manner of
presence, of eruption, of spectacle (‘requires’, that is, as opposed to, tries
to avoid, this manner of … apparition)? For without the lithomorphs
and statues, the stone forms wrought and unwrought, carved and ‘found’,
encultured and ‘natural’, mimetic and ‘evocative’, referential and connotative,
as found in eastern and western gardens and parks, something is missing… A need
for something is answered, completed, provided: but always that something is
disquieting… disturbing… in a relation of contrastive disorientation when taken
in comparison to its context… to its benign and idealizing surroundings. What
is missing? What is supplied? Why statues?
We often find that empty buildings and
structures that appear to be dwellings may be a little uncanny, the presence of
a hesitation that denies the simple use of the term ‘beauty’ or pleasingly
picturesque, pretty… For these habitations are felt to be… ‘haunted’…
haunted by their implied inhabitants. Such spaces include ‘natural rooms’,
caves, and other forms of natural enclosure of shelter, ‘rooms’ in space, in
Nature, corners, pools, streams and rocks where overhanging branches provide a
roof of embracing, protecting arms; all these ‘places’ come with their implied
‘genius loci’ or ‘spirit of the place’. The product of our projection of
ourselves ‘as if’ its dwellers, its inhabitants, the
sense of an inhabitant, of some manner of dweller… And the concomitant sense of
the space as ‘home’; but to what kind of being? Out of this circular reasoning
(or rather structure of feeling, for the ‘place-ification’
or ‘placing’ of such spaces is emotional) personification ensues… It is as if
the statue or lithomorph provided the physical
counterpart of the presence in our imagination, the actualisation
of an emotion, the incarnation in stone, of a complex set of mental
associations and half-recognised mnemonic, as we
‘remember’ that there should be something there…
Perhaps the type
of structure known as a folly or ruin may be taken as coming closest to the
effect of the statue or stone-figure (and in fact they are often found
together, as in classical ‘ruin’ and statue)… But with the difference that the
stone form or figure embodies what, in the case of the ‘habitation’, our
imagination supplies or prompts…
Which brings us back to the question…
why? For if it is only ‘beauty’ that is required, why include an apparently
opposite, or obviously contrastive, type of image/object. The term ‘beauty’ or
‘the Beautiful’, on effect, stands for the sense of perfection in public or
intimate space, space ‘just-so’ with everything in its place, a type of space
either so ordered (or only semi-disordered, disorder stylized) that we feel
comfort and assuredness. A feature of aesthetics, of our reception and
expectation (judgement) of designed space as place (and nature become culture),
as found across the history of design, of landscape (Renaissance, Classic,
Baroque/Romantic, or straight and curved lines, East and West… etc.). Then… why
include something disturbing?
‘Evocative’,
bringing forth parallels, resemblances, clear and occluded, similitudes,
metaphoric and allegoric. In each case, pointing to, indicating, calling forth,
calling out by name, fields of meaning (for the western statues are not simply,
or rarely, specific, particular, even when named so, but rather mythic -
allegorical in range). The eastern ‘lithomorph’, rather,
nameless, uncertain in diexis, calls forth the
un-nameable, something so unutterably Other it has no
name. Our ‘vocative’ in stone. An appeal beyond words,
beyond language…
We note this presence in both East and
West (that is, in the history of Sinitic and Indo-European cultures) in the art
history of the garden, and note straight-away that both are ‘object worshiping’
cultures, both deferring to ‘object right’, such that the right-hand of the
object (in image as in figure or in place) is what is important. This
consonance of cultures at opposite ends of cultural and geographic space (of a
continent) whilst their respective narrative directionalities are opposite,
face opposite directions (left to right in the cultures influenced by ‘the
West’ or of Indo-European cultural provenance, right to left in traditional
eastern cultures – as indeed, historically in most cultures we have records
of). But this relation or normative directionality, ‘object right’, is absent
or denied in Arab and Jewish cultures, which prefer to go anti-clockwise around
sacred objects and places. So it is that in the gardens of these cultures, we
find the absences due to iconoclasm, no effigies, no statues (no ‘graven
images’)… no objectified other (no objectified Other). This contrast, of the
‘coincidental’ co-use in two very different cultural blocks with completely
different paths of cultural evolution, on opposite sides of the earth (or,
again, at either end of a vast continent) and the evasion of these same
co-ordinates (together with their considerable implications) in another
cultural block (perhaps describable as the ‘Ancient’, Mediterranean, Middle
Eastern, or ‘Semitic’ cultures) suggest that the ‘object right’ theory of
left/right directionalities and their role in art history is indeed the correct
one.
Does this observation begin to answer
the question, why? Why it is that we
require the ‘salt’ or ‘spice’ or ‘shudder’ of stone statues and statue-like
forms in ‘our’ gardens…? Why include ghosts in a secluded place, why frighten
people, why make present a haunting entity, like a misplaced quotation, a mis-collocated phrase or piece of collage, a wayward piece
of montage, a troubling image whose trouble is that it feels uncanny in the
context of intimacy, gentle order, harmony and beauty… ?
And of… colour…?
And here we may
note that the ‘uncanny image’ in photography is the black and white photograph,
the equivalent of these statues as two-dimensional images (from the content and
form of the representation of stone statues to the means of presentation that
is the black and white photograph). For the statues we speak of are largely
black, white and grey – the shades of stone. A contrast with colour, the ‘colour’ of presence,
as semi-present… again like a quotation, citation, or collage. So again,
just like mountains… another stone set in a milder looking surrounding, another
rock protruding from a green and blue en-framing,
snow and shadow and shades of grey set in a technicolour
pastoral. Monochrome aesthetic and a palette of many colours
(the ‘colour of the present’ or reality as we
experience it…). And mountains, as we know, or rather feel, are the abode of
gods…
Only at night, with or without the
illumination of moonlight, does the rest of the garden space join the world of
the stone visitants, become in tune with their tonality and so as uncanny as is
any space at night to diurnal animals (ourselves) – in which context they, the
statues, the stones, become truly terrifying, as we too are to ourselves….
For it is the other part of our selves that is here included
– without ‘it’ something is missing… as the object and the other, and the
object as other, are contained in the subject (in experience and in neurology -
where we take the self as object)… so our experience of space as place is
incomplete without our ‘other pole’… without the ‘other person’…
If Nature tamed (or ‘nature improved’)
is the formula for the garden, then this ‘meiosis’ or understatement (as
famously found in the bonsai/pensai formula),
applies also to the other nature there represented. Understatement is already a
feature of the Chinese garden especially, in its use of miniaturization as
repetition of the natural landscape and as in the resultant degree of comfort,
for mountain landscapes are rarely comfortable- not least in approach – and as
found in the rockery (假山/jiashan)… from which quantitatively larger,
and qualitatively different in meaning, arise the lithomorphs,
polite cousins of the megaliths of the other end of the continent (and distant
cousin to the much touched, much polished, much venerated stone ‘linga’ of Hindu culture). If ‘understatement’ (‘meiosis’,
making small) is another act of taming, of incorporating and appropriating
something once more dangerous… the taming of another sort of Nature…then, we
might ask, whose or what Nature?
(…and to take the theme of taming to the limit of the
ridiculous… become parody, as a kind of moronic populism, as a distant echo… as
found in the garden gnomes beloved of many English domestic gardens)…
Personification
whether overt, as in the case of a feature, the statue, or covert, as in the
case of space, a room as the question, ‘Whose room?’, or genius loci,
the ‘spirit of the pace’, or as found in the suggestiveness of the stone forms,
the litho-morphs, as ‘something’ in between the two
poles, of recognition and implication… All are the products of Object as Other
– featuring our longest history, human and hominid, of conscious (and perhaps
even preconscious, fear and wonder as recognition, as deification) relations to
our environment. Conscious and emotive, but perhaps also rational, as in
conscious of the need for an exchange, or sacrifice, or offering, and
conversely of a ‘safe’ inclusion in the pantheon of ‘our’ memory – and of the
two as combined, the Other and our identity (the Same) in rite, in ritual. As
product of our longest-ever repose to our ‘exterior’ to ‘Nature’ as the
universal attribution of another to an object, as Animism, which then became
source of our ‘interior’, producing the senses the emotional complex (or
aesthetics) we call ‘the Sublime’… Present in our collective art history as
‘Object Right’…
Whence the importance of statues in all cultures at permit
them (object right cultures) their replacement when cultures change (religion,
ideology) and their contested meaning when the moralities of the past and the
present clash…
However, there are no statues nor lithomorphs in the classical Japanese garden… Stones there
are a plenty – regarded as more important than plants. From large round pebbles
and chunks of rock, natural stone, to stone lanterns and stone pagodas,
culturally fashioned objects made from stone, the symbolic equivalents of
shrines in a landscape. Yet even the larger stones do not dominate nor intrude
in the way of the lithomorph, they too must appear
natural and in harmony, although they may be imposing and monumental (often
with the largest part buried beneath the ground, itself a symbolic fact…) –
complimentary rather than contrastive. Shinto like Daoism is a Nature First or
Animist philosophy – stones too have spirit/energy (kami). Japanese gardens
appear as a middle case (between Indo-European and Sinitic, ‘stone worship’ and
Semitic iconoclasm), with stone present as ‘natural’ or tamed and smoothed out,
remodeled and stylized into a harmonious if austere (Zen/Chan) aesthetic (the
austerity suggesting abstraction) with the Zen emptiness as the sublime
‘pointer’ or element (a simplicity and emptiness, repeated in western
Minimalism in the art history of the twentieth century).
This then is ‘the secret’ or desire for
the statue or stone form (in whatever form) in the garden (and not only the
garden as empty space). The desire for the Other. But also the desire of the ocean for an island, the plain for a
mountain, the desert for an outcrop of rock. For it is as if once a
perfect plane has been formed, a ground has been imagined or ‘perceived’, then
it desires a feature… like … the object in the subject (or the past in the
present) – a two-part or binary structure. For the statue or stone effigy is
but a figure of ourselves. Of our
‘double economy’. Our diremption.
So from ‘Object Right’ (object as
other) to diremption as our constituting locus of
forces, is but a small step… A step bridging a primeval, even
constitutive, gap of our experience (constitutive of being human). A gap
that is not a gap, but rather more akin to the mutual gravitational embrace of
two planets, two poles; one of which is within the other (the object as
representation of perception or memory) with the former (the subject) also only
present to itself ‘complete’ as an echo, an imitation (ourselves as other) as
picture or imagined memory (again a projection of what we imagine others see
when they see us). Otherwise its presence as the awareness of
being in a kind of ‘eternal present’. Indeed, the Eternal Present. For we are nowhere else…
A binary force that endlessly reanimates our consciousness,
ourselves and objects, ourselves and others, ourselves and objects as others,
and ourselves as objects to ourselves... and others… all in permanent
oscillation. The presence of the oscillation to conscious or analytical thought
as the proof that the limits of such have been reached…
*
The mention of ritual above reminds us
of one ‘cure’ for the diremption. Whether present as
inner oscillation: or in the divisions it founds in our dealing with the
‘outside’. Whether with thought as philosophy, or aesthetics or morality, with
fact/value as the ‘ground’ of the oscillation; in the social sciences with the
subjective, assertive moment of identity and the descriptive, objective
ordering of reality; and in the physical sciences the implications of the
quantum disjunction as the presence of the collective human subjectivity in
what was once thought to be an objective non-disjunctive manifold… classical
science including relativity… With the subject/object divide present as level
crossing and illegal creativity, as the entry of an exteriority (the subject)
into a closed system, in Gödel’s refutation of the closed-ness of ‘object
languages’ - For not even tautology is not exempt from the workings of the diremption. A division ‘bridged’ in ritual and in process:
as rapid alternation – think of the dance of commodity and gift (‘identity
exchange’) in modern consumerism.
A cure present as denial; a denial built on the suture of
the wound by the stitching together of the two sides by the needle of religion
or other forms of belief (Ideology, Natural Law etc).
Guaranteed by rituality; and often policed by sacrifice… (by
exclusion and scapegoating).
So if the above argument proceeded from
inclusion (a kind of return of the ‘accursed share’, or the desire for a
‘general economy’... we may take this further and regard this process as also a
kind of taming… as what was once ‘outside’ in brought ‘inside’. A process
extended from nature to our culture, or to ourselves as nature… a model for the
return of an excluded… but also its holding apart as excluded still… with its
continued actual exclusion as guaranteed by its presence as a symbol (whence
the invisibility of this type of ‘other space’, the unmentioned, unnoticed,
untheorized presences of the lithomorphs, within the
harmony of the garden as a haven… when not as a little heaven (and if the
uncanny poses an inconvenient question then a ready answer is to be found in
the reduction of the rearing rocks into a mere scenic ‘rockery’ - the topic of
my article, ‘Stone 3’).
And when not so neutered (appropriated
or sublimated)? ‘Fear & Trembling…’
(…or perhaps statues are the making
safe of Self and Culture, the garden itself is the making safe of Nature… All
forces tamed, in representation and reproduction – in Romanticism the ghost is
half freed… but still on the leash… the garden and park are not a horror film…
but then we do now have theme parks… and festivals (again) devoted to a tamed
version of fear… once used for identity ritual; now commodified, almost beyond
recognition… But the old fears, the ‘old gods’, keep rearing up… as social and
economic ills wreck their toll… (the blood lust of
‘identity challenged’… in place of the blood lust of identity challenged…)).
Memory: to learn
from the past; never to forget what happens when the demons are unleashed…
*
But why such drama…? ‘They’ are, after
all, just an inoculation… aren’t they?
Or does their invisibility indicate a
‘compromised immunity’…
*
Copyright Peter Nesteruk,
2023