“But it is not with an act of outrageous chromatic arrogance that the maples impose themselves on one’s view: if the eye is drawn towards them as though lured by a musical motif, it is because of the lightness of their starry leaves. Which seem suspended around their thin branches, the leaves all horizontal, without depth, yearning to expand and at the same time not to clutter the transparency of the air.”I was floored at the ‘yearning to expand and at the same time not to clutter the transparency of the air’. How can one think and write like that and pass on that joy to the reader? It amazes me, fascinates me. He not only brings what he sees alive for you, but draws you deeper in his contemplation and worldview. Literally opening up a treasure chest of ways of seeing for you.
This essay leading me, I read through his travelogues from Japan. And the combination of Calvino’s ways of seeing and Japan’s ways of being is quite otherworldly.
“New to the country, I am still at the stage where everything I see has a value precisely because I don’t know what value to give it. When everything finds an order and a place in my mind then I will start not to find anything worthy of note, not to see any more what I am seeing. Because seeing means perceiving differences, and as soon as differences all become uniform in what is predictable and everyday, our gaze simply runs over a smooth surface devoid of anything to catch hold of. Travelling does not help us much in understanding but it does serve to reactivate for a second the use of our eyes, the visual reading of the world.”From what he says about travel, one can perhaps extend to unravel the riches in the ordinary, or the familiar. The way we seem to perceive reality is quite a patchwork of memory and observation. At times, by playing around with space and time - by stepping away, by changing the vantage point or by focusing on another aspect of the observed, we can ruffle the memory a bit to reconfigure itself and in turn, reactivate ourselves for a better ‘visual reading of the world’. Every act of looking anew changes the observed.
Reading him, it seems that richness of feeling, of observing, of living a fuller, deeper, more felt life does not require a lot. It sometimes just needs an openness to feel, and a patience and malleability to let things appear in a form unknown to you, and to be able to play around with the ideas, and then, a simple thing as leaves falling from a gingko tree can hold the keys to a deep meditative state, where one thought can lead to another, and before you know it, you unravel deep secrets of your own which you didn’t even know existed.
A simple thing, this art of seeing in a new way, but, powers so magical – we go seeking out in the world for riches, for more and more, and here, he shows you this new power, where your whole world gets upgraded instantly to a new level.
**
Here, just some water,
There amidst the trees
The sea!
The gardens, designed by poet-architects, are made to be experienced and evoke epiphanies like this haiku here. I haven’t really seen any Japanese gardens as such, or read a lot about them, but under his gaze, the gardens and all their reflected poetry seems to come alive.
“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 once could define the intention that has led to the layout of these gardens. Everything here has to seem spontaneous and for that very reason everything is calculated.”
“Hillocks, rocks, slopes, multiply the landscape. […] The Japanese passion for the small that provides the illusion of the big comes out also in the composition of the landscape.”On the pools of water in Japanese gardens,
“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.”And just by reading his take on these pools, I seem to stumble on some sort of solution for my own internal struggles – those of width vs depth, the look out vs the look in, action vs contemplation. These pools a visual to solve for those complex inner battles. Two lakes. One for each state of mind. Beautiful.
**
His curious, observing, reflecting gaze falls on Japanese houses, palaces, the aesthetic of unobtrusive, ‘the bare and the unadorned’, and he wonders whether this ideal “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 shelled peas, sliced fish, darned socks, washed sheets, emptied bed-pans.”
It makes you think about yourself, and wonder at what he calls, “the heavy weight of existences that materializes in our furnishings and impregnates all our Western rooms.” When you begin to think about it, you realize that one cannot exclude everything. The normal life must carry the weight of the living, “the smell of the frying”, etc, but how much of the life the task of living should occupy – this arriving at essentials through exclusion requires a going through and is a matter of discernment, and perhaps, that is the question to be lived through.
Very soon, this chain of observation on housing and its aesthetics leads him to reflect on the cost of culture itself. He has this conversation with a fellow student tourist:
‘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.This understanding and acknowledgement of the cost of culture, which many of us in a bid to explain the world around fair narratives often choose to ignore or overlook or push away from the view, because it is not pretty and sullies the landscape a bit. But having that understanding of the cost helps, makes one conscious of the privilege and hopefully, mindful enough to not squander it, since it carries not only the weight of one person’s life and thoughts, but the weight of history, of all the lives that went before to be able to provide us with that “different space and time, a proof that the total domination of sound and fury can be challenged…” Another paradoxical, non-linear way of seeing things. And we need more people who can show us things like that - in few words, carrying a weight of years of reflection and consideration. Things which perhaps need to enter the common ways and currencies of thinking.
It did make me realise the position of privilege that I have, to be able to spend an afternoon ruminating over one essay from Calvino’s collection of sand, when rest of the world struggles with what seems like the defining moment of this decade, the way wars were for the last century.
**
I can keep quoting from those essays on Japan. His essays laid out like the Japanese gardens he writes about. The writing rich in meditations, observations, digressions, which can both serve as a trigger and a trainer to one’s thinking and seeing.
“It is by limiting the number of things around us that one prepares oneself for accepting the idea of a world that is infinitely larger than ours. The universe is an equilibrium of solids and voids. The words and gestures that accompany the pouring of the foaming tea must have space and silence around them, but also a sense of inner meditation, a limit.”
**
Elsewhere, he talks about the moon.
“Love for the moon often has its double in love for its reflection, as if to stress a vocation for mirror games in that reflected light.”And the way life works sometimes, this morning, I woke up to a beautiful sight as if directly from Calvino’s Collection of sand - the moon and the stars, reflected in the pool.
The depths of the sky so calmly and so beautifully reflected in the shallow pool. I couldn’t see the moon from the window when I looked out, was too high in the sky, but saw it down below, unexpectedly, looking up to me from the pool.
Interestingly, I haven’t seen anything like this ever. I have seen moon reflected in a lake, and often in the ocean, but that’s not the same. Those waters are moving often, never this calm, so calm, that if someone disoriented you, you wouldn’t know whether you were looking up to the sky or down to the pool.
The unruffled calmness can make a shallow pool of water hold the sky. And I seem to understand Calvino’s essay a little better.