Chinese
Gardens: Totemic Traces
The
presence of absence. Old pines in classical gardens, dry with age. Along a
verdant lake-side, willows with hollowed-out trunks. Along flowing waters, amid
green borders; dry husks, the empty shells of dead trees. Surrounded by
flowering shrubs and the verdant continuity of a myriad growing green things –
a figure on a ground. In such well-tended spaces, with every visual moment
aesthetically accounted for, we find still the empty trunks of willows, tall
yellowing bamboo, pines whose tops have long since withered and remain to tower
above all else. The dead among the living. Unconcealed. Old amid the new. Older
even amid tradition; older than tradition. Occupying pride of place. Often
found to be relying on supports, so defended, perpetuated, kept for their symbolic
value (for if everything has a use-value and a symbolic value, in a garden all
things first have a symbolic value, this is their use-value as parts of the
sign system, the meaning world of the classical Chinese garden space, their
growth, their life, is the material support of their meanings, the cessation of
growth, death, would then appear to lie outside of this meaning world, this
practice of signs, something to be removed – and yet, there they are still,
still standing, persisting…). Incorporated; like stone… Re-incorporated… like
the dead.
Nature worship as
trace of the sublime, effect of an often inimical causality, of a Nature
needing to be assuaged if not understood, so personified and offered palliatory sacrifice, tamed by ritual, absolute outside
bought inside… alongside…
Like
the personification with which we greet the stone forms, the ‘lithomorphs’ that rise up out of waters, stand on mock
hills, and mounds, often constituting these mounds, stone forests, (Lion
Garden), rise in the midst of bonsai pots (pensai or penjing, 盆景the scene
in the pot) often included in miniature (meiosis) within the world of the pot
itself, or just standing in the midst of a courtyard, or to one side adorning a
wall, like a film, still life, old images flickering, a wall, a cinema screen,
the screen of the cave wall, and cave paintings… The personification with which
we tame the all too inhuman forms of the stone ‘gods’… applied to dead nature
too, applied to Nature itself, producing genius
loci, ‘the spirit of the place’, then ‘gods’ then ‘God’… with the
mono-theistic ‘last step’, the ultimate personification or meta-set
personified. Yet the forms we see here, are prior (unlike western classical
gardens we are not surrounded by statues… the end result of personification, of
allegory or actual reference). Suggest priority. A conscious use of the process
of personification, of the suggestive force of personification; but at its very
edge, without its ‘conclusion’, or anthropomorphic apotheosis. Similitude
standing on the edge of similitude. Superstition understood as such…?
Self-conscious superstition? Understood. But still required, its force, the
force of human desire for intelligibility and the desire for the sacred met…
forces half-understood but strongly-felt, made safe. The debt we owe Nature and
the past too are met… (in the words of the philosopher of ritual, ‘give the
gods and ancestors their due, and keep them at a distance…’). And if the
distance is symbolic or aesthetic, this too will do, will produce art and
culture, an art culture… a culture of living wrought out of the fear of the
dead (and the weight of the past) and the forces of Nature. Out of the respect
for the Other (in truth, a strategic
respect), a respect for the self.
He might have said,
‘give the gods and the ancestors their due, and put them to one side…’ in a
space, put aside… so doing framed, (re-framed) become a part of ‘the civilising process’, a ritual ground with its scenes and
analogues of proportion and balance, a ritual of civilization. A ritual with a
ground; made from the ground. The ground on which we walk…
Most
evidently here, in the ‘Master of Nets’, with that strange, anomalous, pine;
towering above all, a totem-like creature, not animal (but looking like an
animal, a massive insect) a plant, then (but no longer alive). A symbolic
presence; but actual, what we see when we look up; what we see in the depths of
the waters, reflected, figure, with the light of the sky as ground (with the
surface of the waters as means of expression). Nature mort; still life, amid the tour de force of the Garden or ‘Nature improved’, ‘Nature tamed’ -
even Nature transfigured. Transformed into safety and beauty – but still the
old threat remains, overlooking the human appropriation, the nightmare (old)
lurking still behind the dream (of a Nature untamed, its processes
uncontrollable, sometimes incomprehensible, destructive, inimical -
incorporated into the culture of the living, a trace, a reminder…). The
presence of the dead; reminder of Nature’s final gift to all things.
In the most organized
of spaces, shrine to beauty and balance: the sign of entropy’s end.
(Even
here, at the heart of the most classical, most elegant, most revered, and
copied of classical Chinese garden spaces… perhaps the model of restraint and proportion, the refined disposition of
matter… the rearing totemic presence…).
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Copyright Peter Nesteruk, 2018