A Teahouse Garden

Reading about Yeats’ obsessions with gyres and religious systems, out of which his simple lyrical poems rose, I realized he filled in the spaces between the lines with humanity.

So this poem comes out of occasional dips into gardens (the Bloedel Preserve of Richard Haag and Thomas Church, Wharton’s house The Mount, Beatrix Ferrand’s Dumbarton Oaks, Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Hirshhorn, Eyrignac Manor in the Dordogne, Eleanor Perenyi’s horticultural writings) and my attempt to turn their trellised myths into something as soft as flowers.

Garden designers are called niwa shi, “garden masters,” in Japan. Poets have to replace their Linnaean geometries with emotions that don’t require vocabularies, mudra gestures and the shadows of actual essences.

Although Nabokov constantly talked about chess novels, which worked out chess problems with characters, as Goethe used physics as a formula for his novel, Elective Affinities, Nabokov used what Beethoven called “false fugues,” plots that superficially mentioned chess (Sebastian Knight, The Luzhin Defense), but that never followed the patterns of a game beyond a few superficial references.

My own quantum poems similarly follow broad logical outlines but replace the specifics with softer emotions. Accuracy is the enemy of revelation.

Walking around the Bloedel Preserve on Bainbridge Island brought back time at other gardens, but the roots of the poem started only after I had abandoned the ideas. As Bob Dylan said, “I’d like to be able to play the guitar like Leadbelly, and then not do it.” You have to forget everything you know to play a concert, to find the accidental notes, the telling mistakes. We must lose our mind to find ourselves.

There are certain folds of space, wormholes where the surface of objects are disrupted, revealing the gears, the wizard behind the screen. These breaches in the fabric of time gather around complexities, groupings of objects, clusters in crowds. They are quantum synapses, junctions in the mind. You see them in the chaos of a Jackson Pollack, in fractal shapes, in musical cat’s cradles that have no ties to the structure of the piece, in explosions of language in poetry or prose, Finnegan’s fall from the ladder. These anomalies hint at deeper layers. The geometric patterns of Japanese gardens have these metaphors hidden in confusion which evoke Buddhist cosmology.

One principle of Hindu-Buddhist cosmology is a vision of the physical universe as alternating mountains and oceans grouped around Mt. Sumeru, the central axis of the world. The arrangement of stones and islands in the pond of Rokuon-ji Temple (the Golden Pavilion) evokes this cosmology, as do the sands and stones of the Bloedel Reserve.

There are maelstroms in time when the massing of objects weighs down the scaffold of gravity, and space collapses in on itself.

On earth, glacial rivers disappear into the ice, into moulins. There are waterfalls in the middle of the ocean. There is liquefaction of soil in earthquakes, where soil in Iceland turns into silt that deliquesces into bellows of existence below the surface.

In space, the cosmic energy grid breaks down and matter is fused into particles smaller than atoms in black holes (as the immense gravity of black holes compresses matter nearly into nothingness). In such places, the illusion of space can no longer sustain the smoke of shape, the thermal patterns of air that mimic the shadows of things.

These patterns, clusters, wormholes are mimicked in Fibonacci helices; branching in trees, swirls of palm canopies and pineapples are its metaphors, its latent recurrence sequences, its eternal return, hinted at by the Zen cosmology of stone gardens.

A typical cumulus cloud weighs around 1.4 billion pounds, yet it looks aerated, as frothy as air itself. The elutriated foam of the sky seems as fragile as ocean spume, but is in fact a cripplingly dense cortex, a circuitry of gyri and sulci, the accumulated synapses of mountain folds and synclines, wormholes found in Precambrian thrust faults of tongues, drumlins, furrows, basins, domes, troughs, alluvial and volcanic formations, erratics, coulees, defiles, and chasms of the air.

This feathery trellis, imitated by neural cosmologies, appears when flaws in its symmetry create holes: rips, roues, moulins, underwater cataracts, cracks in the electric grid. This energy trellis sustains the relationships which underlie visible forces like orbits, gravities, strange attractors which we don’t understand. It appears in the tangle of underbrush, in the amygdala-like cluster of vines in Patrick Dougherty’s Daydreams, in the nebulous gases of galaxies photographed by the Hubbell and Webb telescopes, in the sudden density, the wormhole, which randomly appeared in my reflection photo of the Bloedel teahouse.