Book Review by Rebecca Otowa
OF ARCS AND CIRCLES: insights from Japan on gardens, nature, and art
by Marc Peter Keane (Stone Bridge Press, 2019)
The first thing I noticed about this book is that it is made up of essays, similar to Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Teaching a Stone to Talk by Annie Dillard, which I loved back in the 70s. The voice reminded me of Annie’s, and the way each essay talked about things I had never noticed before was also reminiscent of these earlier books. So I was personally disposed toward Of Arcs and Circles immediately.
My experience of reading it was that this isn’t a book to be devoured as one does a bag of potato chips. Each essay requires time and peace, and rereading, to connect with its essential views, which may hide lessons of a very surprising sort. In this, as well, it was a lot like Annie Dillard’s work for me.
An American landscape architect who lived and worked in Kyoto for many years, Marc Peter Keane has designed gardens of various kinds, written several books about Japanese gardens including Japanese Garden Notes and The Art of Setting Stones, has produced works of art, and has been also involved in preserving traditional environments and cultural heritage. He has made gardens which are also installation art in New York and elsewhere, and is working on a garden in a prestigious hotel in Kyoto. (To see pictures, check out his website at www.mpkeane.com) Because of his work in stone, wood, ceramics, and plants, he is uniquely suited to writing a book about nature and the benefits of noticing the small details of his environment.
His book has several themes, some of which I will endeavor to enumerate here as I experienced them. One is juxtaposition. The decaying farm equipment and the encircling vines. The discarded can and its inhabitant, a small lake fish (both described in “Solace for the Tumbling Mind”). The present view of the old house being demolished and Keane’s personal memory of the flower-arrangement teacher, a friend and mentor, who lived there (in the title essay, “Of Arcs and Circles”). The anemometer and how it stacks up against the movement of trees as an accurate predictor of weather (in “Wind in the Trees”).
Other themes cover the importance of grounding oneself in the physical world, the senses we are given, dancing the intricate dance of being alive within the place we find ourselves. The exquisite detail, down to bark and annular rings, of a piece of sumi charcoal which both is, and is not, the parent tree (“Wind in the Trees”); the intricacy of a reflection seen for an instant in a shop window (“Little Secrets Everywhere”); or the psychological effect on long-ago people, when colors were not a common experience, of bright cinnabar vermilion painted on a shrine gate among all that brown and green (“On Torii Gates”). His eye lights upon the beauty of tiny movements and forms and he spins them out into mental configurations, like a group of wasps making a paper nest. Tiny movements, tiny details, tiny forms. The descriptions of the natural forms, and the mental configurations that these evoke, are themselves fleeting and ephemeral, not weighed down with judgment or gravitas.
Of course, there are moments of elucidation arising from Keane’s extensive knowledge of Japan. This would have to be mentioned as another theme in the book. As examples, I will mention the comparison of the meanings of the words “garden” (in English) and “tei-en” (in Japanese) which serve to illuminate the contrasting views of this space (“A Garden by Any Other Name”); the small details of customs and human interaction, such as the way to show respect at a rural shrine (“Solace for the Tumbling Mind”); the form and meaning, in effect, the history, of a torii gate which leads into the sacred space we call a shrine (“On Torii Gates”).
Occasionally Keane’s writing broadens out into moments of enlightenment which link the natural world, with all its details, to spiritual universes of meaning, though these are never forced or didactic. I especially enjoyed the essay entitled “There is No Such Thing as Art”, as it so precisely put into words my own feeling, which is that art is a process rather than an object to be bought and owned, a process of losing oneself in the act of creation, a moment of oneness between the creator and his medium, which becomes the whole world. This is amply borne out in the penultimate essay, “Wheels Turning”, in which he becomes the creator who is enjoying, playfully and yet philosophically, the process of creation at the potter’s wheel of his wife.
There are pithy little epigrams and pages of what could be called stream-of-consciousness writing. There are trees, insects, and snakes. There is wind and there is water. There are rustic farmers and sophisticated tea masters, a small boy with a dragonfly resting on his upturned finger and a temple cat that prompts a train of thought about where cat food comes from.
In the end, I think Keane would agree that his book might just as well be written in the swirls of earth or the movement of leaves as in the words he chose. Writing, for him, I sense, is a creative process in which he effortlessly weaves words and essays from his experiences with eyes, hands, and the natural world; and yet the making of the book itself is secondary to those experiences. It’s a joy to follow these experiences along with the author. And this reader is looking forward to reading this book again, slowly and peacefully, and to translating his words and ideas into my own in my corner of the material world.
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For Marc Peter Keane’s homepage with a list of publications, click here. For his Wikipedia page, see here.
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