Our recent sightseeing-hiking excursion to the west coast began in slack-jawed wonder while beholding yet again the stunning northern California redwoods, which are ever so old, but simply never get old. We proceeded from there to a deservedly renowned Japanese Garden in Portland, Oregon, after which we piled another tall trees experience onto the trip through the conifer forests surrounding Olympia, Washington.
It was not till the last of those, while picking my way through an impossibly tangled old forest with giant happy evergreens, downed trees at every conceivable angle and stage of decay, and hip-high ferns sprawling over each other in their search for space and nutrients, that I realized something.
Even just the three words ‘rage for order’ are almost laugh-out-loud funny. Rage is anathema to order, is it not?
Without having at all planned the sequence, we had sandwiched the wild, overgrown forests on both ends of the trip around the heavily manicured, spare Japanese garden in a kind of dizzying compare-and-contrast exercise that posed fundamental aesthetic and even spiritual questions it was good to be hiking with at the time, and thinking more about now in its aftermath.
Two realms, two aesthetics, two landscapes and sensibilities. The seemingly unkempt, ramshackle wildness of the woods vis a vis the patient, almost excruciatingly focused attention to detail of a Japanese garden, over which human intervention is lord and master. That’s the basic, surface level, and not at all inaccurate summary.
But it’s all so much more interesting than that.
***
***
In the poem, “The Idea of Order at Key West,” the modernist poet Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) brought the phrase, “blessed rage for order” into the world in describing the perennial tussle between human imagination and the stubborn world that has its own agenda, impervious to human influence or need. Or is it?
The poem is opaque enough to have kept academics mining it rigorously since its publication in 1955. You can read it here, but the capsulized version for our purposes describes a woman singing seemingly in harmony with the natural roar at the edge of the sea. The narrator and a friend are within earshot, marveling at their dawning realization that the sea has become, amazingly enough, subservient, background sound, at least as they are experiencing the moment, to the woman’s voice.
She has, in a sense, mastered the sea with her own interpretive overlay, making a kind of art and therefore taming what is for all other intents and purposes the ocean’s untamable, untrammeled expression. But that’s only when the woman or anyone else is there, in a singing mood, with the chops to make an impact on any other human who might be in position to listen.
Absent that, the sea goes about its self-sufficient way with its “grinding water and the gasping wind,” relentless as it has been for millions of years and perhaps will be for a few million more before its overlord Mother Nature charts another course for it.
***
***
“Oh, blessed rage for order,” Stevens intones to start off the final stanza. The phrase became an immediate favorite of mine the first time I heard it uttered nearly a half-century ago by a learned Jesuit priest I wrote about years ago. Father Bob was pacing in front of the classroom as was his habit, musing on the phrase’s application by a fellow Jesuit theologian who stole it for a book title, published in 1975.
The phrase is brilliant for how much pure and powerful contradiction it packs into just a few words that are reflective of the human predicament, both in everyday life and within the confines of every person’s consciousness.
Maintain control or let things rip? Push the river or go with its flow? Corral that beast or that child or that emotion—or let them run free?
Even just the three words “rage for order” are almost laugh-out-loud funny. Rage is anathema to order, is it not?
But we’ve all known enough control freaks—or even harbored an internal one—to know that behind the tightened jaw and steely eyes lie volcanic, unruly obsessions, the suppression of which costs the unfortunate person a small fortune in emotional health.
And yet look at the word preceding “rage for order.” It is nothing less than “blessed.” Of course it is, because to be human is to seek to make order out of our experience. Not obsessively per the control freak, but as meaning-seeking and story-telling creatures, looking for coherence, for how things hold together, for how they fall apart. This drive is as natural and God-given as a California redwood, if we view humans as something other than robots.
We want to sing with the sea and perform feats on the nearest tree—or at least watch others do so, in vicarious delight.
Also: we create gardens. Sanctuaries of order, which is the very definition and goal of Japanese gardens, the experience of which we will pay for gladly in both time and treasure, and be thankful for the privilege.
***
***
Japanese gardens are essentially works of art writ large, using living plants along with accenting materials such as stone, sand, brick and sculpture. Every inch is chronicled and tasked in the service of an artistry so thorough and intentional that it almost leaves the visitor no other choice but to move slowly, to breathe and think and absorb slowly, in nearly devotional silence.
In its use of generously spaced natural materials, the emptiness-and-form axis assumes center stage, with blank/negative space suggesting quietude, like an uncluttered, sparely furnished home.
All of this in dramatic contrast to the forest understory, where human artistry is conspicuous in its absence and nature’s pell mell drive for abundance rules the day—after day after day after day…
Where the wild forest and manicured garden reflect each other, though, is in the sense of stillness and reverence they project. Walking under forest canopies amidst their seemingly infinite cycles of growth and decay, I think, “Here is my cathedral,” as close as I ever come to the infinite, to T.S. Eliot’s “still point of the turning world.”
A Japanese garden achieves the same basic effect from another direction, not by nature unbound but by nature refined, by the obviously studied, almost liturgical reverence it reveals on the part of its creators. They offer these as gifts to those drawn to the contemplation and stillness a lovely garden induces, another doorway to a kind of dissolution of the Self into the infinite processes that gave it birth, and which leave their mark on every living thing.
***
***
***
See and hit the Follow button at https://www.facebook.com/andrew.hidas/ for regular 1-minute or less dispatches from the world’s great thinkers, artists and musers, accompanied always by lovely photography.
Deep appreciation to the photographers! Unless otherwise stated, some rights reserved under Creative Commons licensing
Homepage rotating banner photos (except for library books) by Elizabeth Haslam https://www.flickr.com/photos/lizhaslam/
Library books by Larry Rose, Redlands, California, all rights reserved, contact: larry@rosefoto.com
Japanese garden and forest photos by Andrew Hidas https://www.flickr.com/photos/andrewhidas/
Ocean wave by Matt Paul Catalano, New York https://unsplash.com/@mattpaul/
My mother would have loved reading today’s blog; Wallace Stevens’ poetry was a favorite. In fact, his words moved her to write two poems dedicated to him. This one reminds me of your hike through the Northwest.
“Tell Me. Wallace Stevens”
Where is this Swatara that you say
Is not the river that you call to mind
With images of winding wet and dry.
Meanderings in time and elevations
In pure air, this river that is none of this,
Yet is?
Through the Minnesota woods we drove
Wandering towards Fargo, fragrant green
Becoming westward-blowing ochre dust as
Unsecured possessions careered down the
Midnight slope, waking tented slumberers
To stars.
There was a town lay north of us
Along this way, a sleepy clutch of ninety
Souls or so touching, but not quite, the Mississippi where it thins to just a fragile
Weaving thread in this old volume that
I hold.
Swatara it alike was called. The sound
It was that beckoned us, a siren song that
Echoed ancient things, things gone, things
Changing, a tiny clinging thing in that
Reverberating space which held us, drove
Us on.
My clear sense is that your mother and I could have been true pals, Robert. We were just born at inopportune times for that to happen. I appreciate you sharing a piece of her soul here.