Visual Imagination: The Garden of Suggestion

What more there might be to see depends in part upon a visual imagination, the power that can see in a little L-shaped garden of which each arm is less than thirty feet long, `towering mountains... waterfalls, and river gorges... an uninhabited wilderness of rocks and falling waters. Gigantic spires rise in the distance, and the dry river flows out between two mountains...' All evoked by a few rocks seen against a back-ground of hedge and a few trees ! This... or sensations akin to this interpreted in literary terms as one might, mistakenly perhaps, try to express music... is closer to the truth of Japanese gardening. More exceptional, more extreme, the last step before the ecstasy of nothingness, of sensation without cause, of perception divorced utterly from recognition, is the garden of Ryuanji... `Ryuanji is a small space of white sand, covering an area about the size and shape of a tennis court. This is raked into straight lines. Placed in this sand there are five groups, of fifteen stones in all. There is nothing else at all.' 2 With works of art so subjective as this the trouble is that one can see in them everything... or anything... or nothing. `The little rectangle is as full of movement as Piccadilly Circus... it is not human movement.... It is no more than an old box with nothing inside it... It is a constellation and the stars are its orbit. Like some disaster of the utmost magnitude, like a world or system split into fragments... They are entire lands or continents... too big for human interest... We are in an emptiness inhabited only by the primal forces... The stones each time you look at them take on another meaning... The fifteen stones, seen in their different angles, take on the significance of a scale of music... The significance is musical. But the meaning is a mystery... Here are the primal law and order... Or would any other arrangement of the groups of stones possess this magic?' A garden of this sort ceases to be a garden in any usual sense of the word and becomes closer to a crystal ball or a mesmerist's eyes or the operations of the drug mescalin. It is the logical conclusion of the refinement of the senses, the precipitous world of the abstract painter, a world in which the stains on the cover of a book can absorb one more utterly than the ceiling of the Sistine chapel; it is the narrow knife edge of art, overthrowing and discarding all that man has ever been and achieved in favour of some mystic contemplative ecstasy, a sort of suspended explosion of the mind, the dissolution of identity. You really cannot go much further than this unless you sit on a cushion like Oscar Wilde and contemplate the symmetry of an orange.