Laurie Sheck

by A Monster's Notes (v5)

  Lion Grove

  Garden of Autumn Vapors

  Could-be Garden

  Thatched Hut of the Abundant Stars

  My friend, what would you name your garden? Would you keep it secret, or would you tell me?

  but no wall will ever be solid enough and the red laughter through the wall

  but the walls are so strong

  no wall will ever

  My Friend,

  I feel the space of you growing narrower and narrower, walls closing in. There are so few letters left so very few and I feel cold suddenly and suddenly coldly afraid. “No space is too narrow to be thought about or used,” Ji Cheng wrote in his book on gardens. And one can build a moon window, he said, a way for the distance to open and come in. Yet the walls moved as your sister moved, they walked beside her. Now I feel them walking beside me. They hover, press in. I can’t feel the smoke trees on the hillside or the way the distance opens.

  There are no more notes of Cao Xueqin’s to translate. Often in my mind I hear Red Inkstone’s words, “there will be no settled version.” Of you, myself, or anyone, our hours in Aosta, your sister, these months I’ve read your letters. Something in me resists this even as I know it’s true.

  In Xu Yuan Garden, in Nanking, there’s a guesthouse named Tongyin Guan which means music-from-the-tong-tree. It’s named for Bo Ya who, almost 2000 years ago, played a qin made from tong tree wood. Legend says he played more beautifully than anyone ever had. He traveled on government assignments but went off alone whenever he could. One day heading back from a mission he moored his boat among reeds. From behind the trees an impoverished woodcutter stopped to listen to him playing. When Bo Ya played of high mountains the woodcutter saw high mountains, when he played of water the woodcutter murmured, “how vast are the rivers and oceans.” Whatever Bo Ya played, the woodcutter never failed to understand. Though he’d lived for decades as a hermit, he stepped out of the woods and the two became close friends. “Your heart and mine are the same,” Bo Ya said, promising to come back within the year. But when he returned his friend had been dead for one hundred days. At this news, Bo Ya smashed his instrument and never played again.

  When I touch the door do I touch the same wood Cao Xueqin touched? When I sit at the table is this his table? Do I wash my cup and bowl in the sink that was his sink?

  You write that you feel cold all the time, that there are burns on your leg you don’t understand. Your garden shines with red flowers. There are words that grow red inside my mind: excision, infiltration. Cattle stumble in red dust, our faces are covered with red dust. There’s a garden near here named Sufficiency Garden. I wish we could go there, you and I. It’s said that even the smallest garden path, if made properly, can form a path for the eyes that’s longer than a hundred miles—

  For days Clerval adds other gardens to his list: Lotus Garden, Half-mu Garden with its Chamber for the Appreciation of Stones and its collection of zithers. Garden for Solitary Pleasure, Hundred Plant Garden. There are paths, moon windows, the Hall of Cloud Shade with its roof that seems almost to float. Every now and then he rests his head on the rough table. There’s only one letter left to read. What will he do after he finishes his friend’s last letter?—probably go back to his translation work, but then what?

  “Your heart and mine are the same,” Bo Ya said. But I think Claire was right—there are walls within walls we’ll never understand. Does she still stand at the cold window in the snow as she writes the word destroy over and over, and says to herself, liberty of thought and silent letters? And the Goddess of Consolation, did she really come to Boethius, or did he sit in his cell alone, touch his lips only to air?

  Aosta, Feb 13

  My Friend,

  These burns on my legs don’t go away I don’t know how they XXXX photophobia ulceration hypopigmentation XX I dreamed they gave me a quiescent certificate but all it said was I must stay completely quiet not make one single sound not ever XXX I tore it up my legs were working I ran into her room XXX

  She wrote in her notebook, “We live in accumulations of the actual with so little understanding”

  “I dreamed I hacked at his garden wall for hours until it broke into 5,000 pieces. Then we were standing on either side of the trellis. I have to repair it, he said. No you don’t, I said, but could tell he didn’t believe me”

  Wrote, “Can extremity nurture?”

  “He moves things around as if it matters—why doesn’t he look to the hills, let into his garden the feeling of hills?”

  Wrote, “Sometimes he looks so small from my window, a crouching animal, unguarded.”

  XXXX If I had someone to read to me If I could ask. you about the Mustard Seed Garden and the Mustard Seed Manual that was written there but I’m glad, as always, you’re not here XXXX

  My Friend, there’s only one letter left to read. I delay I pretend I can send you my notes on gardens, I make my lists of gardens

  FURTHER NOTES ON GARDENS

  “Borrow from the view afar,” Ji Cheng wrote. “Bring the vast external landscape into that which is contained and private.”

  (what do you take into your eyes?)

  ∼ ∼ ∼

  Each plant has its own history and associations. The plantain, for instance, is associated with poor scholars who used its large, broad leaves to write on when they couldn’t afford paper or silk.

  ∼ ∼ ∼

  Each segment or “space cell” within the larger garden needs to be contemplated on and then named.

  (I still don’t know your name)

  ∼ ∼ ∼

  Having retreated from the world, Sima Guang wrote his encyclopedic work Comprehensive Mirror for the Aid Of Government (nth c) within the confines of his garden.

  ∼ ∼ ∼

  “For twenty years I continued to build the garden. I worked and sat and thought and worked and rested and thought but it was still not very good. When I returned from my post in Szechuan I gave my whole heart to the garden, I thought only of the garden.” (Yu Yuan, 16th c)

  ∼ ∼ ∼

  My Friend, I’m still delaying. Will I ever run out of gardens to list?

  NAMES OF GARDENS

  Pavilion of the Roosting Red Clouds

  Surging Wave Pavilion

  Garden of the Foolish Official

  Late Spring Studio

  Winding Garden

  Cool Spring Pavilion

  Pear Garden

  Plum Garden

  Path of Flower Rain

  Kiosk for the Watering of Flowers

  With-Whom-to-Sit Pavilion

  Five Star Bridge

  Jade Peak Pagoda

  Three Pools Mirroring the Moon

  Always when Clerval comes to me, when I can see him, I love to watch his hands, his face, the opening and closing of his eyes, the tensing or relaxing of his forehead, his jaw. But now I’m almost tempted not to look. After he’s finished reading, when there are no more letters left to read, will something rip itself in him as once, long ago, it ripped in me?

  Aosta, Feb 17

  My Friend,

  In what ways does thought pierce itself destroy itself? Her white sleeve the smell of sun XXXX and thou shall not thou shall not and your leper’s dress XXX your hood your clapper What laws govern leaving? XX atropine sulphate acid tartaric XXX she said when she walked the wall walked with her In her notebook she left many blank pages the sores on my leg much worse now and I don’t know why I can barely I will try to

  I’ll try to focus better. Be more clear. Will write more slowly. Maybe that’s what the Master of the Mustard Seed Garden did, just calmed, slowed, talked to himself all those years he worked on his manual. I read that he named it Mustard Seed Garden because it was small like a seed, that modest plot of ground he tended. She dreamed of destroying these walls (she dreamed red laughter). I say she’s my sister I write of her notebook quote from her notebook but what do you really know of her or who I am and how I’ve lived or if she even existed? I remem
ber the touch of your hand through the glove in my mind I call you “my friend” I think of you daily

  I don’t want to become a “story” to you XXXX Is anyone truly held or known or settled within another’s mind? The man who’ll bring you these letters if he can find where you live—I’ve told him that he must not let you set eyes on him or speak with him no matter what, he can leave them only if not seen. These pages are what you have of me as I have my thoughts of you, the idea of the warmth in your sleeves, your small house north of Peking, our hours in Aosta. I can’t

  You’ll wonder if I’m alive or did I die, but what does it matter?

  th XX The sores on my the sores on my leg burn she seemed so sad under the walnut tree and lonely If I could hack these walls but the Master of the Mustard Seed Garden, did he mind his garden’s walls? Wars outside them, disunity, corruption did he and thou shall not if I could rip this solitude this quiet but nothing ever really rips it three injections of 0.01 grams sepsis tourniquet local anaesthetic XXX another snowfall last night her sleeves still smell of sun

  Baoyu still hasn’t returned. His father hurries home from his mission in the south, travels day and night by foot then boat. Near Piling Post Station it’s starting to snow. Baoyu’s father moors his boat, steps off toward shore, briefly wonders: If I could live as a recluse in the country … if I could tend my plot of land … forget… But he misses his son, is surprised how much he misses him. White air swirls. Cold seeps under his clothes. Then he sees something moving on shore, the shape of a man with a shaved head and a red cloak. The shape stops and deeply bows, turns and walks the other way. It seems almost to glide. Two other shapes appear and gently take its arms. There are no footprints in the snow

  At Piling Post Station the snow falls and falls. Baoyu’s father stands in the secluded cove. Didn’t the shape in the red cloak turn the way he imagines planets turn, beyond willingness or mind, undoubting. Something beautiful in how it turned. (My friend, I turn you over in my mind. What will I do with this silence you left me in? There’s rice in my bowl but I don’t want to eat it I should make myself eat it… One face on either side of the trellis… And Red Inkstone didn’t come, or did Cao Xueqin not know that he had come?)

  Baoyu walks and walks in his red cloak. Snow falls on his shaved head, his shoulders—

  NOTES

  Notes on Agnes Martin

  From the early 1960s until her death at 92 she painted grids. Why would she do this?

  Often she titled them after nature but they were of the mind, the way it feels itself and thinks: “My paintings are not about what is seen. They are about what is known forever in the mind.”

  She was born in Saskatchewan, Canada, in 1912.

  Her father, a wheat farmer, died when she was two.

  (I look at her grids, the steady and unsteady pressure of a human hand, soft graphite lines darker here and there, so thin sometimes as if about to break. The mind is an unsteady place. And yet it holds. I feel inside myself its mixture of fragility and chance. How mind is more than mind, outstrips itself somehow—)

  She said, “I was thinking about the innocence of trees and the grid came to me.” “I have a very quiet mind.”

  She said, “Nature is the wheel. When you get off the wheel you’re looking out. You stand with your back to the turmoil.”

  She titled her paintings: White Flower, Words, Night Sea, Falling Blue.

  Why would she make grid after grid? And year after year like that? “Why do you make another?” a visitor asked. “I have a dream. I dream another grid.”

  (Like the way I go over and over in my mind the place that is the mind. As these notes accumulate … these nets of… these grids, veils, traces of… these marks of being on the edge of or immersed in, or—)

  Each grid bears its own particular irregularities, minute fluctuations, intervals, exaltations. Yet how orderly they seem overall, each speaking to the others over space and time, as if to say, each of us is isolate and odd but not singular only, not just that.

  (As I’m not just singular, after all. As a mind’s patternings partly recognize another’s.)

  (She marked such minute gradations, zones of transitivity, of becoming, how did she do that? It’s what you couldn’t meddle with in me even as you made me—somehow it escaped—that grid of thought materializing, dematerializing, in this place inside myself I can hardly grasp or name.)

  “When I cover the square surface with rectangles it lightens the weight of the square, destroys its power.”

  (I watch her fields of powerlessness float. They’re strong in themselves and do no harm.)

  In 1967 she gave away almost all her possessions, left New York City, drove in a pickup truck across Canada and the West. She didn’t paint for seven years.

  Then she settled in Cuba, New Mexico.

  She had no studio assistants: “I don’t know what they do.”

  She didn’t own a TV.

  (I don’t have a quiet mind, but the thought of a hand moving across a surface sometimes quiets me. The way marks create a merging and dissolving, a setting out, a dissonance or peace, a flickering, a membrane, a rough bloom—)

  She titled her paintings: Untitled, Grass, Rain, Leaf, Wheat, The Spring.

  What is it that consoles?

  She said she was painting joy. (I only partly believe her.)

  She wrote, “I would rather think of Humility than anything else. She cannot do either right or wrong. She does not do anything. All of her ways are empty.”

  She died in a retirement community in Taos, New Mexico, on December 16, 2004.

  Notes on John Cage

  He believed there’s no such thing as silence. “Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death.”

  Even in the most quiet moments: breathing, hum of electrical appliances, rustling pages, trucks in the distance shifting gears.

  (When I couldn’t speak, I heard the blood-taste in my throat, the fear inside my body, everything withheld, unsettled; Mary’s hands holding pebbles as she waited, the tossed quiet of her leaving.)

  He said, “quiet sounds were like loneliness”

  “I was a ground in which emptiness could grow.”

  All this is music.

  Years earlier, he’d entered an anechoic chamber expecting to hear silence, but instead heard two sounds. “When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me the high one was my nervous system, the low one my blood in circulation.”

  After this he wrote his “silent piece,” 4′33.″

  The first performance was given by David Tudor on August 29, 1952. He walked out onstage, sat down at the piano, closed the keyboard’s lid. After a period of time he opened it. This marked the end of the first movement. He did this again for the second, the third, his hands never touching the keys.

  (There’s so much sound in waiting and thinking, in stillness and absence, your face rising in my mind then disappearing.)

  He said, “Everything we do is music.”

  “Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. The sound of a truck at fifty miles an hour. Static between the stations. Rain.” “I found that I liked noises.”

  (Was I noise to you, but noise you couldn’t hear as music? As if such sound must be a wrongness, a crude disordering of thought and feeling.)

  He sought no summations, built no walls.

  (He found the beautiful in what’s dismissed or overlooked as ugly. Found such terms, in any case, not useful. I look at my body and wonder: if I’m noise and that noise is part of the ongoing texture of the world, why must I think in terms of ugliness, beauty, aberration? Still I hide, never look in a mirror.)

  His pieces include: Cheap Imitation, First Construction (In Metal), Etude Borealis, Imaginary Landscape No. 1.

  He designed a prepared piano, placing screws, bolts, rubberized strips, and other objects between the strings.