Poetic Manifesto
The Japanese Garden is a botanic structure designed by way of a traditional
[the Japanese garden] [traditionally Japanese] intent for a specific effect.
The garden maintains over centuries a parallel: an unchanging design existing beside a continously altering context and landscape
[thoughtscape].
This is possible because the intentional specific effect designed for the garden visitor is for the garden visitor to gain no specific experience from the garden.
[Truth is that there is only one truth: there is no objective truth].
This tradition hasn’t
There is design;there is view;
There is no conclusion: therefore, there is fragmentation, a dispersal of infinate passive
[there is only your own conclusion]
frames to be viewed or not to be viewed, to be joined or not be joined.
[We shall stomp on the grass.]
Then a Japanese garden should be approached differently to other gardens: a Japanese garden should be acknowledged as a potential space for a different active participation. The viewer must seek out what it may offer her, and only her. She must read herself in the ferns, the boulders, and the spaces between them. She should acknowledge that space as possible discovery. She must accept that space shall always partially exist. She takes her own route, directs herself: perhaps even discards the map.
[We stomp on the grass!]
The viewer may take photographs of a few frames in an attempt to document those specific views, [the breeze can make nothing still] but when outside the initial site performance, the viewer’s experiences gained whilst within the garden cannot be re-experienced [the breeze makes nothing still]. To attend the memory of those experiences will only allow re-interpretation.
[When it was the winter season, snow rested upon the leafless branches. When it was summer, mosquitoes bit ankles. The breeze made nothing still.]
To seperate fragments from others is a healthy past-time. If frozen by documentation, however, the fragment, now framed outside its context, is restricted within its original form: it now has potential to become unchangable. Over periods of time, the document may replace the original interpretation, and the memories belonging to that experience are, unless frequently visited, overridden. Instead, re-interpret and re-visit those flexible fragments which belong to Memory. Instead, further the potential to become a continuous reflexive subject outside those initial experiences and performance sites.
[When it is the winter season, snow rests upon the leafless branches. When it is summer, mosquiotes bite. Breeze makes nothing still.]
[He bought a fan: a memento. We wrote a poem: a memento.]
With words it is easy to document experiences by creating mementos: keepsakes, closed conclusions; I would argue this is not entirely fulfilling the potential of experience, and in turn, of art; to look back is to move forward only if there is space, only if art is an arena for (re)interpretation and (re)discovery. We can predict nothing at all. Breeze makes nothing still.
How would we adapt to the unpredictable, and what would it lead us to discover? [Safety blankets are irrelevant]. Too readily accepting given structures without honouring their potential to the self, nor looking beyond them to other possible subjective structures creates documents: what we may describe as proof of occurances. Occurances are irrelevant to experience.
© Stephanie Marley 2010
Stephanie Marley studies English Literature and Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is interested in formulating a process of producing poetry which imitates the process of self-creation and self-acceptance. She is in love with Julia Kristeva, and plans to study East Asian Literature at the School of Oriental and African Studies after graduating this year.
