LAYER

Last night it was too hot to sleep; i lay awake, looking through an open window at lightning in the sky sparking silently cloud to cloud, illumining wild, feral shapes. The light reflected off the face of my wristwatch lying near me on the tatami. With each flash, a fragmentary image of lighted clouds appeared momentarily on the crystal, then darkened, replaced by four precise phosphorescent dots marking the major hours, like points on a compass. FLASH! For a moment the lens went berserk—the electric chaos of thunderheads alive in the lens—then suddenly it was orderly again; a glowing second hand sweeping rational circles through time.

This morning, I rest in a temple garden, cool beneath an old wisteria arbor. Last night’s sticky warmth falters, hesitant before a heavy blackness that gathers over the mountains to the north. The air cools and stirs, its pressure falling headlong; I can feel it in my joints. Above me, the leaves of the wisteria ripple in the breeze, flickering in waves across the arbor, off the edges, down between me and the temple pond in wind-tossed veils. The fluttering leaves seem to flow, but go nowhere. Like a mechanized image of a waterfall I once saw in a coffee shop, they cascade in place, fall, yet never reach the ground. The long, sweet-smelling panicles of flowers that hung in the arbor this spring have passed, leaving only their wiry stems, each studded with tiny nodules where petals were attached. The stems wave in the breeze the way willow branches do, supplely, whiplike. The dark clouds on the horizon gather in masses, but they are still distant; the sky just above is bright blue. The garden, its lotus pond blown with pink blossoms, swims in light.

Squeak, squeak, squeak! A little girl in a bright yellow dress comes running by, carefree. She has been circling the pond since she arrived with her mother. Squeak, squeak! She flies, running with arms outstretched like wings, her feet patting the ground, the sandals designed to make each step a squeak. In rapture, she delights at the wind on her face, the rhythm of her own feet, the light, the flowers. Her mother, who sits nearby, is slim, almost gaunt, long black hair falling loosely about her shoulders. She watches her daughter without smiling, her vision focused on something other than what lies at hand.

It’s summer. Half the pond is choked with dull-green lotus leaves, large and disklike, floppy, with crenellated edges like elephant ears. They rise above the water surface, pointing in all directions, chaotic, layered one upon the next to form a dimpled mattress across the pond. I have a sudden desire to join the girl in her flight, to circle the pond with wings outspread, then leap out onto the lotuses and fall softly on their cushions, like Buddha dreaming.

The lotus is the flower of Buddhism; the pattern of its growth is perceived as an allegory for spiritual development. The plant grows in shallow, still water, the bottom of which inevitably becomes sedimented with silt and clay creating a deep, muddy ooze. Into that darkness, the lotus sends its roots—thick, chambered, and tubular. The bottom of the pond, viscous and dark, is symbolic to Buddhists of the mortal world we live in, its impurity and defilement. Yet, as lotus grow, they rise above that uncleanliness and push their splendid leaves high above the water surface, rising toward the light of heaven. Above the leaves, crooked stalks lift further still, each as thick as a thumb. At the end of each stalk is one large bud, acicular, like a hand held with all fingers squeezed into a point. Come summer, the bud unfolds into a flower so beautiful—the richness and shade of its color, the symmetry of its form—it has become an emblem of divine perfection. Buddhist lore proposes that even as the exquisite lotus rises to perfection from base origins, so too can we surmount our impure origins.

Yellow flashes across green; the girl flies by again, then stops, abruptly, looking into the pond. A flower herself, a perfect blossom aged four or five. Has she risen so quickly from the muck? Or, do we all begin as pure, only to fall at some point, lodge firmly in the mire, and need to work our way out again? The lotus describes a transition, an upward rising toward spiritual perfection, but it also represents a flow of time; the roots reach back into the past, the flower rises into the future. In bridging the distance, the lotus describes a continuity, a line (albeit crooked) that interpenetrates time.

Several hours south of here near Nara City there is a temple in which the entire garden describes a flow of time. Founded nearly a thousand years ago, the temple, called Jo¯ruriji, sits in a shallow basin between low hills, a jewel in cupped hands. At the center of the temple is a large pond. To the west of the pond is a long, low wooden hall and to the east, on top of a small bluff, is a three-storied pagoda. The western hall, its weathered cedar structure now dark with age, contains nine sculptures of Amida Buddha; to the east, enshrined within the pagoda, is a sculpture of Yakushi Buddha. The choice of directions stems from Buddhist tradition which asserts that Amida Buddha presides over a western paradise called Saiho¯ Jo¯do, the Western Pure Land, and that Yakushi’s paradise, Jo¯ruri Sekai, the Land of Pure Lapis Lazuli, lies to the east. The placement of hall and pagoda express religious traditions as part of the landscape.

Yet, in addition to this spatial allegory there is also one of time woven into the garden. Yakushi is the Medicine Buddha, whose elixir alleviates and severs ties with past impurities, while Amida Buddha awaits those who are of pure heart and call his name sincerely, accepting them into the Pure Land and thereby removing them from the cycle of life and death. Yakushi in the past; Amida in the future. Pilgrims who come to the temple begin their prayers at the pagoda with appeals for salvation from past wrongdoings—then turn west, to face their futures.

The girl is at the pond’s edge now; her flights of fancy distracted by something that is floating in the pond: a flower petal. She is trying to use a stick to pull it to shore but can’t quite reach it. Her mother sits in the shade of the nearby temple hall, contemplating the ground. I go over to the girl, catch the petal on the end of a stick and hand it to her. Her prize in hand, she smiles, looking it over, then to me says, “Ageru, yo,” “Here, you take it,” drops it, and flies away.

I stay; dallying at the water’s edge, poking at the surface of the pond, probing its muddy depths, spinning out clouds of fine clay. Each twist of the stick stirs up another cloud and the feeling that I am tinkering with the past. I poke and recall a day when I was little, no older than the girl in the yellow dress, playing in my backyard, face down on the lawn. The grass has a warm summer smell; my mother’s voice is nearby, calling softly. The cloud rises in the water and subsides. I push again and see a birth, my son slipping out from between his mother’s legs, slick, red, arms and legs contracted against the sudden touch of cool air, and remember pausing in puzzled disbelief at seeing on his little body my own face. The cloud subsides. I poke again and am by the edge of a cold, wet highway at night. Nearby a battered car lies upside-down, a boy on the road, motionless, blood dripping from his ear, his father’s head in my lap, he too not long to live. I stop there. Enough rummaging.

The clouds of mud settle, and as they do other clouds reflected in the surface of the water come into focus. The darkness of the pond bottom makes the surface mirrorlike; the sky hangs upside-down inside, a taut skin of light pinned across the pond. I glance up and down, comparing reality with illusion, and find the world in the water most alluring; there is a minute ripple to the reflection that gives it an added sense of motion not found in the real world. I throw the girl’s petal back in the water. It floats away, pushed ever so slowly by the wind; a gossamer vessel plying the many worlds, real and reflected, that gather at the surface of the pond.

The pleasure of sailing, I have come to realize (though, honestly, I am a sailor of little experience), is that it occurs on a surface where two fluid masses meet; sky and water. It is entirely different from walking, for instance, feet measuring clean, even steps against the solidity of the earth. Different, too, from flying or snorkeling in which you are immersed fully within air or water, given over entirely to their inclinations. When sailing you glide between the two, and the currents and urges of both affect you each in their own way; the wind draws you in a direction that one minute counters the intent of the water and the next amplifies it. In constant flux, wind and water move in vastly complex patterns that can be sensed but not determined, connected yet separate; the surface that lies between them is the sum of their changing moods. Sailing, you glide along that undulating plane, eye on the horizon, nudging the rudder, adjusting for changes in the surrounding fluid worlds. We live as if sailing, traveling the illusory surface that lies between past and future.

The present is an illusion. Like the glistening surface of a pond, it is a fictive layer between two worlds: a thing that appears to be, yet is not. The present marks the moment at which future flows to past, yet in the instant of its conception, it is already gone. The clouds reflected in the pond grow darker, each fold and ridge is real enough to touch yet completely unreal, existing only on an atom-thick surface that catches light and tosses it back; a mirror game. The root of the word mirror, mirare, means “to see” and similarly the root of miracle, mirari, means “wonder.” It’s not coincidental. Reflections hold wonders for those who look. A crow flies overhead, carried south on a tailwind. I see it reflected in the pond, traversing the cloud landscape; it wavers and dissolves in a drop of rain.

Another drop strikes a lotus leaf like a pea on a drum. Then another. Then many, shattering the clouds in the pond. I should run for cover (summer rains can turn torrential) but rain on lotus is a fascination beyond reason. I set my hat and settle in for a concert of sounds audible only at this spot, by a lotus pond in the rain. It comes slowly at first, rain pattering on leaves, then builds to a crescendo. The size and shape of each leaf determines its pitch; the hundreds gathered in the pond create a symphony. What’s more, each leaf is somewhat cup-shaped and collects rain drop by drop. Microscopic hairs on the surface of the lotus leaf, which create its distinctive dull-green hue, also resist fluids, so that rain collecting on the leaf balls up, silvery, like liquid mercury. As the amount of water increases in size and weight, the leaf begins to sway on its stalk. The water rolls around lazily inside the hollow of the leaf, nearing the edge then slipping back to the middle, again and again, swaying drunkenly, until its weight overcomes the strength of the stalk and the leaf tilts and dumps the water into the pond. PLASH! Like frogs jumping. First one falls, then many. Raindrops patter, water plashes: music beyond notation.

I stand under the eaves of the temple with the little girl and her mother, waiting out the rain. The pond trembles in the downpour. The girl sits on her mother’s lap, face buried in her neck. Her mother stares out through the rain, gently stroking her daughter’s hair. Something in her thoughts passes across her face like light, softening her brow, drawing a half-smile; then she retreats. She kisses the girl’s hair and falls back to staring. I look away, pull an apple from my pack, and take a deep bite. A slight stinging arises on the inside edge of my lip, just at the point where the rough outer skin gives way to the wet inner lining of the mouth. Every time I feel this sensation, the same strange image comes to mind, that of a single human cell splitting.

Our embryonic development begins with a single cell that cleaves in two. Continuing, the two split to four, four to eight, and so on until a hollow sphere of a hundred or so cells is formed. The sphere then folds in upon itself forming a double-walled cup called a gastrula. The inner layer of the gastrula, the endoderm, will develop into the internal organs, the linings of the air passages, and digestive tract. The outer layer, the ectoderm, gives rise to our skin, hair, and fingernails. A third layer, the mesoderm, which forms between the other two, goes on to develop into our meatier parts—muscle, blood, and such. Three layers—that is where we start.

In Japan swords are made from layers of different types of steel, some harder than others. The swordmaster sits before an intense charcoal fire. He stacks small plates of steel one on top of the other, heats them until they glow, and then, while his assistants hold them tightly, he forges them with his hammer into a single block, sparks showering out from the work. Again he heats the steel, cuts it partway in two, and folds it, doubling the numbers of layers. Even though the master will repeat the process until the number of layers reaches into the thousands, the two metals do not completely blend. When he gives the sword its final shape and polishes it, the layers remain visible, creating on the sword a grain like wood. We too. Beginning with just a few embryonic layers, we are folded again and again upon ourselves in our mother’s wombs, our complexity rising exponentially with each cleavage; as in swords, the primal layers repeated become the grain of our bodies, expressed within us forever.

I had always thought that the place that stings on my lip when I eat apples was the borderline between endoderm and ectoderm; that some strange quirk in the nature of that edge between inner and outer me, some small rent in the fabric of humanity, allowed for the reaction. It turns out that the actual threshold between those two worlds lies further in the mouth, at the top of the throat, but I cannot eat an apple without seeing cells dividing and envisioning the myriad folded layers of my body. Looking back I see the little girl snuggle in against her mother sleepily, so close to the womb from which she came. She like a lotus bud tight with petals; like a sword; layered.

I spent some time with a friend last autumn in China, exploring Xi Hu, West Lake, so named because it lies in that direction from the center of Hangzhou city. West Lake was an object of fascination for Japanese gardeners throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, though none of them ever had the opportunity to see the lake personally. They knew of it instead from references in literature and from scenes in paintings. What caught the gardeners’ fancy about the lake, and what they invariably incorporated into their gardens, was an earthen causeway that runs across the lake, a slim spit of land, punctuated by several stone-arch bridges, that traverses the watery plane like a single brushstroke on empty paper. In the Japanese gardens that employed the causeway image, the original causeway was greatly reduced in size to fit the constraints of smaller garden ponds in Japan. Not built in miniature, instead abstracted, it was recreated as a small dike containing two or three stone bridges—just enough to work as a mnemonic device, triggering the flow of images ingrained through education in the Chinese classics. As glyphs, the Japanese versions work well, but as an example of landscape art, it is the original that sings.

We arrived in Hangzhou at night, after a long, slow ride on the night-train from Shanghai, and woke in our hotel early the next morning. Decidedly bleary but none the less anxious to get out and about, I threw open the curtains to look outside. There was nothing: the window was chalk. A cold, heavy mist had settled on the city, shrouding the landscape, leaving only my own perplexed face staring back at me, dimly. It was like waking from a dream into a dream, not knowing, looking back at the bed expecting to see yourself asleep and finding instead only a warm impression left in the sheets.

We headed out an hour later. The air was still thick with fog and rich with the earthy scent of smoldering coal fires, white and motionless, no more than meters visible in any direction. As we walked down the hill to the causeway, the town materialized eerily before us: bicycles and cars, people ambling the sidewalks, large plane trees along the street. At first vague white apparitions, they gained form and color, grew believably real as they grew closer, emerging from the mist as if born of it, then slipped past and receded behind us into nothing: swallowed whole.

In addition to the causeway, there are several man-made islands in the lake that are accessible only by shallow gondolas. The dark-blue boats waited, dim by the pond’s edge, still unmanned this early, the lake disappearing into the mist behind them. Launched into that white abyss, would they return or pass therein into another, as yet unknown, world?

Approaching the entry to the causeway, we could make out its slim form stretching out into the lake, a long, narrow mound, low to the water, lined on both sides with rows of black trees, extending to infinity. It had no end. Instead, the land simply dematerialized in the distance, disappearing at the point where the mist and pale water fused, welded into a single block. We strolled some distance out the causeway. It was unearthly quiet, no other visitors, only the occasional bicycle appearing suddenly, humming by, and vanishing. By the time we got out to the first bridge, the shore had completely receded from view. All that was left was the ground beneath our feet, the trees close by, the water and the mist. The bridge arched high above the water to allow small boats to pass beneath. We walked up to the crest of the bridge and sat on its carved stone railing. Directly below, the water was the lustrous dull color of gunmetal, but looking out toward a distant shore we could not see, it gradually lightened in color, fading eventually to the hue of the mist, so that the line where sky and water met was imperceptible. No separation between past and future, we hung in the moment, adrift in a boundless present.

Later, we came upon a lotus plantation by the edge of the lake. Fenced in to keep the fish out, the shallows were massed with shriveled lotus stalks, an occasional tattered leaf tipped down to the water, frayed, punctured, browning along the edges. By then the mist had risen and reformed as low clouds that reflected in the water between the lotus. The brown stalks were bent and twisted, looking like rusted metal bars. Each stalk rose out of the water at an angle, bent over in half where it had weakened, and returned its seed-head to the water. Hundreds of those broken stems were reflected in the perfectly still, metallic surface of the lake, doubling, like crumpled wire set on a mirror. A half-circle above the water completed below; a triangle reflected into a rectangle; strangely twisted lines replicating, layering one upon the next, increasing in complexity toward the horizon, iterating to infinity.

The same lotuses that stretched so elegantly from root to bloom in summer now doubled back upon themselves, humbled and forlorn. When we idealize a linear flow of time from past through present to future, there is no symbol more graceful than the summer lotus, rising from muddy root to sky-bound bloom. Yet, if we were to trace our lives more realistically—our pasts in so many ways circling forward to affect our futures, resurfacing, refusing to be left behind—would it not look more like the snarled disorder of an autumn lotus field?

The rain has passed. As quickly as it came, it went. Back at the water’s edge, I sit on a wet rock and sketch the lotus from top down: open flowers; large ovate buds clasped in green; massed leaves, endlessly layered; and in the shadows beneath, green stalks tracing down into the water, receding into the darkness below. Down there, where sunlight pales, a slow current appears vaguely in the mud. It builds in strength and begins to move purposefully, out from the tangle of the roots toward me, rises, and assumes a form—a brown carp. Not one of the splendid varieties splashed with patterned colors; just a wild one, fat as Hotei, God of Good Fortune. It turns, lazily, spawning a cloud of silt with each stroke of its tail. Meandering back and forth, the fish slips in and out of the lotus’ shadows: now here, now gone. Two dragonflies clatter into view, one clutching the other, reflected in the pond, silhouetted against clouds. They move in the staccato manner distinctive to their genus; hover, turn, rise and fall in short clean bursts, freezing in mid-air between each movement. Settling on the edge of a leaf, they hold still long enough for me to catch their gesture on paper, then swoop down to the water surface, making short neat dabs against the water, laying eggs, sending out a delicate ripple each time. The carp rises from below, floating up languidly, nearing the surface just as the dragonflies dip. Mouth near the surface, it sucks noisily, inhaling water, air, and insects indiscriminately, then sinks down and flows back into the shadows. Large ripples cast out across the water from where the dragonflies were, quicken, slow, and subside.

Things happen at surfaces: dragonflies meet fish; a boat tilts headlong with the wind; a memory lingers at the threshold of the present. We live in layers of time and space, some stretched taut, reflecting, some folded back upon themselves, convoluted, touching in places. The little girl in the yellow dress is leaving, asleep in her mother’s arms. Something happened to make the woman so removed; something that is far away in time or space yet to which she is still inextricably linked, tugging at her from across a void, unwilling to let go. Was it long in coming, I wonder, or just a moment—a sudden death, a shock of betrayal—that broke surface, rippled, and now refuses to subside? The carp rises for another meal, but I’ll not watch. I head for the gate, too, leaving that layer to be broken without testimony.