In Pursuit of Silence (33 page)

I liked the sound of it, but why had they listened?

“You are in the window seat,” she went on. “This seat is for the guest who will excuse himself next to make the passage to the teahouse. It shows who is first, not who is higher in rank. Guests waiting on this bench would be silent, except to apologize at the moment of departure for going before the others.”

We left the teahouse and started up the trail of broken stones, the “dewy path,” to a spot where Harmon pointed out a low building to one side of the teahouse. “That’s the changing arbor. The Samurai put aside their long swords in the arbor because they couldn’t fit through the narrow crawl space of the teahouse entrance. This was intentional on Rikyu’s part. Not a single blade of grass or iris leaf was allowed inside either because their shapes were reminiscent of the sword. Inside the teahouse, there was no differentiation among guests in gender or rank. No rich or poor. The only thing we carry into the tea ceremony is the fan, which represents peace, meaning: ‘I’ve willingly set aside war and all my worries outside the teahouse.’”

We continued our ascent. The uneven pattern of the stones, Harmon said, forced guests to think about their passage from the crowded external world to a state of pastoral seclusion. The second guest would wait to leave the portico until the first guest was visible moving from the changing arbor to the teahouse. With each step, there was a peeling away of the outside world, an emptying and a clarifying. “I studied in Japan for six years,” Harmon said, “and when I walked on the stepping-stones to the teahouse my teacher kept saying, ‘There is something not right in how you walk!’ He finally called his wife who trussed me up so tightly in a kimono that I could barely move—and then I understood the placement of the stones.”

I asked her how she’d become involved with Japanese gardens. It was a long, winding path of its own, beginning in her childhood on her grandmother’s Texas ranch that bordered the property of a family of Japanese farmers. At the age of seventeen, Harmon moved to New York City and became friends with a Japanese woman who introduced her to the world of Japanese language and thought. In the midst of many other pursuits, Harmon managed to complete a medical degree and become head of an endoscopy unit at St. Joseph Hospital in Houston. “And then one day,” Harmon told me, “I just said to myself, ‘I’ve done my last colonoscopy! I have to do something new.’”

As we entered the teahouse, Harmon remarked that once inside, every aspect of the experience was designed to harmonize with every other aspect. “Rikyu’s idea,” she said, “was that if we have harmony, respect, and purity, then tranquillity will surely follow.”

She pointed out the different elements that made up the plain structure of the house—the long “sleeve gate” echoing the sleeves of a kimono, the tatami-mat seating area looking over the garden where the tea ceremony is performed. “Throughout the tea,” she said, “there is no conversation. There might be moments of apology, but the well-trained guest knows when to perform the different actions without the host having to say anything. Everyone is seated on the floor. They are breathing in synchrony, so that even breath is not really heard. There’s the whisper of the silk kimono on the mats as you move forward and back with the bowl of tea. And there are other small sounds. First, when the pot is on the coals, the hiss of the water. Then, as the kettle cools, the hiss stops, the guest takes a bamboo ladle for the water, making a clacking sound intentionally to accentuate the silence, to signal the depth of the solitude. There’s the sound of the pouring water, and of sipping from the lip of the bowl.”

Rikyu’s era has been described by the historian Yuriko Saito as the flowering of an
aesthetic of imperfection
. Everything from the worn stepping-stones to the irregular water basins and tea utensils (Rikyu left detailed instructions as to how a host should handle a badly cracked tea bowl) was meant to emphasize usage and contingency. They tell stories without speaking. Part of what’s being celebrated is the notion of transience itself. Yoshida Kenkō, a fourteenth-century Buddhist monk who inspired much of the aesthetic in which Rikyu’s tea ceremony is grounded, wrote:
“If man were never to fade
away like the dews of Adashino, never to vanish like the smoke over Toribeyama, but lingered on forever in the world, how things would lose their power to
move us! The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty.” The chipped, worn implements of Rikyu’s tea ceremony nurture, in Saito’s words, the submission of one’s ego to the natural process of change and mortality. Similarly, we might say that the intent quiet of the tea ceremony serves to spotlight individual sounds that arise from silence, then dissolve back into it.

At the end of the ceremony, Harmon said, the guests make a last bow to the single chrysanthemum blossom that gave its beauty for this one day. “They leave one by one, and will never speak of their experience with each other or anyone else. And if they are ever invited back to this teahouse, they will never be invited with the same group. Throughout the hours of the ceremony, the guests have watched the movement of sunlight and shadows through the screen. When we come out, the changed light shows us a different garden.”

Rikyu seduced the Samurai to cast aside their swords for an experience of silence. The Samurai knew that they would get out of the tea ceremony exactly as much sensory revelation as they could make room for by quieting themselves. As Deutsch wrote, though one might initially be overpowered by a beautiful Zen garden, particularly when the experience of it takes the form of “a mere stepping away from the humdrum chaos of one’s ordinary being and routine,” one must learn to “become as the art-work itself is—in truth of being.” Master Bash?, a seventeenth-century poet, described the practice of listening to the world as a way of coming to identify with it: “when we observe calmly we discover that all things have their fulfillment,” he wrote. Thus, we are enjoined to “learn from a pine things about a pine, and from a bamboo things about a bamboo.” In so doing, we allow a spontaneous,
natural harmony to emerge—the same as the one evoked between guests at a tea ceremony.

In an essay written in 1929, a Western scholar of Oriental studies named A. L. Sadler characterized
Chanoyu
, the way of tea, as
“an institution that made
simplicity and restraint fashionable and at the same time kept itself accessible to all classes, providing a ground on which all could meet on terms of equality, thus combining the advantages of a Mohammadean Mosque and a cricket field, and, some may feel inclined to add, also those of a Freemasons’ Lodge and a Quaker Meeting-House.”

As we left, we came upon Harmon’s friend in a small building at the back of the garden eating quietly from an enormous bowl of trail mix. Harmon smiled at me. And then it was time to leave the garden.

I came back to New York in a buoyant mood—filled with admiration for the way that Rikyu had managed to carve out a space in which to quiet all visitors, even the Samurai. Yet I knew that my experience in the garden amounted to the study of a historical era that had passed. That didn’t make it irrelevant. We ought to build more Zen gardens. But these enchanted oases won’t recapture the devout attention they attracted in Japan some four hundred years ago. Harmon herself made the point to me that the only real way to appreciate a Japanese garden is in solitude. But the mandate of the Portland Japanese Garden is to
be a public garden first, and only then a Japanese garden. Even in Japan, she added, there are almost no gardens left that limit the number of people who are admitted at any one time.

But what, then, can we do now? This much I felt I
had
learned from the Zen garden: if we want more silence—not just in our individual hearts but also in the public sphere—we have to build spaces that harbor silence just as we create structures to facilitate other pursuits. However otherworldly some of its associations might be, silence needs a home in the here and now. One might even say that our lack of silence today reflects a failure in architecture. The great American architect Louis Kahn believed that buildings could foster empathy, and the creation of spaces enfolding silence was at the center of his thinking. I wondered how one might begin to fashion such a space today. And then I had the fortune to meet Hansel Bauman.

“I’ve resigned myself
to the fact that this is going to be an adventure, and nobody knows what’s going to happen.” Hansel Bauman flicked open his cell phone to check the time. “We’re running late—of course.” He glanced up at the high-pitched Gothic Revival structure of Chapel Hall. “Boy, those Victorians knew what they were doing. Look at the way light passes through those long windows from one side of the building to the other. That transparency … inclusiveness to the whole campus—panes of glass on the south side half the size of those on the north—all the subtle connections they make to where the structure is relative to the sun … They really listened—heard the silence.”
He flicked open his cell phone again. “I hope the community members will be sympathetic.”

Bauman and I were standing in a parking lot at Gallaudet University, the foremost college for the Deaf in the world, awaiting the arrival of a group of his students for a daylong collaborative project with various groups from Washington, D.C.’s, troubled Fifth Ward. This event was one of the first to bring Gallaudet’s students together with residents of the surrounding neighborhood. It was an icebreaker for a larger, more ambitious under taking whereby the campus renovation that Bauman is spear heading will include the creation of a pedestrian thoroughfare (dubbed the “Sixth Street Corridor”) linking the two communities. This is not just a typical campus upgrade linked to a vague gesture of community outreach. The redesign is being conceived as the launchpad for Deaf Architecture, which combines the perceptual experience of the Deaf with design. The Sixth Street Corridor plan is intended to show that the Deaf understanding of physical space has something vital to offer the larger world. What happens to your visual understanding of space if you look at it while receiving little or no auditory information? How might architecture designed to facilitate silent communication enlarge our relationship to the world whether or not we can hear? What would a building created for silence—a dynamic, sociable silence—look like?

Bauman is bright-eyed and fine-boned with short-cropped white hair. When his retro black glasses are pushed back on his head he resembles a Nordic ski instructor. Bauman has been given a signed nickname by his students that involves pinching the thumb and forefinger together, then sliding them down the
left side of the chest. It means, “He’s so cute you just want to put him in your pocket.”

Deaf Architecture, which was first articulated in a series of workshops with Deaf faculty and students at Gallaudet, is in its infancy. Bauman, who is himself hearing, is gambling a great deal on the hope that the Gallaudet Deaf Space project can have lasting effects, but, as he told me in his gentle California twang, “Architecture is all I’ve ever known, and the unknown is a big part of that.” When he was a small child, Bauman’s mother deeded him their backyard. On Sundays, the two of them would go off to construction sites and steal scrap wood that he would then cobble into houses, which he would name after semi-mythical beasts and sell to his mother’s friends. His last project before coming to Gallaudet was a building at Oakridge to house a proton accelerator. The scientists, he said, “definitely have their own language,” and helped acclimate him to “working in cultures.” If one had to sum up his diverse efforts, he told me, it would be about trying to humanize environments built for populations who’ve never been heard when it comes to designing their space. “A lot of Gallaudet was built by people who were incapable of hearing the Deaf,” he told me.