The Silver Pavilion and its gardens

"I love
My hut
At the foot of the Moon-awaiting Mountain
And the reflection
Of the sinking sky"

The Yamasa Institute reproduces this poem by Ashikaga Yoshimasa describing the "Silver Pavilion", Ginkaku-ji, in the foothills east of Kyoto.

Ginkaku-ji was intended to contrast with Kinkaju-ji, a spectacular pavilion covered in gold leaf located northwest of the city. Each began life as a villa for a member of the Ashikaga family, and became Zen temples. The grandson of the owner of Kinkaju-ji built his pavilion intending to cover it in silver leaf. But this plan was never realized.


Today, the temple complex is officially called Jisho-ji.

The original name of the building on the edge of the central pond persists in common use, and the impression it makes continues to be a personal retreat.

Unlike more massive Buddhist temples that overwhelm with the size of their buildings and the images contained inside, Ginkaku-ji is intimate, a cluster of buildings linked by mossy and raked gardens surrounding a small pool of water, nestled on the edge of the steep eastern mountains.

The raked garden is attributed in tourist guides to Soami, described as a a landscape gardener. He was much more: curator of the art collection of the Ashikaga shoguns, he practiced the arts of poetry, painting, flower arranging, and the tea ceremony, as well as designing gardens.

The dry garden, Ginshaden, Sea of Silver Sand, incorporates a tall conical mound of gravel. Guide books describe it as representing Mount Fuji, but its name-- Kogetsudai-- links it to viewing the moon, the activity described in Ashikaga Yoshimasa's poem.

 The raked garden was not mentioned in historic texts until long after the place was built. Its form may not directly owe its inspiration to Soami.

But the plantings and placement of stones around the pond in front of the Silver Pavilion were created as art works; the Yamasa Institute describes the views as "meant to conjure an image from classic Japanese or Chinese literature".




Individual stones in the garden are named. "Bridge of the Pillar of the Immortal" crosses the pool at one point. Directly in front of the pavilion, a single stone surrounded by water is called "Ecstatic Contemplation".


Despite the uncertainties in its history, the fabric of the surviving pavilion, the setting and the care in creating changing views that always remain striking all suggest that it was composed carefully-- if not by Soami then by another artist working with the very materials of place to create beauty and peacefulness.

In the garden at Nijo castle

Nijo's garden is famous for the wealth and variety of its rocks.

This peculiar sentence captions one small picture in the two page spread on Nijo Castle in the Eyewitness Travel guide to Japan.

The main focus of the description is paintings in the rooms of the shogunate palace, Ninomaru, painted in the early 1600s by artists of the Kano school, actually members of a samurai family who gained prominence for the distinctive decoration of the walls of this rambling set of rooms. Kano school trees, birds, flowers, and landscapes spread across gold backgrounds. Even with the evident damage from 200 years of neglect during the period when Edo became the focus of power, they still are impressive.

The guide helpfully points to a scene of wild cats in a cloudy bamboo grove, noting that the artists "mistook leopards for female tigers". The paintings impress less for this supposed confusion and more for the way the bodies of the felines undulate, their heads elongated unnaturally. Signage in the palace notes that these cats "were unknown" in Japan at the time except through imported pelts, and we can imagine artists trying to think through these feline bodies with only house cats as models.

The palace creaks as we walk, an engineered effect called "nightingale floors" that would warn residents of anyone attempting to break in. The chirping becomes so normal that it is when it stops, in a section that perhaps has been restored (or is in need of restoration?) that the sound of shuffling feet without the bird noises becomes noticeable.

And then we exit into the pathway that winds over to the garden, with its justly remarked-on rocks. The water runs from a small fall arranged at one end, and the rocks surround the pool, each one individually distinctive. There are fewer people here enjoying the view. There are no benches, no resting places to stop; in a World Heritage site, keeping people moving is more the goal than allowing them to stop and contemplate. A few people arrange themselves in front of the water for photos of themselves to post for their friends and family.


I take my own photos, despite the unsuitable light, that suffuses everything with a mist that is like the clouds surrounding the mythical tigers in bamboo groves, enjoying their lives with their leopard companions. I want to be able to think of this place again.

A Myth, a Delirium, a Story

my mother in a delirium wrote a myth of the old times and my sister coming home through a snowstorm in a yellow rented truck "with all her earthly goods." I still have the manila folder on which my Moon wrote this chronicle in her own hand. In it she calls my sister "the special one"...

 This is a fragment from inside the jewel box of fragments that my brother, my sister-in-law, and I wrote together, Sister Stories.

sometimes what she wrote were only simple charms - to ward off the breaking of bones among her children for instance, or to bring my sister, "the special one," home through the snow storm for New Year...

It is hard even now for me to think about her thinking of me as "the special one". I made the drive with a rented U-Haul truck from Urbana to Buffalo in December 1981, knowing I planned to fly to San Pedro Sula on New Year's Eve to meet the technical requirement of my Fulbright and take up residence in Honduras before the end of that year.

These days I need a year by year list of research to remember what happened each year; that I spent the first seven months of 1981 in Honduras as well, during that time when I gradually remade myself as a person with roots in more than one place: a rhizome, no longer a day lily growing from a budded corm nestled safely with others where I was first born.

That New Year was difficult despite my re-rooting; staying in the Hotel San Pedro for the first and only time, a little too close to the bustle of the Tercera Avenida market, a little too out of place especially in those days before mass tourism and the economic boom from exploited labor brought foreigners in larger numbers to the city.

When the Moon died my sister was away on a dig among her own people, not these Mexica but the Maya of the terminal classic as it is said. 

He understands, my brother who wrote this passage, which-- given our authoring approach-- I did not at first see, and still can only find through circuitous routes: this time taking me past Teteo Innan, Mother of the Gods, in her eagle feather shirt, her shell-covered star skirt, her broom and spindle whorl in hand, and past the old men, singing for the children.

"A dig among her own people"; no, not the Mexica, nor the Maya, really. Among the Sampedranos, and the Limeños, and the Santiagueños. The people who lived in a valley so well watered that everything was always green, but in a country so poor in infrastructure that water could be rationed in the midst of all that.

It took me days to contact her, I had to reach her through her professor on the telephone and he sent a driver out in a jeep through the Honduran jungle to find her where she watched over her crew of workmen at the dig.

The driver who found me arrived at the barraca, a former dormitory for single male banana workers, partially turned over to the archaeological institute. We had come in from the field, as we did every day, to the town of La Lima. We were excavating at Travesía, in the midst of cane fields, in the fringes of intact soil that looters looking for carved marble vases had left unexcavated. Not the jungle of North American imagination, but tropical nonetheless, hot and sweaty work.

The person who reached me was a banker, a businessman, and an ardent collector of Honduran antiquities, all registered with the government and thus, in theory, legal. Because of his contacts I was able to find a reservation in time to come home and say goodbye.

Home: I write that easily here, but it never felt like home from that day on. Before, no matter how far I roamed or how deeply I rooted myself elsewhere-- not Ithaca or Illinois, which I always knew were steps on a road to somewhere else, but the Ulúa Valley in its indescribable beauty-- no matter, I was home the instant I walked in the door and sat down to listen to her talk.

The one who studied is my sister, this is my sister's story, and when she was dying, my mother in a delirium...wrote a myth of the old times...

Delirium. That is how the memories feel, even with so many years passed, and so much more loss. I remember Monzón's sister, Margarita, a nurse, urging some sort of pill on me as I collapsed weeping in the barraca where there was no question of privacy.

Margarita, from whom I rented half of a house, the space intended for a married banana worker, which her husband had been able to purchase when the United Fruit Company divested itself of real estate in La Lima. The walls of the house were board to within a foot of the ceiling, and from there up wire mesh, necessary for air to circulate. When I worked in the kitchen on my side of the house Margarita would call to me over the wall, how was I, how was the day? Privacy in La Lima was different as well.

I expect the pill was a sedative. It was her way of caring for me, for her-- what? lodger, brother's employer, protected guest? I think the last; it was simpler then, much less dangerous, but Margarita was one with the older women who urged me in 1979 to put valuable papers inside my bra after my passport disappeared from my bag on the bus back to La Lima after my visit to the Feria Juniana in San Pedro. Imagining me as young and unworldly, unworlded in their realities.

I don't remember what I told the crew to do with the excavations at Travesia. I never went back, even though I came home to La Lima right after the funeral. Writing about Travesia today, I use the euphemism "unanticipated circumstances" to explain why I never completed the excavation. That isn't entirely untrue; on my visit to Buffalo over Christmas 1982 and especially New Year's, she had timed her chemotherapy so that she could manage the celebrations, and I believed what I saw and wanted to be true. So yes, unanticipated.

I don't remember how I started working again, either. I did: I went back to Cerro Palenque itself, somehow pulling myself together for the first time, starting the process of training myself to respond to pain and loss by getting on with it (I get knocked down, but I get up again...).

Not really starting that process, though, because she had started me on that course almost a year earlier, in early 1982, when I found out by accident that she had been taken to the hospital but, I was assured, was home and fine. And, calling from the phone office in La Lima, found that the news was half right, and there was now another diagnosis, not a good one. Saying "I will come home" and hearing her voice-- I can hear her saying it now-- "No; you have to stay and finish your work".

So I came back from New York just a few days after her funeral, just a few days after my birthday, also, and I went to finish my work.

This is my story. That is my story. I go back and finish my work.