Plant Story Gravity: Revelations with Ikebana Revolutionary Watarai Toru
In which I try once upon-ing, several uncrossed 猫の柳 branches and petals and puerhs at a time.
By now the flowers have wilted. Their stems, which I plucked this morning while walking hoji, have become frowny faced offerings, held like accidental Pietà statues of my microscopic experience of the plant world by their gleaming, upright multifaceted counterparts.
I promise, at one juncture, it looked something like a gorgeous creature smoking a long cigarette except it wasn’t a cigarette at all. It was a flower. Like a flower inside a tank nozzle-type beat. A peace puff.
Curious that these 猫の柳 (neko no yanagi, aka pussy willow) were given to me days ago by Watarai Toru (of Tumbler & Flowers here in Kamakura, just a hood north in Nikaido.
What business do I have with Ikebana? Beef with plants? Pork with fallen branches? What am I? Chicken about flowers?
Let’s take the stakes down 20,000 leagues and play with the possibilities on the ocean floor. You know the place I’m talking about, the one where they keep finding outlandish creatures of the depths with outrageous capabilities, impossible colors, and shapes that defy our fathom muscles.
As an unabashedly tea-swoon individual—if you haven’t heard I’m bonkers about the stuff—I was bound to leap into Ikebana at some point. Though, if I’m being real, I suspected—like nearly all of my other interests sparked in the last 10 years—that it would be a retirement hobby. Well, either I’ve retired early or…wait a second. Have I retired early? Are these dispatches actually notes from the not-yet-midlife retirement pastures?
Maybe they are, friend. Maybe they are. Or at least, a certain type of retirement of a certain type of obsession with a linear view of reality, progress, productivity, growth, hustle, control, doing, being.
Don’t change just yet. That digression looks good on us.
Lo + behold, for all my pausing and hesitation and cosmic calculus, here comes the universe with a big-ol’ face cactus for my patience. I cracked open Eighty Degrees, Issue #11 this past month and lo-fi, hi-key got my mind mash-potatoed by Watarai Toru San’s portrait alone and that’s before I saw the photos of his gravity-defying, vegetable-reimagining, hauntological modernization of Ikebana. Later, of course, I learn the fact that he’s Kamakura based, knows my neighborhood sensei Sergio San (who told him to revolutionize Ikebana, which he seems to be in the midst of doing), shared the same photographic benefits at the services of the impossibly-talented Yuthanan, and served his previous employment duties as a writer/editor.
I could go on about the experience—about Watarai San’s candor, skill and the beautiful 100-year Kominka in which the lesson in Nikaido was housed—but better to discuss, surprisingly, plant stories.
You see, I’ve really given stories the boot of late—going as far as calling them a kind of drugs (making myself a drug dealer) and attributing, maybe, all of humanity’s ills (and, if we’re being fair, much of its achievements) to these pesky narrative inventions—because they work too effectively. In so doing, they also steal me out of the moments of my life. Even when they are artful, they are eaten by entertainment, which is eaten by distraction. It’s why I say that all of language is a lie, because all of stories and language are so tragically intertwined.
For years I’ve said I see perfection all around me: in music, in painting, in design, in tea, in nature—and, of late, in poetry. But in narrative? Stories? Prose? I can only find flaws. Dumptrucks full. Lightyears long. Hysterical hypocritical paradoxical flaws on hyperloop.
But then on Saturday, during my Ikebana lesson, I watched Watarai San twist up my bungled branches, snip past my flowery flailings, and fill the quadrant of space I was allotted with such an undeniably fuller, experiment-proof arrangement. In expressing how he got there, we slid over to an another piece on the other side of the narrow attic.
The light was thin, but the truth was clear as freshly opened contact lens. We beheld a story, indeed. There were the strings of yellows. And their sprawl and droop. Their stretchy pursuit. Then, the pair of reds, brave, brash, almost aggressors. Or holdouts. Inside these story pieces were those mouth-watering ambiguous trenches of all great art, where each viewer can fill them with their own tales: troops for warfare or muddy slides for amusement or troughs for agriculture to start again, yet more stories.
Maybe we can never, truly get away from the appearance, or at least, the apparence of stories. We seem to all have built-in, pre-determined apparent beginnings and ends. Not a design flaw but a design feature. Like the server in Kyoto who gazed so lovingly and longingly down at the kabusecha leaves, I’ll be thinking of that first Watarai San plant story for a long time. Something tells me I’ll be able to draw it on my death bed. If I can still draw. If I get the gift of a bed to die in and if writing utensils still exist.
In his piece in Eighty Degrees, Watarai San talks a lot about gravity. For when the story of life and death is too crass and cliché, I found, this very morning, gravity to be a substitute story worth fidget spinning. I did what I could to capture that spin—those flowers I had plucked had stayed suspended, acrobats flexing their muscles as best they could until their training gave out—in the offertory positions where I placed them (or is it, where they wanted to placed?) for at least a few cups of tea.
Which tea? A quartet blend, of all the Pu Erh Global Tea Hut sent with the Winter Issue. The last of it sits lukewarm in my cup now.
Today I was too ensnared by the ikebana stories. I could hardly taste the tea*. Now, that, friends, is a scary story indeed.
The Twist
The story
Is that you are born and you die.
The twist
Is that those are only words.
Sign posts, pointing
At the craters
On the moons
Rising and
Falling and
And suspending
On our pages.
The story
Is that what goes up must come down.
The twist
Is that’s only what’s been proven
By instruments
We invented.
To make sense of a world
We can never fully
Or even partially
Or even superficially
Know.
The story
Is that the plants don’t hurt when we pluck them.
The twist
Is that we don’t speak plantese.
But if it hurts so bad
Why does it taste so good?
And besides,
If they grow back
Tomorrow
Or next year
Isn’t it all good?
But if you ask the plants
they might wonder
why it’s such a big deal
when a person is killed
if another is going
To be born anyway
So, isn’t it all good?
Don’t you see now,
How easy
Stories twist
And do you hear
That hammer rise?
Guns can’t wait
To get in
On this kind
Of Ikebana sesh.