… Suddenly, as they crossed a street and turned the corner, the city exploded vertically. The neon made a canopy that made it both stars and ceiling, both endless and finite. Tall buildings with shops and restaurants which allowed those inside a front row seat for this maze lined the walkways on either side. Both customers and pedestrians viewed those who were just far enough away for this not to feel like a voyeuristic intrusion. Ahead, tangled amongst the neon, was the museum. At a glance, this large structure of steel and glass seemed as nondescript as the block as a whole had just moments before. Connor found himself amazed by the examples of prudent coordination which he saw in so many parts of Osaka. This city, he thought, not only dazzled, but did so when you were in a position to be engaged. They approached the large luminescent structure and entered into an exceedingly modern art gallery. Like all of Japan though, the contrasts which were housed within were the star attraction. Inside this modern armor, a tribute to architecture and lighting, were paintings as old as the soul of Japan herself; painted Zen circles, known simply as Enso which had been collected for an extremely rare viewing event.
"We'll want to take our time here," Maruko smiled. "Much of tonight will be contradiction. There will be sheets of parchment, some large and some small. We may see profound messages presented in the simplest of ways. The opposite may be true as well."
With that they walked through the white metal doorways. The four-story building was comprised of many windows which ran from the floor to the ceiling. As they entered, Connor was struck by the degree to which Maruko's words had been correct. This building was an open air, cutting edge masterpiece with high glass walls and breathtakingly high ceilings. Mixed into the scenery were large stone walls, oddly placed amongst the space. The crowd seemed to reflect both the mystique of the event and the classic nature of the subject, as well as all the while representing Japan's ultra-modern need for both. Attire ranged from tuxedo and gown to leather pants and sports coat. Many drank or wandered about mingling while those ahead, amongst the works, rarely if ever looked back at the crowd. It was as if while in this wide open room, people were all the more confined by invisible lines and arbitrarily placed obstacles.
Posters for the event were in frames on stands near the front desk where one could leave a jacket and pay the admission fee. Connor did the latter, but kept his jacket. This room of glass and stone didn't exactly exude warmth.
The poster read "Enso" and featured a painted white circle on a background of black. To either side were Japanese characters in faint colors. Connor wondered if this were a poorly designed welcoming sign, for it wasn't very easily read. Later, he would find that with Enso, one sees different answers depending on where one stands while asking the question. Furthermore, Enso rarely seemed to have been made in error, having been left open for debate deliberately.
Maruko wore a sweater suitable for staying the evening's chill over a silk dress which eclipsed even the one she'd worn to Osaka-jo. Its walnut color and sheer texture fit Maruko well and hung from her body so as to enhance her strong, yet delicate frame. Underneath the dress she wore slim jeans which flared at the ankle to reveal black heels which had bold straps and a stylish, thick sole.
As they walked across the room, unaware that all of this, the crush, fling, journey, whatever it was to be called, would all soon have a context, their hands swung into one another, not to grasp the other, but not on accident either. They were here together. They were here together. They were here together. It all seemed rather unreal, but on each level, this was very much happening and both, true to their private yet common pledge, were present.
As they walked towards the main displays, walls of iron amongst the walls of stone, they stopped to read a solitary framed poster on a stand. This one, contrary to so much before it and yet to come was very legible:
Welcome to tonight's event. The Enso is the ultimate in Zen calligraphy. Each painted circle is unique. Likewise, each artist, each effort is different. Each stroke, each saturation, each void tells a story. There is no perfect circle and this unified truth is what makes each perfect to itself. Each moment in Zen represents the culmination of a lifetime. These strokes give the narrations of moments where all things which ever have been or which remain still to be done come together to meet in the present. Each Enso was drawn by a hand whose pursuit of perfection within, even if sought through removal from, this world is chronicled in each drop of ink you see presented here. How long did it take to create this embodiment of perfection, you may ask?
"Did the monk take merely a few seconds to create this quintessential Zen statement? Might we also count the time he spent staring at the empty paper and preparing his mind and spirit? Or should we say that it took the monk eighty years, the span of his life, to produce it? If we consider the entire history of Zen, passed on directly from master to pupil for generations, we may even decide that the Enso took hundreds of years to create."
(Stephen Addiss, PhD)
With that we welcome you to this experience. Please explore each display for as long or as short as you feel is necessary. Only you can know the amount of time it will take for you to see where each circle began or was eventually finished. What served as each painting's preface? What lies in between? What are we to think as we look at each finished product? These are each but a small part of the Zen experience. Enjoy your journey.
Though none of this was lost on Maruko and Connor, that idea that everything which had been had led to this one moment seemed particularly apropos.
"So see?" Maruko looked up at Connor, "It's important that you were here to see this, too. Not only will this affect you, but you will then share it with others. What's more, your having been here will impact everyone else who is here viewing this tonight as well."
In the first section, the walls of metal and stone, which now seemed anything but arbitrary, held mostly classic looking pieces. These were almost always on a cream to yellow parchment paper with thick black ink forming the Enso and then a name stamp made in red for a signature. Almost all of the circles were accompanied by some amount of script, sometimes a few words, sometimes far more.
Frames were grouped in sets of two or three to a wall and then there were spaces between that free-standing wall and the next. There were also much larger cloth-mounted manuscripts draped from the taller stone walls.
The pair walked towards one frame which held a paper about one foot tall by two feet wide with a dark, saturated Enso on its left. Its creator, a monk named Ungo, had drawn this while the abbot of a Zen temple and school in the 17th century. Legend had it that Ungo had climbed many mountains in his time. On one such climb, he had reached enlightenment. However, he had been alone and so had no one to witness his event. To commemorate this achievement, he'd written a poem on a piece of paper and released it to the howling wind. Years later, on another hike, Ungo found the same piece of paper, well preserved, poem still intact. He took this to be validation for the enlightenment experienced that day.
"The ink use here," Connor started slowly, still forming his next thought, "It looks happy or sad? What do we think? What do you and I think, but also what are we to think; people as a whole? The ink gets wetter, as if he took excessive time, so maybe he went slowly because of extreme grief and reflection."
"Or maybe," Maruko responded intuitively, "he was extremely satisfied, like a man approaching the finish of a great meal, and this caused him to savor each centimeter of the drawing. The sign in front did say to view these works at times as if they were the culmination of a lifetime."
They noticed a quote from Ungo to the side of this selection which read, "Thinking good or evil is Heaven and Hell."
"So are we to think the good," Connor wondered, "the bad, or both?"
"Or neither," Maruko finished the progression. "Enso were the focus of meditation. Now this word, meditation, means something almost the opposite of the Western ideal of concentration. Often, the goal of meditation is the lack of concentration, a total focus on nothing."
"I had a friend," Connor responded, "who said that if prayer was talking to God, then meditation was listening for His reply."
"Yeah," Maruko smiled, "that sounds about right."
They moved on to the next framed piece. This one was quite unique from the rest. Its orientation was vertical, not horizontal. The thick, smooth Enso was at the top and enclosed within it was a Japanese character. Another was scrawled beneath it and to the left was the red block signature.
The title for this piece was En Tsu. En meant circle, or more so enclosure and Tsu for communication without hindrance...
"Does this speak of an ideal or a truth?" Connor wondered aloud.
"How do you mean?" Maruko responded, herself unsure.
"Well is this how it is, all communication within each person's individual circle is, without hindrance? Or is this how we'd like it to be?"
Maruko looked up at the Enso while speaking next, "It's that, I think, true unhindered communication is truly balanced and true balance is shown through unhindered communication."
"That," Connor shook his head smiling, "would be a fine lesson for our world leaders."
Moving along, they gazed upon many more of these simple, yet profound tapestries. Maruko reminded Connor of the entrance and how she'd suggested that each person in attendance influenced the perceptions of every other there. With this idea, and a certain amount of attention reserved only for one another, they continued looking around the room for a few moments without taking in the art, instead watching the people who were themselves looking to the drawings.
They looked at an old man and wondered how he would have seen the Enso; perhaps as a link to an ancient time? Next, a student, how would he see it? Would younger visitors see these symbols as outdated relics, no different than many saw statues from other ancient worlds? Or, they had to offer, were there also older viewers who hadn't seen the Enso come to represent anything in their lives? Surely, they had given it long enough, these viewers would protest. Likewise, Connor and Maruko assumed, there were young people to whom these drawings were an inspiration of something to come. To them, Maruko wondered, was the Enso a promise that Japan would remain intact in a world rife with twice-yearly technology upgrades? She was certain that this was how she saw them.
It was with these thoughts fresh in their minds that they found the next display all the more appropriate. The next group of drawings was something different all together. These Enso were brushed so lightly that the brush sometimes didn't even meet the paper. These blank areas, known as 'flying white,' added an entirely new and different dynamic to the art as a whole. Were these areas where the circle didn't touch down laziness? Certainly not, they agreed.
"Maybe," Maruko took a stab at the riddle these areas posed, "It's a way to navigate between the barriers; to move within. If the Enso separates inside and out, then this is a way to go from one to the other, this is the journey of it all. It makes the inside look freer, doesn't it?"
"Free, sure," Connor began, "or vulnerable. Maybe it's both? Don't you think it looks a little less strong? Again, more vulnerable, more..."
"Honestly?" Maruko interrupted and looked up at Connor, who nodded, though his eyes were fixed miles away. "I think it looks less noble, sure, maybe even less decorative than the saturation, less exact. Certainly it looks less capable of holding the characters which were drawn within the one we saw earlier. But, then isn't there something beautiful about the balance in this Enso's balance?" Maruko's wordplay was not at all ironic and didn't come across that way from her delivery.
"It's like," she continued, now standing in front of Connor with her hands held behind her back, "this Enso clearly exists, it is there, it is, but it also isn't restrictive. Instead, part of the balance here is that it knows it will need to be open to an influx from beyond to remain perfectly mixed.
Connor smiled, agreeing fully, and reached ahead of himself, gently rubbing his index finger against the exposed base of Maruko's palm. Maruko, without turning around and without either jump or startle, gently flexed her fingertips and held Connor's finger against her hand. It was as if she'd been expecting him to make this gesture all along. Both stood still for what seemed much longer than the next few moments and held one another's fingers firmly in this delicate, most honest and fragile way.
Walking forward they moved from one part of the presentation to the next; from past to future. Gone were the stone and iron walls, in their place were walls made instead of thick glass. These freestanding walls were each made of one undivided pane, ten to twelve feet tall. Each featured one Enso similar to the ones they had passed earlier, complete with signature and, often, inscription. What was different was that here the Enso were screened onto the glass itself. This being the case, a pane might feature a slight and gentle Enso, a paint glob holding a thick and foreboding one or even something in between, perhaps wispy with noticeable flying white. These last Enso, one may have found him or herself thinking, resembled how snowflakes may have looked if etched on windows by God Himself.
They approached the first pane of this group. It contained a thick Enso which started in the bottom left and then worked steadily clockwise to its completion. Inside the circle was a thinly penned inscription which was translated to read, "Eat this and drink a cup of tea!" The accompanying text explained that the author of this Enso, a monk named Nantembo, preferred to use childlike sayings with his drawings. He felt, it went on, that children represented the birth, death and rebirth cycle and also that many things Zen which could not be viewed in a complicated way, could much more readily be seen through the simple eyes of a child.
Nantembo," Connor began, "made these during the 1900s. You'd think that his world had become so much more complex. Maybe this necessitated or at least inspired this appeal to the inner child of his viewers and students."
"Connor, look here," Maruko gestured down to the floor in front of the glass wall to a thin red line which was drawn in front of this and, indeed, each pane of glass in an elliptical shape. "It reads," she continued, "For each Enso is best viewed from wherever the viewer at that given moment resides."
Maruko approached the line and her eyes ignited like one who'd just seen their spouse walking down the aisle for the first time, "Remarkable," she blindly reached back for Connor behind her, "Look at this!"
When standing at any point on the ark, the light reflected not on the Enso, but behind it, so that, whereas the wall before had stood illuminated, it was now transparent. Now the words, those which asked the reader to become a child once again, were to be read while projected upon a living picture of whoever was walking on the other side of the wall at that moment. Maruko observed and commented on a pair of Osaka's urban cool youth- perhaps they were still an active embodiment of this childlike simplicity, the writing seemed to say. Next, Connor looked upon the text as an older couple in evening attire strolled by. To them, he wondered, were these words more a call for balance? Were they more urgent to one pair than the other?
"My Gosh, this is Japan," Maruko spoke through a mouth still agape with wonder, in a hushed tone, as if those they looked at could hear them through the thick glass wall, "Classically modern, anciently relevant. Amazing, this is just, amazing."
They moved from one side of the arc to another. From either corner, the Enso itself seemed much more elliptical and therefore offered a smaller viewing window. However, when one stood directly before the Enso, its open circle offered a full target or frame through which to look.
They continued forward through this maze of glass for another thirty minutes, often looking at the art, though at times their eyes would catch the other looking in their direction. At these times, both would fight to suppress outwardly noticeable grins. Inside, their emotions faced little restraint. Each felt as free as a child might have in that moment. As they walked, they wondered aloud what backdrop they were providing for other patrons who themselves were just seeing the red viewing arc upon the floor. In the end, they decided that each Enso had been perfect, but, like love, none held the explosive potential of the first one they had viewed. It wasn't that there was anything remarkable about this first Enso, it was more that each one after had come with an understanding of what to expect. The first painting, like so many of life's greatest experiences, had been more shocking because they hadn't had any reference within which to categorize it. Still, they had felt an affinity for that which had made them aware that something new and different indeed existed. For these reasons they would always remember the first painting of the evening as well as every other first which they were experiencing together with an added intensity and wonder.
