Sukiya Living—Introduction

Now that I am retired and have been four years in Columbus, Ohio, what have I done and what am I doing? I bought a small old house for its Japanese garden potential; the house needed attention including a gut-rehab. Doing the house and the garden took most of the last four years. I have continued to do suiseki (the art of the Japanese viewing stone). Two years ago, when the garden was approaching its threshold of realization, I posted a web-site consisting of images of the garden and suiseki, and text relating to each. At the moment, I find myself at another juncture — the house is basically completed; the garden is approaching "being on its own," — the creative design work is finished and what remains is maintenance. Thus, the dimension of writing has risen to new importance — recently the concept "Sukiya Living" has come to my attention. Here, at its core and in its implication is a particularly pregnant concept. The upshot is the current project, which consists of text approaching 20,000 words. Before launching into this primarily autobiographical endeavor, I would like to address my relationship to the written word.

Over the past 20 years, my writing has been criticized for being too philosophic. I am making an effort to reduce this tendency, the success of which is left to my critics. I wrote virtually nothing after completing my thesis in the late 60s until 1998, when one of my residential students asked me to write about my experiences through the years; as I recall, the way she put it was, "You know, you are not going to last forever; don't you think that it might be a good idea to record some of your ideas?" My return to writing had two components — 1) the residual pain of writing analytic philosophy, never to be revisited; and 2) my interpretation and response to this student's request that I write. As it has turned out, this has been a mixed bag — in an effort to move away from the philosophic style in which I was trained, my writing came across as a quasi-free flow of consciousness. Since beginning to work and reflect upon things Japanese, writing has become more important to me; in addition, it has become a bit more systematic.

A good friend asked me, "Why do you write?" I have not felt comfortable with any answer to this query; thus, I might make another attempt — I began taking music lessons when I was in grade school; music has been in my blood since before I learned to walk. From this early age, art has always been more important to me than is cognitive knowledge; and I dare say, it is not easy to be a "non-cognitivist" philosopher. The irony has long been my desire to figure out what art is, which necessarily involves considerable cognitivity.

What is writing, in the present project? The narrative is relevant here (whatever that turns out to be), as is history; and finally, I actually believe the old philosophic dictum — continue to talk until you finally say what you mean. And taken to the next step — continue to say what you mean until you understand what you are doing and eventually who you are. In light of this, I think the observation that my writing was no more than stream of consciousness was not quite accurate — while there is a method in my madness, it is not easily discernible. Not surprisingly, my writing objective is difficult to grasp or understand; I am not trying to argue or explicate a position, state of affairs or a concept; rather, I am trying to figure out who I am in virtue of the meaning of what I have done over the course of the past 70 years. In addition, the question arises "Who is your audience?" In the strict autobiographical sense, it is I. To the extent that anyone gives a damn, it is s/he; this could render the audience very small indeed, possibly consisting of few beyond my two daughters and possibly those students who lived in the house. This is certainly good enough for me.

Finally, a few words of background — some 50 years ago, I came to philosophy through the back door — during my years at Curtis, ironically I learned that I had no future in professional music, especially in America. I was passionately interested in big A art, and so I made the a priori, albeit uninformed decision to go into philosophy; talk crazy. I should not have been surprised that philosophy did not satisfy my quest for the nature and meaning of big A art. Go figure - "aesthetics has nothing to do with art;" if only I had known Barnett Newman then as I do now, maybe I would have taken a different path. Philosophy did provide a couple things - recognition that the cognitive is distinct from the artistic; and that it is at least logically possible for the former to inform the latter (contradiction intended). Thus, having done Japanese gardens and suiseki for nearly a quarter century and trying to figure them out both in the world and on the page, I beg the reader's indulgence for my returning to text here with a touch of the philosophic. A final thought before setting philosophy aside - the 20^th century, Anglo-Analytic tradition went some distance toward the destruction of Western philosophy; but then again we might give this a positive spin and attribute the original seeds of Postmodernism to have been sown by Wittgenstein in his Tractatus.

Disclaimer: My degrees are in music and philosophy. I have no credentials in art, art history or criticism. I have had no formal training in any of the Japanese arts; I neither speak nor understand any but the most basic Japanese. My concept of and activities with Japanese gardens, suiseki and Sukiya Living are dynamic and constantly ongoing. My credibility in these areas resides entirely upon the quality of present state of the existing entities — primarily the garden and the suiseki in the flesh, and the following text. And beyond this, one can experience their shadows on this web-site. My objective in this text is to present the concept of Sukiya Living; and to provide greater clarity, meaning and conceptual foundation to those empirical objects which I have created.