anyone who likes these and who wants to understand where they're coming from should read six names of beauty. one thing i'll point out: mountains are actually very large stones, and stones are very small mountains. the relationship is not like a picture to its object or motif.
i realize i have been studying and thinking about and teaching about japanese aesthetics for a quarter century. i've sampled calligraphy and ikebana, been seeing in particular all of very rural life in terms of a wabi sabi aesthetics, and i have been teaching about and in my own way trying to practice zen (or, for me, even more fundamentallly) taoism for a very long time very seriously. all these go together with what i think about myself as a cult of the ordinary, and a continuous cultivation of attention. the tao te ching is how i made my peace with the 'spiritual side' of 12-step programs. i call my higher power the tao! i hear the same thing in zen buddhism.
so i love about suiseki that it calls attention to things that are already there, rather than creating new ones. if you simply attend to things that are already there, your art can't be an achievement; you're not doing it in order to score; it's just happening through you. i want people to see these rocks as i do, and i could never in the rest of my lifetime design any of them, and they are just ordinary rocks. for me, they open up a peephole on how infinitely beautiful the universe is and how far beyond human capacities to describe or envision or see clearly. but you see more if you really attend. it requires no hand skills. i was always one of those kids who couldn't draw, had abominable penmanship, and so on. well i'm not drawing or painting here, just drawing things together from the world.
the best introduction i know to japanese aesthetics is mokoto ueda's book literary and art theories of japan, long out of print. get it on inter-library loan! he knows a lot more about this than i do, but i find myself intuiting it or using it confidently and spontaneously by my own lights, and my ability to do this is bringing me great peace and joy even in a time of wild emotional and practical swings.
