Chaos

Tea is about controlling chaos.  Miniature everyday chaos which mostly doesn’t end in disaster but sometimes does: spills, broken dishes, little injuries, ugly things, dirty things, unknown things. It refines the social encounter through intense practice to be largely predictable, meshing smoothly like carefully honed gears.
Like noh and other traditional performing arts, you practice your part by yourself, and it is the rigorous attention to detailed reproduction of forms (kata) that allows the event itself to run smoothly when everyone comes together.  In contrast, in the west we tend to rehearse the parts all together in order to make them work together. This is one way to ensure a harmonious whole, but not (the Japanese example makes clear) the only way.
We know what to say when, we know what to do down to infinitesimal, invisible details, and there are very very few places or details where the teacher will say, “how you do that is up to you.”
The catch all way that we often describe this training is through one of Rikyu’s (attributed) 7 rules: Prepare for rain.
[All seven are “ First you must make a delicious bowl of tea; lay the charcoal so the water boils; arrange the flowers as they are in the field; in the summer suggest coolness, in the winter, warmth; do everything ahead of time; prepare for rain; and give those with whom you find yourself every consideration.” In a very Biblical turn of events, the student who asked Rikyu for his advice said he already knew all those things, and Rikyu is said to have responded that if the student could do all those things, Rikyu would like to become his student.]
We are attempting to be prepared for any contingency, including our own mistakes. But, here’s the other half:Chaos is happening all the time.Our preparation is an always-already doomed enterprise because chaos laps at our feet and tugs at our hanging sleeves all the time. The mind trying to control every part of the body misses one finger, and it slips out of place. As host in hakobi usucha (a very basic procedure) you stand up in the tea room 6 times. One of those times you’ll forget to squeeze your heels together when standing up. An elbow bumps something, pieces of kimono (precariously if extensively tied) slide over the hours. Things go awry; things fall apart.
Natural forces and physics conspire against us: the charcoal branch we’re cutting isn’t straight and nothing will make its two faces perfectly parallel. The ash form crumbles due to lack of humidity. Gravity occasionally triumphs over our wild balancing acts of bamboo ladle on slick brass container rim, a domed lid refuses to hold a bamboo tea scoop, a slippery lacquer lid won’t stand upright. Things happen.
Our preparations for rain are ultimately bound to fail because the chaos is much greater even than our innumerable plans and rules and procedures. And that’s the rest of tea. Gracefully negotiating the chaos. Imposing just enough order onto the chaos to make a moment that slows the tumbling flow of time and things. We try to distill the chaos into one awe-inspiring flower miraculously arrested in its fall from the vase, into the leaf that fell into the path at the last moment after a meticulous sweeping.
There is nothing like concentrating on rules and preparation all day every day to make you realize just how much chaos remains to be negotiated every second. That’s when it’s time to make a calculated leap into the unknown. That’s all the time.

Everything here is a story. Nothing here is documented. Or there are documents, but they are documents of stories that are told and everyday things that are done. The everydayness of a thing can make it seem as if it has not changed, as if this is the way things have always been done. But that is of course an illusion, albeit a powerful one.

three big days

coming up:
tomorrow, welcome chaji. It’s hango, which means no meal, but everyone’s been working hard to get it in order and some folks are a little stressed out and on edge. I’m a little doki-doki (that’s the onomatopoeic sound of a heart beating fast in Japanese) about it because I am the shoukyaku—the big number one representative guest who has to do all the talking and be the mediator between hosts and other guests.  Aieee! I’m not too worried about the movements and order, or even making conversation about the things in the room, but I’m worried about when to do the talking, because we so rarely do all that in regular practice. Plus, we’re doing TWO nonstandard procedures tomorrow: kasane-chawan, where there are two bowls of koicha going at once and tsuzuki-usucha, where we go directly from thick (koi) to thin (usu) tea without a break between.
Hopefully everyone will be in the swing of it by tomorrow once we’re out of the anticipation and into the moment and it won’t feel too strained.
Then Tuesday we’ll get up really really early and go to the Tenjin flea market because we don’t have class until 10am (quiz day!).  Actually, we’re not even allowed to leave the dorm until 6am, so it’s a good thing the market doesn’t start then (we had thought it did, but it’s actually not til 7.) Then we rush home on bikes, hopefully with tons of new treasures, and jump into kimono real fast and go to school to take the quiz and, yknow, have a regular day.
Wednesday we cut sumi all day instead of classes or keiko. That is, we saw up really expensive charcoal to make small pieces of incredibly luxurious charcoal. Ask me later for the post on the incredible zen luxury of burning really expensive stuff every day and making incredibly labor intensive artworks out of ashes meant to be obliterated by fire. Good times.

Midorikai: the game

here’s where we live. I live in girls dorm in the bottom left hand corner. It’s on a big street called Horikawa. It’s in the “no aisatsu” zone, which we could also call “outside.” When you turn at the temple, next to the center (where kokusaibu, the international division is) you are “inside” the aisatsu zone.  That means you have to greet everyone you see with a bow and ohayo gozaimasu, konnichiwa, konbanwa, or shitsurei itashimasu, depending on time of day and whether you’re departing. If you see another gakuen student you say “otsukaresama desu.” This means basically, “you must be tired,” and although it’s slightly euphemistic to say it in the morning, I can assure you this is usually no mere platitude. We *are* tired. If you see a car, you bow but you don’t have to say anything. This is because anyone could be inside.
Anyway, daily weekday life is bounded within these confines for the most part. Turn into the temple, cross through then turn left up Ogawa. But first at the corner bow to and greet the security guard at the gate to Chado Kaikan, then bow to Kabuto-mon, the gate into Konnichian, the Sen family home. This is, we are told, because somewhere back there is a statue of Rikyu. Now head up and away from Kabuto-mon and to Gakuen, where we have morning classes on second floor, and afternoon keiko (practice) on either the 1st or 3rd floor. 1st floor is a series of 6 8-mat tearooms and upstairs is hiroma, a wide expense of tatami that we also clean four days a week (M-Thurs). More on that later. Across the street is Shokudo, the cafeteria where we eat two meals Monday through Friday. I have been devouring every meal and cleaning my plate every day. I’m always starving. No idea why that is. And so much meat.

I think we should make a side-scrolling video game of this— you have to aisatsu all the right people in the proper manner at the right time while trying to get from dorm to gakuen. Bonus points if you meet a Sen family member— we are supposed to say “Gokigen wa yoroshu gozaimasu” if we see one of them.  I can tell you that that phrasing will be an extremely complicated button sequence on the game.
There are many other levels on the way— more on that soon.

Why failing better?

>>>FROM 4. SEPTEMBER 2012

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
-Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho

Hello everyone.
Perhaps this feels like a funny name for a blog about doing something so exotic as moving to Kyoto Japan and studying the Japanese way of tea for a year.
Here’s why: I have come to feel like a massive proportion of tea— the practice of the practice of tea is learning how to be wrong. I decided this long before I came here to Kyoto. Many of you will have heard me talk about it before. Doing Tea is all-encompassing and fluid. And it’s largely repertoire based— unlike many authoritative western institutions, it’s not about the archive and the written word— as Hamana-sensei told us in orientation, it’s not a high art, it’s an art of everyday life. In other words, it’s about performance. And one thing we often say about performance is that it’s protean, it’s contingent. And that’s nice, because it’s flexible, and that’s really hard because it sometimes feels there’s nothing solid to hold on to. Or so many solid things to juggle that we could never possibly get it all right.  It’s especially hard for us newbies (the kohai) right now, because every single little thing is new, and we are trying to learn every kata (form), every shikata (way of doing things) at once. But if 13 years of practice is any indication, it doesn’t stop being hard.  So this is about learning how to fail better than before, to fail with grace. And as Gary-sensei told us today in our first lecture class, to always make new mistakes and not old ones.


Now, on with the rest of it. Next come a bunch of my first few days’ thoughts.  It’s long, it ends abruptly because guess what, it’s really busy and it’s impossible to do everything justice!  Ah well. I am very happy to hear your thoughts. I’m working to figure out comments and how to enable conversation here.
~cheers
M.

How to be wrong. And welcome to this blog.

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
-Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho

Hello everyone.
Perhaps this feels like a funny name for a blog about doing something so exotic as moving to Kyoto Japan and studying the Japanese way of tea for a year.
Here’s why: I have come to feel like a massive proportion of tea— the practice of the practice of tea is learning how to be wrong. I decided this long before I came here to Kyoto. Many of you will have heard me talk about it before. Doing Tea is all-encompassing and fluid. And it’s largely repertoire based— unlike many authoritative western institutions, it’s not about the archive and the written word— as Hamana-sensei told us in orientation, it’s not a high art, it’s an art of everyday life. In other words, it’s about performance. And one thing we often say about performance is that it’s protean, it’s contingent. And that’s nice, because it’s flexible, and that’s really hard because it sometimes feels there’s nothing solid to hold on to. Or so many solid things to juggle that we could never possibly get it all right.  It’s especially hard for us newbies (the kohai) right now, because every single little thing is new, and we are trying to learn every kata (form), every shikata (way of doing things) at once. But if 13 years of practice is any indication, it doesn’t stop being hard.  So this is about learning how to fail better than before, to fail with grace. And as Gary-sensei told us today in our first lecture class, to always make new mistakes and not old ones.


Now, on with the rest of it. Next come a bunch of my first few days’ thoughts.  It’s long, it ends abruptly because guess what, it’s really busy and it’s impossible to do everything justice!  Ah well. I am very happy to hear your thoughts. I’m working to figure out comments and how to enable conversation here.
~cheers
M.