Stumbly, but Not Half-Assed

Writing is my livelihood, I dabble in bonsai, and I recognize a strong kinship between those two things. But the whole vocation v. avocation, work v. dabble, duality doesn't quite convey the way I think about it. I'll circle back.

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I've noticed some confusion in the gradual and natural winnowing effect of experiences over the decades; to extend the image, what was apparently wheat has turned to chaff or often the other way around. For example, a long time ago I watched my friend Bill, who had been my only real male friend growing up, play the role of Jerry in Edward Albee's Zoo Story. Thinking back on the experience, three impressions return.

Remember the play? Jerry confronts Peter in Central Park and imposes an increasingly disjointed conversation on him that culminates in Jerry's telling THE STORY OF JERRY AND THE DOG!, the ongoing struggle between Jerry and his landlady's mongrel. Things get less rational, more physical; Jerry forces a fight and impales himself on a knife Peter is holding. So the first impact on me was the distress of watching your best friend from your high school days turn into a crazy guy in front of you. In public.

Then, with a little distance, I remember Zoo Story's familiar themes. The play is about all those mid-twentieth-century concerns that have faded from favor over the years: the distance between people, the triumph of materialism, the absurd arbitrariness of experience.

I can conjure these when I remember watching the play back then. But what came to mind just recently — spontaneously — was the phrase Jerry uses to describe the dog dedicated to tearing him apart. "He was sort of a stumbly dog, but he wasn't half-assed, either. It was a good, stumbly run, but I always got away."  Stumbly, but not half-assed. T-shirt, if not actual epitaph material. I guess if one of Albee's themes was about the dislocation of experience, it took.

The phrase came to me when I was thinking about a cotoneaster plant I was pruning. So to be more precise, then, my work with bonsai is stumbly, but not half-assed. I don't dabble, I commit. And it's not always easy.

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I feel the weight of a history that runs from the Tang Dynasty Chinese practice of what came to be called penjing (or pen ching) through Japanese bonsai and down the centuries to my workbench. I know about how early penjing specimens were oddly shaped trees thought to have magical powers. These were followed by re-created landscapes in trays — plantings of rocks or more complex arrangements of rocks, plants, and decorations — creations that, if not religious, were at least mysterious enough in their ability to miniaturize nature to contain their own sort of power. When the practice of tray planting (pen tsai in Chinese) emerged in Japan as bonsai, its aesthetic was simplified to correspond to Zen beliefs. A bonsai composition came to comprise a single tree, and I try to see each tree as an embodiment of the entire universe.

But I'm defeated. Often it's simple fear at the moment of pruning a branch — gone forever, the harmony destroyed. Or it's the cold reality that true bonsai take many years to become convincing; I might not live to see any project through to completion. And I'm defeated also by my own confusion. I'm not comfortable with the control element of bonsai, which seems to appropriate the Judeo-Christian idea of nature existing in service to humans. In theory, the practice honors the natural world by trying to understand it, but recreating it and controlling it using techniques such as wiring, defoliating, and trunk-chopping feels hubristic.

What I settle for is the Zen truth from that famous Buddhist aphorism: Better to travel well than to arrive. At no point are the plants under my control; they're in charge, and the best I can do is cooperate and sometimes collaborate. And I can just enjoy the process, stumbly as it is, and what the process teaches.

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Since most dictionaries, if they acknowledge “stumbly” at all, assign a prosaic definition — "given to stumbling" — I feel free to offer my own:  Stumbly adj. 1 something lacking in polish that is produced by an engaged maker;  2 a condition required to produce such a result. To be stumbly is to be enthused, unguarded, honest. It insists on mindful attention to each moment at a task. It cares little for "outcomes," avoids the cheap, the hurried, the vain. And now the topic is shifting here — from bonsai to writing to a way of living. It turns out that stumbly and "not half-assed" are the same thing; work and play can be likewise joined by a dedication to mindful living.

Paul Valery gets translated repeatedly in workshops and writer interviews as saying a poem is never finished, just abandoned. I think closer to what he really said was "A work is never completed except by some accident such as weariness, satisfaction, the need to deliver, or death." Same thing, just more specific: the point is that you can choose to be satisfied or you can die; you may be finished but your work isn't. And note that Valery's list doesn't  include a frantic need to publish as many works as possible that leads to dashing off a poem in one sitting and submitting it, simultaneously, to two dozen journals.

Also in Zoo Story, Albee has Jerry observe “sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly.” That may be gibberish, or it may be useful — the two are sometimes so close together I have trouble telling them apart. In the context here, though — of bonsai, writing, and editing — Jerry seems to have been given a moment of clarity. At any time on the way to the zoo, you can’t be anywhere else except where you are. Might as well give each stumbly moment its due.

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I'm obviously ignoring my own counsel by writing a blog; however, I will take my own advice and not publish a photograph of my own bonsai. The one that precedes this piece was taken in the North Carolina Arboretum's bonsai exhibition garden in Asheville, North Carolina.