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Art for the Eye


"Oh, you can walk up to the Rose Garden!", Daniel said, with all
the confidence of a stout young Christian holding four aces.

We walked up to the Rose Garden.
It didn't seem so bad until we ran out of breath
and our muscles cramped and a nice man
named Tensing Norgay asked if he could help us.

All right! I exaggerate! We had to ask him.

The Medical Center in Portland is situated at the top of Mt. Everest
as a way of controlling medical costs by controlling access:
anyone who can climb that high does not need medical care.
The Rose Garden is one of the camps on the way to the top.

It is a magnificent Rose Garden, but in my thorny opinion,
in spite of all its color and romance, it pales compared
to the Japanese Garden just up the hill. Every turn
in the Japanese Garden opened another sculpted world.

Maybe it was that I had been reminded how much
of the Pacific Northwest has been scorned by yards full
of old cars and broken machinery. It is not just there,
where I was born, that Junque for Jesus is collected,
and it does get better, over time, but the Evergreen State
and its neighbors are not all green: they are rust, too.

In the Japanese Garden, one sees what it is like
to live in a world where art is not sound, but sight;
sight and texture and controlled serenity.
I wanted to live in the building that is the gift shop.
Mari finally asked me to stop storming about,
demanding that the clerks take everything out,
in order to let me live there. She said I did not like
taking care of gardens, anyway. I sulked.

We walked to the nearest bus stop, going back.
It was only about a hundred yards to the north, and
about 7000 feet down the hill, but we were fit (to be tied).

Never ask a guy who rides a bicycle from downtown Portland,
at river level, up Mt. Everest to the Medical School,
how to get about town. Those guys have not yet had
their first heart attacks, and they eat lentils.

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