Mujuan : The re-use of the world




What we leave behind


Fallen barks, dead trunks, decrepit walls and forgotten bags are strewn all around Awaji. Coming here, I was given the keys of Mujuan, a tea pavillon as abandoned as the island. The 1995 earthquake has seriously shaken the two tea rooms and gigantic garden. A young beginner like me should not claim to open his own tea pavillon, but what master would settle in someone else’s house and, furthermore, a let down house ?

Aguste Comte said that « the dead rule over the livings ». They are the cause of our birth, our world is the result of their actions. We are born in ruins — palaces and forests that our ancestors shaped. Someone else grew what we are harvesting today.
Yet, we like new things. We like when an item is made for us. We like to be its first owner, its only recipient. The more I go, the more this mindset seems strangely vain to me. Ceramics I like will survive me for thousands of years. I am merely one of their guests.

I do not know of the story of Mujuan, I do not know who drew it, named it and used it. But I know that, today, if I do not go there, no one will. Entering into an antique shop, all that we see are items that no one wants.  What some acquires, another has thrown it away or sold it.


regeneration as an ethic


Many people’s dream is in the complete building of their own world. They want a flat land, a new bed and advanced technologies. It is a cartesian dream : to make a clean sweep and build everything again while controlling every atom, as a true « master and owner of nature ». But I think that it is also a chimerical dream : should we not admit the rule of our ancestors over us and start by keeping alive our heritage ? Always take something new and never taking care of the old, is it not the best way to exhaust our earthly ressources ? I am not advocating here for a kind of conservatism though : to keep alive is not to keep in a formol bottle but to make things evolve.

No one has inhabited Mujuan, so the spiders made it into their domain. Entering the pavilion for the first time, I really thought that there would be ghosts.  Cleaning the pavilion, I also thought that the dust would never go away. Today, with my tiny experience as a man of tea and my few spurts of will, I warm up the hut that others left behind.

To regenerate what is sleeping instead of sweeping off what once was seems to me to be the only way to go forward without ignorance of our history. Maybe, one day, I will make my own tea room, but I hope that it will be made of used wood boards.

In the meantime, I cultivate my own garden — a garden that does not even belong to me. This daily discipline, to offer every morning an hour of my time to rearrange the dirt that others have prepared, this discipline teaches me humility and, everyday, I breath with more pleasure. To maintain the world in order may seem like a poor activity to pyramid builders, but it is the only activity that teaches us to be inspired by the present instead of sighting at our future.


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