Ideograms are composed of strokes. Very limited in number, these strokes nonetheless offer the possibility of extremely varied combinations, and the whole set of ideograms may be seen as a combinatory (or a transformation), going beyond the strokes, which, though they are very simple, are already significant in themselves. Of the following six characters (all but the last of which are simple characters), the first is composed of a single stroke, and the last of eight.3
The first ideogram consists of a single horizontal stroke. This one, undoubtedly the most important among the basic strokes, can be considered the “initial stroke” of Chinese writing (the Chinese writing system). Its drawing is, according to traditional interpretation, an act that separates (and simultaneously unites) heaven and earth. In addition, the character means at the same time “one” and “original unity.” By combining the basic strokes, depending in many cases upon the “ideas” that underlie these strokes, one obtains other ideograms. Thus, by combining “one” and “Man” (homo), one obtains “big,” just as one obtains “sky” (heaven) by adding a stroke at the top of “big.” By making the vertical stroke of “Man” (homo) surpass the upper horizontal of “sky” (heaven), “man” (a man) is born. The last character, , a complex character, is a combination of “man” (as a phonetic sign) and the root element for grass, or herbage (). Strokes intertwined with other strokes, meanings implicated with other meanings. The codified meaning of each sign never succeeds in completely repressing other, deeper meanings ever present within the sign. These are always ready to burst forth; and the full ensemble of the signs, formed according to the demands of equilibrium and rhythm, reveals the many possibilities of these clusters of significant strokes: attitudes, movements, intentional (sought) contradictions, the harmony of opposites, and, finally, a whole manner of being.
It is well to remember that tradition establishes a link between this system of writing and the divinatory system called ba-gua (the “Eight Trigrams”). This system has played an important role, throughout the history of Chinese civilization, as much in the philosophical domain (where it provides the basis of later treatments of the idea of mutation) as in daily life (where it is used in astrology, geomancy, and other divinatory practices). According to tradition, the system was invented by Fu-xi, the legendary king, and perfected by the first Zhou dynasty king, Wen Wang, before 1000 B.C. The system centers around a set of figures whose internal relationship is ruled by laws of transformation according to the principles of the alternation of yin and yang. Each base figure is composed of three superposed strokes, with full strokes representing yang, and broken strokes yin. Thus the idea of heaven (or sky) is represented by three full strokes , and that of earth by three broken ones ; the figure symbolizes water, while the figure represents fire, and so on. The ideograms are similarly composed of strokes (the numerals up to three are represented by a corresponding number of strokes), and the most ancient character for shui (“water”) was written . Some think to discern, on the basis of these similarities, a link of parentage between the two systems. In considering this possible linkage, it is worth noting, in any case, that the ideographic signs do indeed attempt less to copy the exterior appearance of things than to represent them with essential strokes, the combinations of which may reveal their essence, as well as the hidden ties which unite them. By the balanced structure which of necessity characterizes each of them (they are all, regardless of the number of their strokes, the same size, with each possessing its own constant and harmonious architecture), the ideograms appear not as arbitrarily imposed marks, but as so many beings, endowed with will and with internal unity. The Chinese perception of the signs as living unities is reinforced by the fact that each ideogram is monosyllabic and invariable. This confers upon each an autonomy, and at the same time a great mobility in terms of the possibility of combination with other ideograms. Within the Chinese poetic tradition, the poet often compares the twenty characters that make up a pentasyllabic quatrain to twenty “sages.” The interrelation of these individual personalities transforms the poem into a ritual act or scene, where gestures and symbols provoke constantly renewed “meanings.”
Such a system of writing, and the conception of sign that underlies it, conditioned in China an ensemble of signifying practices that includes, in addition to poetry, calligraphy, painting, and myth.
The influence of a language conceived no longer as a denotative system that “describes” the world, but as a representation that organizes the connections and provokes the acts of signifying, is decisive here.4 It is not simply that the writing serves as a vehicle for all of these practices; it is, even more, the single model active in the process of their constitution as systems. Inspired by the ideographic writing and determined by it, poetry, calligraphy, painting, and myth form a semiotic network both complex and unified; all share in the same process of symbolization, and obey certain fundamental rules of opposition. The language cannot be disengaged from the consideration of any one of these without reference to its connections with the others, and, through these, to a generalized aesthetic. In China, the arts are not compartmentalized; an artist devotes himself to the tripartite practice of poetry—calligraphy—painting as to a complete art, one within which all the spiritual dimensions of his being are exploited: linear song and spatial system, incantatory gesture and visualized words. I will outline, in the following pages, the manner in which the writing system is bound together with calligraphy, painting, myth, and music, and, at the same time, where appropriate, that which poets drew from this relationship in their efforts to forge a language for their special purposes.
Calligraphy
It is no accident that calligraphy, which exalts the visual beauty of the ideograms, became a major art. In the practice of this art, the calligrapher seeks to rediscover the rhythm of his deepest being, and to enter into communion with the elements. Through the signifying strokes, he may completely surrender himself. Their thickness and their slenderness, their contrasting and balancing relationships, permit him to express the multiple aspects of his own sensibility: forcefulness and tenderness, abandon and quietude, tension and harmony. In the accomplishment of the unity of each character and in the balance among them, the calligrapher, even in the act of expressing things, achieves his own unity. These immemorial and always restrained gestures provide the cadence, instantaneously achieved with the strokes, which, as in a sword dance, thrusts and crosses, soars and plunges, holding a meaning of its own, and adding another to that one, codified, of the word. It is appropriate, when we speak of calligraphy, to speak of meaning; its gestural and rhythmic nature must not make us forget that it works on signs. In the course of execution, the signified of the text is never completely absent from the mind and spirit of the calligrapher, nor is the choice of the text either gratuitous or a matter of indifference.
The calligrapher’s preferred texts are poetic texts, poems and poetic prose. When a calligrapher begins a poem, he does not limit himself to a simple act of copying. Through his calligraphy, he attempts to revive the entire gestural movement and imaginative power of the signs. This is his manner of penetrating the profound reality of each of the signs, of marrying them within the uniquely physical cadence of the poem, and, finally, of re-creating the poem itself. Another type of text, the sacred and no less incantatory texts of Taoism (and Buddhism), is equally attractive to the calligrapher. Here calligraphic art is seen as restoring to the signs their original magical and sacred functions. Taoist monks gauge the efficacy of a talisman (or charm) that they draw in terms of the quality of their calligraphy, as it is that quality which assures good communication with the beyond. The Buddhist faithful believe that they may gain merit by copying canonical texts; and here too the efficacy of the result is in direct relation to the quality of the calligraphy.
Nor does the poet remain insensitive to the sacred function of the drawn signs. Like the calligrapher who, in his dynamic art, perceives himself as reconnecting the signs to the original world, as unl
eashing a movement of harmonious or contrary force, the poet has no doubt that in combining the signs he reveals some secret of the spirits of the universe, as this line by Du Fu demonstrates:
The poem completed, gods and demons stupefied!5
From this conviction as to the sacred and magical power of the signs there arises, in the moment of the composition of a poem, the quasi-mystical pursuit of zi-yan, “word eye,”6 the one key word that illuminates the entire poem at once, delivering thereby the mystery of a hidden world. Innumerable anecdotes describe one poet prostrating himself before another and venerating him as his Yi-zi-shi, his or “teacher of one word,” because the latter has “revealed” the necessary, the absolutely perfect word that has permitted the former to finish a poem, and to “perfect creation.”7
Neither does the poet deny himself the evocative power of the imagistic aspect of the characters that is constantly made available and magnified by a calligraphic art whose execution allows multiple meanings to emerge from the multiple graphic strata of the signs. Wang Wei, an adept of Chan (Zen) spirituality, describes, in the following line from a quatrain, a magnolia on the point of flowing.8 The poet seeks to suggest that he is able through his contemplation of the tree to become of “one body” with the tree and to perceive from the “interior” of the tree the experience of its blossoming. Rather than using a denotative language to explain this experience, he contents himself, in the first line of the quatrain, with aligning five characters.
The line is translated “At the end of the branches, the magnolia flowers.” Even the reader who does not know Chinese can easily become sensitive to the visual aspect of these characters: the succession of the characters taken purely from the point of view of their visual aspect is completely in accord with the lexical meanings of the characters, and finally of the line itself. Viewing these characters in order gives the visual impression of the process of a tree blossoming into flower (first character: a bare tree; second character: something is born at the end of the branches; third character: a bud breaks out, being the radical of grass or flower; fourth character: the bursting open of the bud; fifth character: a flower in its fullness). But behind what is shown (the visual aspect) and what is denoted (the normal codified meaning of the characters), a reader who is familiar with the language will not fail to note in addition, through the ideograms, a subtly hidden idea, that of the man who enters the tree in spirit and who therefore participates in its metamorphosis. The third character () contains the element “man,” which itself contains the element “Man” (homo); thus, the tree presented by the first two characters is from this point onward inhabited by the presence of the man. The fourth character () contains “face” (the bud breaks out into a face), which contains the element “mouth” (this speaks). And finally, the fifth character contains the element “transformation” (man participating in the universal transformation). By an economy of means, and without recourse to external commentary, the poet re-creates, before our eyes, in its successive states, a mystical experience.
In the preceding example the process of development from the simple to the complex, evoked through the successive stages of blossoming, is graphically represented. In the following example it is in a sense the inverse process, a process of “stripping away,” of moving from the complex toward the simple, that is related. The theme of the poem9 is a visit made by the poet, Liu Chang-qing, to a recluse. While walking on the winding mountain path, the poet perceives from a distance the hermit’s dwelling, the door of which, with an air of peaceful leisure, is blocked by wild plants. The closer he comes to the dwelling, the more he feels won over by the spirit of “stripping away,” and the door appears as a reflection of the hermit’s adherence to this spirit. The fourth line of the poem goes as follows:
This can be read on three levels. According to the “normal” reading, the line means “The perfumed plants bar the idle door.” The purely visual aspect of the characters presents more clearly the development of the process of simplification, the “stripping away” that is discussed above. The first two characters () both have the plant radical (); they mark quite well the idea of luxuriant flora. The next three characters () contain the door radical () Their succession suggests the increasingly coherent, the increasingly clear, vision of the poet as he approaches the dwelling of the recluse. The line culminates in the final image, a bare door, bare as if at last stripped of all that is superfluous. This idea of successive stages of “stripping away” is reinforced on a deeper level by the meanings implied in the third and fourth characters in the line: contains the element “talent,” “merit,” and contains the element “plant,” “ornament”; they seem to signify that to arrive at true spirituality, one must first free oneself from all worldly care for exterior merit and ornament.
A third example shows the poet Du Fu using, in two lines of verse,10 a procedure very dear to the Taoist priests in their magical uses of the characters. This procedure consists of clustering together words (with the Taoists, sometimes invented words) that have the same radical or root element, as if in an attempt to accumulate the type of energy suggested by the radical. For Du Fu, the attempt is not without irony, as the lines in question describe the poet’s anguished and finally disappointed anticipation of rain in a time of torrid heat (the magic formula has, then, had no positive effect). The poet employs a series of words all having the rain radical (): “thunder,” “lightning”; “crash of thunder”; “cloud.” Finally he allows the word “rain” itself to appear, a word contained in and promised by all the words that precede it. It is a vain promise, however; this word, but barely appeared, is followed by the word nothing(ness)” (), which finishes the line. Moreover, the word has as its radical” “fire,” Thus the aborted rain is absorbed by the air, set aflame.
The two lines, accompanied by a literal translation, appear thus:
Lightning, thunder, in vain lightning thundering
Cloud, rain, at last illusory, nothing
The ensemble of these words creates, through its progression and the contrast they provoke (the clouds that amass, the thunder that announces the rain, the rain absorbed by the fire), a visual image that is striking indeed.
Let us cite one final example of the use of the graphic elements of the characters by poets. This example is drawn from the first strophe of along poem by Zhang Ruo-xu,11 in which the poet introduces immediately the theme of dualism between two symbolic figures: the river (symbolizing space-time, and permanence) and the moon (life force, vicissitude):
Without explicitly stating the theme, the poet opposes a series of words containing the water radical (): “river,” “water,” “sea,” “scintillation,” “wave,” with another series of words containing the radical “moon” (): “moon,” “clarity,” “light,” “brilliance,” “to follow.” Among these characters with opposing radicals there appears twice the word “tide,” which contains both the water element and the moon element. If the words of the water group are represented by the sign , the words of the moon group by the sign , and the word “tide,” which participates in both, by , their occurrences in the four lines can be represented as follows:
The simultaneous relation of opposition and correlation of the two figures is graphically suggested in an extremely efficacious manner.
Painting
If the connection between calligraphy and poetic writing seems direct and natural, that which unites the latter with painting is no less so in the eyes of the Chinese. In the Chinese tradition, where painting is often referred to as wu-sheng-shi (silent poetry), the two arts clearly belong to the same order. Numerous poets also devoted themselves to painting, while every painter owed it to himself to be a poet. Without doubt the most famous example is Wang Wei of the Tang. Inventor of monochrome technique and precursor of the style of painting called “spiritual,” he was equally celebrated for his poetry. His experience as a painter greatly influenced his manner of organizing the signs in poetry, to such an extent, in fact, that Su Dong-p
o, the famous Sung dynasty poet, could say of him that “his pictures are poems, and his poems, pictures.” The primary link between poetry and painting is, put simply, calligraphy. The most notable manifestation of this trinitarian relationship, a relationship that forms the base of a complete art, is the tradition of presenting a poem in fine calligraphy in the blank space of a picture. Before defining precisely the significance of this practice, it is necessary to underline the fact that calligraphy and painting are arts of the stroke: it is this fact which makes possible their cohabitation.
The art of calligraphy, aimed as it is at restoring the primordial rhythm and the living gestures implied by the strokes of the characters, liberated the Chinese artist from the need to describe faithfully the exterior aspect of the physical world, and gave rise, very early, to a “spiritual” painting that, rather than pursuing resemblance and calculating geometrical proportions, sought to imitate “the act of the Creator,” catching the essential lines, forms, and movements of nature. Seeking the same sovereign liberty as the calligrapher, the painter uses the same brush in the execution of his work. It is only after a long period of learning to draw a variety of elements from nature and the human world that he begins to execute what may be called in the strictest sense works of art. The ensemble of elements that he must first master have themselves been the object of a slow process of symbolization. Having become signifying unities, they offer the accomplished artist the possibility of organizing them according to certain fundamental aesthetic laws; in mastering these elements it is as if the artist had learned the visible universe “by heart.” The execution of a work is done without, and beyond, any model (for the work must be an interior projection); it unrolls exactly as does calligraphy, rhythmically, as if the artist were carried by an irresisble current. This is made possible only by the fact that all pictorial elements are drawn with the stroke. Through their continuous rhythm, the strokes permit the artist to follow the movement inaugurated by the first stroke.12 The real world arises beneath his brush, its “vital breath”13 never interrupted. In the eyes of the Chinese painter, the strokes express both the form of things and, at the same time, the thrusts of dream; they are not simple outlines; through the contrast of the full and the light strokes, by the white that they surround, by the space that they suggest, they already imply volume (never fixed) and light (ever changing). The painter creates his work by abiding by the strokes, strokes that draw themselves together or oppose each other, strokes that embody themselves in figures conceived and mastered in advance; thus he is not copying or describing the world, but engendering figures of the real in an instantaneous and direct fashion, without later additions or retouching, in the manner of the Tao itself.
Chinese Poetic Writing Page 2
