Bamboo and Pine: Symbols of Constancy

松竹含韻

Today's kanji mean "pine, bamboo, include, elegance" and the phrase is said to be from a poem by the Chinese scholar, Liu Yuxi (772-842).

It is an autumn poem, and depicts the still-green pine and bamboo amid the rest of the trees of the forest that are changing color and losing their leaves.

The idea is that the pine and bamboo are admirably constant in maintaining their native color and vigor while the rest of world changes according to whatever is new.

Make Friends Through Learning

以文會友

I  haven't properly practiced for weeks. My fortnightly lessons have been the only times. So I was surprised this week that my brush didn't feel as rusty as I'd expected, and even more surprised  when my teacher took the extraordinary step of gracing it with the comment "Excellent work" - as much, he said for the fact that it manifested character as for any overwhelming skill or beauty.

This week's inscription means something like "make friends through learning"and is a quotation from the Chinese scholar Zengzi 曾子 (505 BC–436 BC). The import of the phrase is that, like all the best things, learning, too, should be a social affair, saving the scholar from getting lost in his or her own thoughts, providing a much needed counterpoint to thoughts and conclusions reached on one's own, and facilitating further, better learning.

Blaze of the Day

赫日流輝

This blog is about calligraphy, but there's a limit to how interesting successive postings of what is essentially black ink on white paper can be, especially if what's written in black ink isn't immediately comprehensible to the reader.

So today here's a picture of a flower from our balcony: a hosta that a kindly gentleman who has a part-time position at the company I work at gave me a couple of years ago.

A hosta, a native of north-east Asia, is a very generic office plant—there for the touch of green that it faithfully provides with very little maintenance indeed.

 I once wrote a haiku about my hosta that actually features the plant's lack of flamboyance:

The wan hosta

I watered at dawn

Is now in blazing heat 

Well, it turns out that while the "blazing heat" of this year's summer has yet to make itself fully felt in Tokyo, what heat we have had so far has made the formerly frumpy little hosta bloom - and gorgeously!

And it's on the topic of "blazing heat" this week's shodo offering comes in. My teacher set me it a couple of weeks ago, perhaps imagining that by the time I got it right summer would have made itself felt.

It means "the blazing day, raked by the sun's brilliance."

The first character 赫 is the character for the verb "shine brightly," kagayaku, and is made up of the character for red, or aka, repeated left and right. You'll see that although the form is essentially the same, the way I have written them are different. The left hand one is bolder than the right hand one, at least in its upper half, whereas the right hand one has a more delicate upper half and a bolder lower half.

Simple as it may look, it was one of the most challenging characters I have ever encountered in my shodo career to date. Getting it looking good enough was exceptionally difficult and time-consuming, but this morning I finally got it to the point where I considered it fit to introduce to the world.

Shadow of the Willow

柳結濃陰

"Shadow of the willow, dense and twined"

My shodo offering this time is particularly lyrical: the kanji for willow, entwine, dense, and shadow. Put together they paint a picture of bright sunshine on a willow tree whose branches make a dark tangle of shadows on the ground.

In the world of Japanese haiku, which being a written art is closely linked to the world of shodo, the willow, or yanagi, is a seasonal word for the month of April. Yet, although it is now the end of May, you'd be forgiven for thinking it were still April in Tokyo, being so cool and the air still so dry.

It has been almost a week since I properly practiced, and, having the whole day to myself, I wanted to get my offering this time looking right. But, perfection eluded me as usual, in spite of doggedly pursuing it for three hours. After dozens of tries, half of which I gave up on halfway through, I finally settled on this one above. See below for the competition it faced.

In the meantime, a little willow poem.

A willow hangs like veils

fingering long and reedy

the air, that glitters to the sound of birds,

in whispers around its thighs

 Except when rain

washes off from the ground

the long black plaits of shadow

and the willow

wet and gleaming

in six grays and seven greens

twists and glissandos

clinging and breathing

to the brisk wind

The candidates for today's shodo blog!

Out with the Old, In with the New

Spring is all about newness - for me a newfound indolence, it seems, or lack of resistance to enticing TV shows, many of which, I protest, have been very worthy: documentary in fact (besides Family Guy, The Big Bang, Hot in Cleveland, RuPaul's Drag Race, and fast-forwarding-to-the-singing Glee, to name a few). But even the trashiest TV watching takes the form of "little dates" with Charles, and what could be more sacred than bonding with someone you love?

"Out with the old, in with the new"

As I ask that question, thunder claps and black ink rains. The god of shodo is a jealous god and wants me all to himself. Well, tonight he got me - all two hours of me, on my knees in fact, bent over the brush in practice and almost weeping, if not for my sins then in frustration for the ugliness, imbalance and uncoordination that is the punishment for my month of laziness.

My assignment last lesson was the phrase "out with the old, in with the new" and my hours of laboring over it this evening have produced the above. It is in kaisho (standard script) style which, with its unforgiving demand for balance, I find the most challenging of the scripts.

Shodo itself seems to me a constant process of out with the old, in with the new. Every new technique I pick up or new insight I acquire at my Thursday lesson somehow has the effect of sending me back to square one, both blessed and burdened with the new; and the old that I labored so hard to acquire seems to go into hiding. To elaborate, last lesson was all about visualizing the skeleton of the characters. You can see how my teacher showed me below. What he was doing: tracing in black around the characters he'd just written and then adding in pink the lines the brush should follow, seemed an almost childishly simple teaching technique when he was doing it. I already have four or five years of shodo experience behind me, so told myself I already knew that. All the same, my previous teacher had rarely spelled it out that clearly for me, and when I got home and practiced focusing on those pink lines, the exercise had a profound effect on my shodo, and yet more scales fell from my eyes.

The skeletons of kanji - the brushstrokes elucidated

That "simple" mapping out of the strokes gave me a new grasp of the nuts and bolts of Chinese characters (or, kanji), and I'm gradually working it in. However, in the process of getting my eyes and fingers to visualize and trace the skeleton, there were other things tonight that I completely forgot about, like varying the look of the strokes, and keeping track of each character's relationship to the others. I don't have the cerebral RAM to cope with all of them together. I felt like I was back to square one. In that way, the new ousts the old. It is only by spending more time with both the new and the old that you get them back all under one roof.

In that sense, shodo - or any skill for that matter - is like learning the layout of a city. It has to be done in bits and pieces, and then one day, without any warning, you happen to find out that the neighborhood with the 1970s municipal housing estates that you cycle past on the way to work actually backs right onto the little cluster of sloping streets lined with fashion boutiques that a friend used to take you now and then on weekends. They used to seem worlds apart, now they're on the same map.

It's that moment of "getting it" that we all live for, when things dock, fuse, come together, have intercourse in fact, and produce a whole that, with the thrill of comprehension, suddenly glows with more than the sum of its parts. It happened to me, too, when I was learning to mix records in the late '90s. Starting out, I DJed every Saturday at my friend Honolulu's bar in Osaka. No matter how well I managed to mix tunes at home, my mixing went to grating amplified cacophony whenever I DJed out - for months and months. But then it suddenly happened. I'll never forget the incredulous joy on what were usually longsuffering faces when at last I mixed two records perfectly. Honolulu cried "It's a miracle!" and drinks were poured; and a miracle it was, because never in all the years after that did I fumble a mix again.

But getting to that point of sudden togetherness involves the TVless and littledateless loneliness, and the frustration that sometimes borders on hopelessness. Not that I had such a moment of real togetherness tonight. My characters are still too blunt and tend towards top-heavy, but I ended up feeling less strange with the new and getting back on terms with my old.

"Simplified and fluid"

簡単化　流動性

Most of the calligraphy I have posted on this blog has been standard style, AKA kaisho, typified by definite, clean lines. However, one style I have very little experience of is sosho (literally "grass writing").

Sosho is one of the cursive scripts of Chinese calligraphy, the cursive style emerging from about the second century B.C. in China, i.e., the Qin Dynasty, as a shorthand form of the squat, angular clerical script that was the standard script of the day.

The example of sosho I have posted here actually comprises the same characters as my last post, Beauty Battle. However, if no one told you, you'd probably be hard pressed to know. Sosho is abbreviated to the point of having to approach it almost anew. While attempting it, any experience of or even proficiency you might have in standard script seems to be of little help in producing good sosho.

Because, from the aesthetic point of view - which is really the only point of view that matters when it comes  to calligraphy - sosho cannot be reduced simply to shorthand standard script, even if historically speaking that is how it developed. Rather, sosho is the epitome of the quality of grace (yun) that was the quality most highly prized in the Jin dynasty (265 A.D. - 420 A.D.), the dynasty that can claim China's most famous calligrapher, Wang Xizhi. In the words of one of China's most preeminent historians and theorists of calligraphy,  Liu Xizai (1813-1881), cursive script (and, to a lesser degree, a similar style known as running script) was the epitome of all that was "simplified and fluid" (from his Discourse on Calligraphy (Shu Gai)).

But the significance of sosho goes beyond the abstract. Fluid and sinuous it may be, but a single glance at sosho is much more likely to get the imagination working than with kaisho. For all kaisho's classical poise and architectural balance, sosho has an urgency clearly visible in the brushstrokes. Sosho clearly owns up to being born of something hairy in the clear legacy of the brushmarks, it's not too proud to show the muscle that went into it, it runs and darts in spurts and even gets a little out of breath. The spur of the moment randomness and the textures in sosho are closer to the pictorial than in standard script. And whether you can decipher the literal meaning or not, you can still read a lot into its form and movement.

These characters paint the scene of two gorgeous blossom trees vying in beauty: the kind of contest that draws on all sorts of fierceness and sublimity, which I hope found expression here in the flow of the characters themselves.

Cherry blossom viewing in Shinjuku Gyoen, Toyko

Beauty Battle

桃李争妍

Spring in Japan is a strange affair. There is next to none of the storybook, post-winter balminess of meadows in which swallows dart and children play. Spring in Japan is little more than the tail end of winter's frigidness, and is very quickly taken over by early summer mugginess. It is now late March and not quite cold enough to see your breath anymore, but requiring on most days almost as much dressing up for as mid-winter does, all the same.

Nevertheless, if humans don't really feel it, vegetation does. Plum blossom has begun appearing here and there, and the tight dark buds of ten days ago on our potted apple plant have suddenly released vivid little leaves.

Shodo is intimately associated with poetry of which much is seasonally based. This week's assignment is resolutely vernal, but with a bit of a martial twist. The four characters are, from top right to bottom left: "peach," (momo) "plum," (sumomo) "contend," "beauty."

The gloss goes: "The blossoms of the peach and the plum vie in beauty"—a simple but gorgeously evocative scene that will be a reality in a couple of weeks from now. Note that this poem does not include the famed sakura (cherry blossom), which is actually quite welcome, beause sakura is so archetypal of Japan in spring that its less praised yet arguably equally beautiful sisters deserve some serious complimenting of their own.

The interesting twist for me in this poem is the inclusion of the character for "contend/vie" (arasou), because spring is usually a byword for tranquility. But its pairing with "beauty" certainly adds spice to the idea of attractiveness. The character used here for beauty is a somewhat unusual one. Beauty is usually bi, written 美, whereas in this case it is ken, written 妍. 妍 consists of the radical for breasts/woman 女 (the radical to the right of it is purely for phonetic purposes), and, as such, has a slightly different nuance from the stately 美, in that 妍 is more about charm, prettiness, seductiveness, cuteness, coquettishness.

So we have here not the solemn waving of respective banners of classical beauty on the chivalrous battleground of spring, but the fierce posturing of the floral equivalent of blondes and redheads in air that is messy with jealousy.

And speaking of messy, you will note that the inkan (stamp) bearing my initials I produced a couple of weeks ago (see Blood Red Sealed in Stone) is now officially part of my shodo repertoire. At the lesson on Thursday, my teacher inked it up and tried it out. I hadn't etched it out deep enough in some spots, so he kindly excised those bits and enhanced the sinuousness of the S, which the way I had done it looked more like three lines than a single snake.

Being the proud owner of a new inkan, I also bought myself a pot of the red stuff, indei (literally "stamp mud"). It is remarkably thick and stodgy. You mix it up with the spatula into a lump, and then repeatedly pound the inkan into it before affixing the inkan to paper.

It looks very distinguished, not only in the somewhat archaic idiosyncrasy of its font, but by the simple fact, too, that it adds a splotch of color to the black and white sheet. You could say, perhaps, that my shodo has suddenly blossomed.

Bird of prey

"Eternal" is the kanji (i.e. Chinese character) that is used to demonstrate the eight basic strokes used in shodo (Japanese calligraphy). The character for "eternal" is called ei, and those eight strokes are collectively known as the eiji happo 永字八法, or the "'eternal' character eight methods."

It is useful to know about them, because they give further insight into the concept of "calligraphy and painting are one" (jiga dotai 字画同体) that is at the basis of the Chinese aesthetic.

Each of the eight stokes, like all kanji strokes, are inspired by something from the real world.  The 8th century Tang dynasty Chinese artist Zhang Zao said of his work that it was "A reaching outward to emulate Creation, and a turning inward to master the Mind." And because "calligraphy and painting are one," this applies as much to calligraphy as it does to painting. And in the case of calligraphy, you could say that the Mind is attempting to master itself (i.e., organize what it perceives of the world and give it meaning) by drawing on Creation for the tools (or, symbols) by which to do so.

When it comes to kanji strokes "emulating Creation," I want to talk about just one stroke here: the very first one, at the top of the "eternal" character. It is a simple dot, or to put it in Japanese, a ten.

However, even this ten, or dot, has an unexpectedly dramatic story. The classical Chinese name for it is soku which in itself is a kanji meaning "side," written 側.

How does the word "side" express the idea of a dot?

Think Rorschach, because this is where the seemingly irrelevant title of this post, "bird of prey," comes in. Have a look at the picture of the hawk here, scroll up and have another look at the ten, focus on the outline of the hawk, apply a touch of imagination, and see if you can work it out. Think "side".

Sharp chic and vernal

東風解凍

Harukaze kori o toku - The thaw of the spring breezes

I wasn't on form this evening. Fifty minutes and sheet after sheet of  "the thaw of the spring breezes," "the thaw of the spring breezes," and it all felt rather flat

Yet today felt like the first day of spring. For the first time this year, I wore my cotton beret to work instead of my woolly ski cap, and even stowed my sweater in my bag for the trip back home.

Perhaps that new mildness, however welcome, dulled my edge this evening. My homework is the poetic phrase I quoted above, "the thaw of spring breezes" and what better day than today, I thought, to get it looking good. But beside my teacher's work: sharp, chic and with a real "spring" in its step, my best efforts looked blunt, slumped and ready for bed.

There are many qualities crucial to good calligraphy: balance within and between characters, elegance, verve, imagination, variation of touch, to name a few, but before any of this comes the execution of the stroke.  It's like being a good speaker: you have to have something to say, know how to illustrate it, color it, and make it come alive for people - but first you need vocabulary and diction.

My teacher's version

The shodo at the top of this page is mine. The one right here is my teacher's. Take a look, for example, at the top right character, higashi (東, "east") (although in the idiom of this particular poem it is pronounced haru, or "spring"), and observe the bottom of the central vertical line.

My teacher's stroke tapers to a needle point, and converging on that point is a clean curve to the right and a razor-sharp line to the left. Then have a look at mine at the top of the page. You couldn't sew with mine! And the curve has a chip out it, and there is no line to the left - just another chipped curve.

It is in details like these that the finesse of an experienced and skilled calligrapher is apparent. It's the calligraphic equivalent of using the right word, of pronouncing it properly, and not mumbling.

There are a lot of people who call themselves artists on the strength of how passionate, imaginative, dedicated, well-versed, serious or spiritual they are. These qualities, for sure, are marks of a true artist, but I believe the ultimate yardstick, at least of seriousness, passion and dedication, is how perfect a mastery you have achieved of the fine points first.

Blood Red Sealed in Stone

印鑑

My shodo (Japanese calligraphy) lesson ended this week with a homework commission like I'd never gotten before: to finish the assignment ... in stone!

The teacher had gone over the main point of the lesson once again, and then, turning to something else, he seemed to be done with me. I wasn't quite sure if this was a low key dismissal or something else.

I sat there irresolutely, and half a minute later he turned back to me, with a small bar of polished green-gray stone in his hand, and asked me to write my initials on a piece of paper.

I could see what it was about, so put a little extra flair into my "DJS" and handed him the paper. He took it and with a red marker pen carefully transposed it in mirror writing onto the end of the stone bar. He then took an awl and began carving out a corner of it, at the bottom left of the back to front S.

I watched with interest, as I'd never seen it done before, with some trepidation when he play-acted slipping and driving the awl into his hand, and finally with a touch more alarm - this time tinged with excitement - when he made clear that I was to finish it off.

I did it last night. It took at least an hour. I doubt whether anything (anything non-erotic, that is!) has ever so fully absorbed my attention before in my life. My whole universe shrank to 289mm². A false move is a final move. A false move can quickly become a painful move requiring emergency care. And preventing a false move requires as much effort as making a right move, doubling the effort involved. Twenty four hours later the left edge of my right middle finger tip is still sore from the intense pressure. That tiny square was crystal clear and important, everything beyond was a needless blur.

The eyes of my teacher were on me. The eyes of everyone who will see my seal at the bottom left corner of the best of my work to come were on me. My eyes were on the steely edge of that little flat blade and those red markered lines on the stone. Staying too shy of them threatened those red edges with ugly unevenness, and getting too close - with obliteration.

Twice the blade skated uncontrollably, and I cut very finely through the S at one point and then the corner just below it. I won't know what the seal really looks like until my next lesson when it gets red-inked up and pressed onto the paper. Faults can often be favorably interpreted as one-of-a-kind virtues. Might these slip ups, too, come across as "character"? Stay tuned.

Calligraphy meets Claude Monet

江山景物新

This phrase in Chinese characters is roughly translated as "Rivers mountains all anew." It is a line from a poem that forms my calligraphy assignment this week. Word for word, the five characters say "river mountain scenery new," and it's all about nature reawakening to spring. And it so happens that this week saw the Japanese Andromeda plant on our balcony start to bloom its pink bunches of tiny flowers again. This is in spite of the occasional warmish day being followed by a day sometimes cold enough for snow. Spring is in the air, however frigid, and we're all feeling it.

This is Monet's Vetheuil in Summer, and you might wonder what it has to do with calligraphy. Well, my teacher showed it to me last night when instructing me on the main point of that lesson.

The blurring of painting and calligraphy is a feature of Chinese art. They have traditionally been considered essentially the same thing, as expressed in the Chinese phrase shuhua tongti  书画同体, or in Japanese jiga dotai 字画同体 (literally "letter painting same body")

The brushwork in artwork, especially since the Impressionists, is virtually indistinguishable in technique from the brushwork used in calligraphy. My teacher directed my attention to the reflections of the trees depicted in the river or lake in Monet's painting - the horizontal yellow strokes, and asked me how many of them were the same. "None," I replied. "Ah ha!" The point was that just as in most painting no stroke is exactly repeated, neither in Chinese calligraphy should any stroke look exactly the same, even if, formally speaking, it is the same kind of stroke.

So that was my assignment when writing "Rivers mountains all anew": to keep changing the angle of the brush "artistically" to help give each stroke personality. Basically, it's that quality of changefulness that Wang Xizhi was one of calligraphy's leading lights of.

The above is my gyosho (行書) version of it, and according to my teacher it's my best attempt so far. I noticed later that one of the strokes in 物 (butsu), the second character of the word for "scenery," (景物 keibutsu), is missing. But gyosho being basically a somewhat abbreviated form of writing characters anyway, what I missed in form I hope I make up for in feeling!

Wang Xizhi, China's Sage of Calligraphy

王羲之

Calligraphy is intimately tied to the course of Chinese history, being in fact its very medium.

China was united under the Qin and Han dynasties over the four centuries or so between about 200 B.C. and 200 A.D. But then for the next four centuries it descended into relative chaos.

Wang Xizhi (303-361) - pronounced Ōgishi in Japanese - was born into one of China's most influential noble families during the time of the Western Jin dynasty, which gave way to the Eastern Jin dynasty in 317. His birth was just three years before the end of the War of the Eight Princes, followed by the Wu Hu Uprising. Both were extraordinarily barbaric events of mutual ravage and slaughter by the ruling class that, combined with famine, floods, and epidemics, decimated the population and led even to such horrors as cannibalism.

In this situation, with the traditional rulers of China having almost eliminated themselves from public life, scholar-officials stepped in as new sources of authority. Unlike the old ruling class that based its legitimacy on the virtue of its behavior and speech, the scholar-officials prized the written word. What under the old order had been dismissed as an "unorthodox craft" or a "trivial skill" now became promoted as a national project of lasting significance. Calligraphy, the main personal pursuit of China's scholar-officials became a major part of this new-found focus, and calligraphy came to be invested with personality and spirit. The chief  exemplar of this development was Wang Xizhi.

Wang Xizhi was noticed by the Eastern Jin imperial court as a teen for his potential and, having found official favor, quickly rose in to positions of influence. The quality he was most noted for was his seriousness of mind that showed in his indifference to worldly success. He was said to have lacked any affectation in manner and shown more concern for those he was charged with administering than with his own person or career.

Wang Xizhi's family had several prominent calligraphers, the most famous being his uncle, younger than he, Wang Yi (276-322). He was taught calligraphy by Wang Yi and one of China's most prominent female calligraphers, Wei Shuo (who may have been his aunt).

Wang Xizhi seems to have found most acclaim as an artist in his later years once he had renounced life as an official and took to touring, hunting, fishing and discussing Taoism with his friends.

His calligraphy was considered sublime in its strength and vigor, its grace (grace being the quality most prized in calligraphy during the time of the Jin dynasty), and its changefulness. He was apparently able to greatly variegate the characters he wrote while still maintaining an almost magical unity among them.

Having practiced Japanese calligraphy myself for only about four years, I am still a novice when it comes to judging the quality of calligraphy, but a look at Wang Xizhi's work inspires me with its real kick and flair that never descends into exaggeration or quirkiness, but maintains a strong backbone and an overall classical harmony. If a person's hand really does reveal his or her personality, then the stories of his personal strengths and virtue do indeed ring true.

Wang Xizhi's many works exist only as copies today. A couple of his most famous are Deploring the Death of My Aunt (Yimu tie) and Letter Written in the First Lunar Month (Chu yue tie).

Wang Xizhi still occupies the top echelon of China's artistic pantheon as the "Sage of Calligraphy."

Mountain High, River Long

山高水長

Last month I changed calligraphy teachers. My teacher until last year, Ransui, taught me boldness of style (and did his best to teach me balance), and I owe my calligraphy experience so far to him. However, his studio was near Omotesando which, once my partner and I both moved to start living with each other, became a lot further to travel to all of a sudden.

So last month, after a break in my tuition of about four or five months, I got a new teacher, a late-middle aged professor of calligraphy at Chuo University in Tokyo who teaches at a studio near where I live in Taito ward. Wtih Ransui, it was all vim, zoom and bold black lines.

With my new teacher, things are all different. There is a new delicacy of touch that I'm having to take on board, with the effect of making me feel like I'm almost back at square one - in some ways a slightly despairing feeling, but in others exciting, in that I'm now stepping into new territory.

 Today I'm posting my work under my new teacher for the first time. It is the best I could do this morning after an hour's practice and as such I should be proud of it, but it has significant flaws all the same.

 It reads 山高水長, or "mountain high, river (literally "water") long."

It's a truism in Chinese/Japanese calligraphy that the simpler the character the more difficult it is to get it right, probably because the space around it is thereby defined that much more starkly, and any imbalance becomes that much more conspicuous.

 The character I am proudest of here is 山, and least proud of, 水. However, as I said, it's more about the balance than the individual form, and I think I am slowly improving the vertical balance between my characters.

 But the ultimate point of calligraphy is to be inspired by the play between the form and the lyricism of the characters. So there it is: mountain(s) high, river long. This photo of the Atlas mountains south of Marrakech comes to mind, taken in January when my partner and I visited Morocco.