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!