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.