Karl Young - "Notation and the Art of Reading"

China, 810

For millennia the Chinese have used many surfaces to write on, and they have used all the major bookforms: scrolls, screenfolds, mapfolds, spinebound volumes of several types. A practice reaching back nearly to the beginning of Chinese writing is the inscription or painting of poems on buildings and on the rock faces of cliffs. This latter practice united reading with the viewing of landscapes -- an activity raised to a high art in China. Chinese literature is full of stories about people making long trips to read inscriptions on mountains and temples. Occasionally these inscriptions were cut very large: we have instances of several inscriptions whose characters were each more than ten feet tall. Neither giant banners with political verses written on them nor Democracy Wall in Beijing were Maoist inventions. Readers of inscriptions often made copies of them by covering the text with wet paper, working the paper into the incisions, and rubbing them with charcoal or ink. These rubbings could be rolled, folded, or bound into books and it may have been this practice that gave rise to the art of printing [Fig. 3]. At some Chinese universities, official texts were inscribed on stone drums, and students acquired their textbooks by making rubbings from them. Not only was this a good way of generating copies, it produced standardized texts, without textual variations, an invention usually attributed to Renaissance Europe. Surfaces for writing didn't have to be flat or static: Tuan Ch'ng-shih, writing in mid 9th century, reported seeing a workman whose whole body was tattooed with poems by Po Chu-i.
Calligraphy has been essential to the art of writing poetry in China, and calligraphy, in turn, has been closely linked with painting, so that there has been a continuum between the three arts, often referred to as "The Three Perfections." Ideally, the calligraphy that a poem came in should be of as high an artistic caliber as the poem itself. The nature of written Chinese encourages this sort of artistry in a way that the roman alphabet (for all its beauty) can not do. The large number and complexity of Chinese characters provide a wide range of design problems that challenge even the best calligrapher's abilities, as well as allowing the widest range of potential forms with which to express himself. This range becomes even larger in the cursive styles of writing, in which the calligrapher abstracts, simplifies, or elides the characters, working on intuition and a sense of the design of the whole text. The cursive hands are difficult to read, even for adepts, and this puts an extra emphasis on the calligrapher's art [Fig. 4]. Poems often appear with paintings, and developments in each art influence the other. In some periods, landscapes, birds, etc. have been painted in calligraphic manner; in others, pictorial possibilities of characters have been stressed.
One of the reasons for the continuity of arts is that the basic tools of painter and calligrapher have been the same: a hair brush mounted in bamboo and lampblack ink. This brush allows the artist- calligrapher a wide range of strokes: it can handle straight lines, sharp angles, graceful curves, thick lines can be modulated into hair- thin ones; outer hairs on the brush can create delicate traceries around the main strokes, etc. The brush, however, does not allow the calligrapher to rest his hand in mid stroke, which would cause a running blot. The artist has to work quickly and this encourages both spontaneity and care in visualizing what he wants to do before dipping brush in ink. The artistry of the calligrapher has shaded into the craft of the inscriber and block-printer. By the 9th century, characters could be painted by master calligraphers on stone or wood blocks with enough skill and precision to accurately reproduce the graceful curves, sharp angles, and outer hair traceries. Many rubbings and blockprints seem as spontaneous as brushwork [Fig. 3 & 4].
Another reason for the continuity of the three perfections is the nature of written Chinese. Basically there are three types of characters or character components: 1, pictograms, characters based on abstract pictures of things; = man, and looks like a stick-man; sometimes these characters imitate gestures instead of static forms. 2, phonograms, symbols representing sounds without any pictorial content. 3, ideograms -- these are often combinations of components in the other categories; they chart ideas but do not wholly represent them either phonetically or pictorially. Arthur Cooper has called the system etymological -- perhaps the most important characteristic of this type of writing is the history behind each character. Chinese readers don't pay much attention to any of this when reading everyday documents, such as letters, popular fiction, newspaper and magazine articles -- in such instances characters are just symbols for words. In writing or reading poetry, however, readers tend to be much more attuned to the interworkings of sound, sight, gesture, and idea. The interaction of components emphasizes continuity and versatility; a mind trained to read interwoven pictograms, graphs of gestures, phonograms, and ideograms can be expected to feel a continuity between sight, sound, gesture, and intellection.
The Chinese have felt that sound is an important element in poetry, as basic as the three perfections. In the 9th century, poetry was generally chanted or sung and the ideal poet was not only a good singer but also a skilled lutanist. According to the Confucian Analects, "Except in unusual circumstances, a cultured man is never without his lute." The Chinese spoken languages, which rely heavily on variations in pitch, encourage poets to create musical patterns in their poetry. This is perhaps the most difficult characteristic of Chinese poetry to bring across to western readers. I don't know of anyone who has tried to translate the music of Chinese poetry along with the lexical meaning. Many poets have tried to find correlatives for its visual forms [Fig. 5] , but its melopoea has been thus far beyond us -- perhaps it's a job for some future sound poet or composer.
Though printed books of poetry were available in the year 810, most poetry was circulated in manuscript form. A ninth century Chinese poet receiving a manuscript from a friend would first unroll or unfold it before him in an almost ritualistic fashion. He would certainly take notice of the silk or paper on which it was written, feeling its texture, hearing the sounds it made, perhaps smelling it. He would first look over the manuscript as a piece of abstract design. Then he would start reading it. It would probably be written in a cursive script, so reading would be something more like deciphering -- he probably would have started figuring out the author's particular approach to cursive script when he began looking at the manuscript as abstract pattern. The design would have implied a mood or state of mind which he would now work out on the level of individual characters.
Having gotten his bearings, gotten the hang of the individual nature of the calligraphy, he would determine the form of the poem. Although modern editions of Chinese poetry sometimes indicate line endings by a small disk or other device, traditional Chinese poetry has not had any markings or layout conventions to indicate where lines end. A reader determines line endings by internal means involving pauses, syntax, parallelism, etc. Five and seven character lines were most common, with a caesura just before the middle and the reader would have these numbers in mind as he determined line length. Parallel or antithetical couplets were focal points in poems of the period, and the reader might isolate them first, reading them as units before he began reading the poem through from the beginning. Chinese is a language without tense or number, and with a minimum of the connective and relative components (such as pronouns, prepositions, articles, etc.) found in western languages and Chinese poets have often accentuated the ambiguities and generalizing tendencies latent in the language. The reader would probably decide fairly quickly on solutions to these ambiguities (as he would do almost instantaneously in less artful writing) but keep other possibilities in mind as the poem as a whole took shape in his mind. Poetry of the period was full of allusions and a sensitive reader would let these reverberate through his memory, linking the poem before him with many other texts and with social situations at which they had been sung or recited. After pondering over the verses until he felt he grasped them, he might explore the poem's sound potentials beyond those of ordinary speech. The line and caesura structure would suggest a rhythm, and the tones a melody. This would give him the keys he needed to chant or sing the poem. Many poems were written to well known tunes, and if this were the case an attentive reader would sing the poem to the appropriate tune -- setting up further reverberations of allusion and memory. At this point he might get out his lute and accompany himself or grind some ink and paint a picture or write a poem in response. If the poem pleased him, he would commit it to memory.
This reading would obviously have been a slow process, but it would have allowed the reader a wide range of activity and creativity. We find in this reading a continuity between visual text and sung poem, each dependent on the other, and the two together drawing on other senses and experiences.
Like the Aztecs, the Chinese found magical powers in writing -- those scrolls and wall hangings you occasionally see in Chinese restaurants in North America may have talismanic significance to the proprietors. A number of myths attribute divine and mystical origins to books and writing, and written characters retain an affinity to the hexagrams of the I-Ching, to which they are etymologically related. In the 9th century, Po Chu-i hoped that his profane poems would be reborn as Buddhist sutras; he hoped that he would be reincarnated as a monk, and be able to read them in their transfigured state.

Copyright © 1984 and 1996 by Karl Young.