LVII
Yi, a little word. Capture it if you can.
We’re mean when we’re loaded,
we were raised on rhetoric.
And still:
Superb-faced Manhattan!
Comrade Americano! to us, then at last the Orient comes.
To us, my city,
Where our tall-topt marble and iron beauties range on opposite sides, to walk in the space between,
To-day our Antipodes comes.
The Originatress comes
The nest of language, the bequeather of poems, the race of eld…
…And you Libertad of the world!
You shall sit in the middle well-pois’d thousands and thousands of years…
The sign is reversing, the orb is enclosed,
The ring is circled, the journey is done,
The box-lid is but perceptibly open’d, nevertheless the perfume pours copiously out of the whole box.
Young Libertad! with the venerable Asia, the all-mother,
Be considerate with her now and ever hot Libertad, for you are all,
Bend your proud neck to the long-off mother now sending messages over the archipelagoes to you,
Bend your proud neck low for once, young Libertad.
Were the children straying westward so long? so wide the tramping?
Were the precedent dim ages debouching westward from Paradise so long?
Were the centuries steadily footing it that way, all the while unknown, for you, for reasons?
They are justified, they are accomplish’d, they shall now be turn’d the other way also, to travel toward you thence,
They shall now also march obediently eastward for your sake
Libertad.
Wrote Whitman of “A Broadway Pageant” in the year six-oh.
The overblown has a tendency to become merely blown.
Witchdoctors without borders, oh my.
Tock[sic] tick.
Let us listen again to how the Old Master of the Stone Drum Parade, in beginning to teach the art of painting, chose to return to that inseparability of image and phenomenon signified by the term xiang [which means both “image” and “phenomenon,” and on a more abstract level “configuration,” and is both a verb and a noun]. The old man reminds the neophyte who believes that “resemblance” suffices to achieve “truth” that he must first fully consider the “phenomena” (xiang) of beings and things to achieve both the “flower” (of external resemblance) and the “fruit” (constituted by breath-energy). Otherwise, resemblance, in its superficiality, lies in achieving the material form but abandoning the breath-energy that permeates it and makes it vibrate. The term “vibrate” is not metaphorical here, nor more or less aptly poetic, but rather expresses the vibratory phenomenon of reality. If that breath-energy is transmitted only at the level of external manifestation and loses its way when the phenomenality of the image is concerned, it is the “death of the image” – xiang – and of its phenomenon. The image, the master insists, is at once external manifestation, and as such called on to resemble, and internal phenomenon, which, like any phenomenon, is a phenomenon of existence. It cannot therefore be fully itself – “alive” – except when, far from being cut off from the worldly order of phenomena, it remains inhabited by the same flow of reactivity that, in its course, ceaselessly brings about and also comes about. It does so through breath-energy, which continuously makes the image emanate, just as it continually makes the world breathe. It permeates the traces of the painting just as it passes through the veining of the mountain or the arteries of the human body. From Jullien, The Great Image Has No Form…
And Jullien on Alberti’s great discovery, as propounded in On Painting (Della pittura) ca. 1436: the intersection, or veil, a device intended to immobilize and decompose the object (to be painted). I take a frame holding a very sheer, loosely woven veil divided into a certain number of squares by thicker threads, and I place that frame between my eye and the object to be represented, at the tip of the visual pyramid. After plotting the reference points on the veil, I can always relocate that object, displayed from a determined angle, in the same position, and at equal distance from my sight. The advantage of that intersection is that, in keeping “a thing ever the same before the eyes,” it isolates and secures the object, confines it in its presence and determines it in its essence by submitting it to the fixity of point of view. The slightest deviation from the established position would render the measurements void, would jumble the lines and shadows…
…Nothing must move, therefore, neither perceiver nor perceived, so that my gaze can go straight to the object, tirelessly traveling the same distance again and again, without ever venturing to deviate, meticulously carving up the thing and carrying back the object. And, in addition to the value the veil has in clamping down and definitively fixing the living in its net, it possesses the advantage of facilitation a methodological dissection. By dividing up the visible into squares, it makes possible an analytical decomposition, assigning each of the object’s respective parts to a precise location, which makes them easier to identify. I can see the forehead isolated in one square, the nose in the next, the cheek in the one beside it, and so on. Are there still transitional zones where the change is barely perceptible, perhaps at the temples, barely suggested convexities where shadow and light mingle indistinctly? To eliminate any haziness and approximation from them, I will go so far as to divide these spherical forms into miniscule squares, as if there were any number of surfaces assembled there, And, even in the variation of these surfaces, I will always mark the middle of the interval with a line to distribute shadow and light more distinctly, to more radically separate day and night, arrested in their course at that instant and defying eternity, even in the most insignificant fragment of each object.
And what rough beast dances beneath the veil?
To awaken and feel the qi-breath of heaven and earth suffuse one’s body. Is there more?
What brings about comes about.
Sir, I hold your views on primatology to be an insupportable overchimplification.
In an instant, mists and clouds can return to their primeval form;
Red trees fill the skies spreading fire through the heavens.
I invite you, sir, to get drunk on my black ink strokes.
Lie down and watch the frosty woodland as falling leaves swirl.
Writ Shitao on his painting “Drunk in Autumn Woods, ca. 1700.
Increasingly, you see the West, the West that formed you, in terms of the impulsive, even compulsive, mode of the human spectrum of responses. Not merely dualistic, we navigate a refracted non-space of the evermore extreme discontinuous. Speed of surface movement masks incoherence at a depth. De Tourette, mon amour.
Jullien writes of a “desire,” [or is it a compulsion?] to “extract a unitary object distinct in its properties, self-consistent and self-sufficient (in the relation of form to matter), entirely disconnected from the perceptual gaze, and always self-identical, at once stable and definitive, and to hoist it up out of the undifferentiated course of things and erect in in its essence. That desire formed European reason itself, and the painter’s approach, all in all, is only an indicator of it. In the classical age, physical science took advantage of that method to constitute ‘nature.’ Since Chinese thought had not wagered on Being and conceived of reality only in constant mutation… and since it had not extracted an autonomous subject laying claim to all initiative and supremely organizing the world from its point of view, it is logical that the literati painter chose instead to paint ‘modification,’ (bian), diffuse and gradual as it is, constantly open as a result, to the undifferentiated Fount. The world, emerging-submerging, between there is – there-is-not, cannot be separated into states – poses, planes, surfaces, objects – by the impulse that continuously extends and renews it. In that world without God (Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet [Enlightenment theologian, rhetorician and court preacher to Louis XIV] said that ‘the eternal object is God’), even the world of invisible powers is in constant mutation…
“Hence when you paint landscapes, ‘changing dispositions-configurations’ ‘come about on their own’ under the brush… [Su Dongpo.]
Painting, therefore “will consist not of fixing [a thing’s] qualities, but, as we already know, of passing through all its modifications as though so many resources, thoroughly exploiting its variance. The real is thus apprehended not in terms of being and properties, but as fount and capacities. Where the European painter [and by association, the writer], in his [sic] ambition to represent (objects), comes face to face with the unrepresentable (the sublimity of the storm overwhelming the object in Poussin or Kant), the Chinese painter, according to Shitao, comes up against the ‘unfathomable’ dimension of these endless modifications to which the mountain and water are subject, and which constitute the landscape. As Shitao says in summarizing the purpose of painting, as if he wanted to rid it of any ontological aim, painting ‘is the great rule of modification assuring the world’s continuance.’ It is ‘the flower and quintessence of the landscape’s forms in tension,’ the ‘furnace where all things ceaselessly melt down and come into creation, from the remotest times to the present,’ and ‘the flow of energies varying their rate of speed between yin and yang.’” [The Great Image… pp. 233-4]
Could the radically other reading of images suggested by Jullien open an unusual door into the Western subject-object wrestling match? Does language bias our thought – even unto what we think thinkable – or does it impose a definitive and defining structure? Is it possible to speak English and think Chinese? More radically, is not the primal language of all human beings simply breath?
What part does the conscious intention of the artist play in deploying the breath-energy for which said artist serves as the wrist and the brush?
A painting “of” a tree borrows form in much the same way as a tree borrows form from the energies that have constituted it: the endless modification process by which its form is not – at least at the moment it was painted – a cow or cloud.
Pictures, therefore, at a different level than as representations, can also be understood, even grasped, as existent forms, living embodiments of breath-intention. Am I deluded in imagining that a painting by, say, Vermeer, can be imbued with spirit-resonance, regardless of the rules he believed himself to be following in his practice, and, more deeply still, in the cultural ways of seeing that informed his perception?
How much of the negotiation of the pictorial experience lies in the ontology or non-ontology of the painter, and how much in the quality of the beholder’s gaze?
What I am getting at, perhaps subversively of Jullien’s essential argument in The Great Object, is the idea that while yi, breath-intention, operates through the cultural constructs and precepts of the Chinese literati, it may yet retain its own, autonomous drive to arise out of the natural rhythms of yin and yang and resorb into them. Putting it more succinctly, is it possible that the West, while possessing neither a conceptual-perceptual basis for dealing with the yi-intention of pictures – nor a language for describing it – nonetheless produces many images that are imbued with (unintended) yi-intent?
Said yet another way, is it possible for a feeling painter, however culturally constituted – by which I mean a painter who can serve as a vehicle for spirit-resonance – not to paint “intentionality,” regardless of what they think they are painting?
