Depths in No Man’s Land – Spaciality and Namelessness in Tang Poetry and Song Painting (618 - 1279)

Frank Kraushaar, University of Latvia (Riga) / Tallinn University (Estonia)

Preliminary remark

This lecture has been delivered at the University of Stockholm during a workshop on Tang poetry with students from the Institute for Oriental Languages in February 2012. The institute’s regular Monday’s lectures during the spring semester focussed on the perception of space in arts. However, the main ideas presented here – especially the argument for avoiding the traditional translation of shan shui by the Western concept of landscape and an accent on „namelessness” – evolve from a longer and more complex process. Interactions between „landscape” or shan shui as highly codified modes of perception on the one hand and „namelessness” on the other hand as an important paradox at the core of Chinese literati aesthetics began to shift into the center of my work already several years ago. In October 2011 a research seminar at the University of Latvia in Riga assembled scholars from Japan, Korea, Hong Kong and Europe to discuss problems of „Language and Landscape in East Asia” on a broader scale and most of the papers presented then are currently reworked by the authors to form a major part of a monography that will be published in 2013 under the title „Language and Landscape in East Asia and Eastern Europe”. Thus, this lecture is barely an episode in the process that later will result in a summary of reflections on language and landscape in Chinese classical poetry. However, as some of the texts and visual materials that were found useful for interpretation here will probably not reappear in later publications, I wish to make this paper accessable for those who themselves deal with simular questions. [As no support for independend editing and prove-reading is available for the moment all flaws and mistakes, indeed, are my own ones.]

Depth or Distance?

At first sight the title of this lecture might seem to express an ambitious claim: to analyze and explain classical Chinese poetry by what Westerners would call a “perspective approach to the work of art”. Its first word “depth” bears clear overtones of structured or leveled perspectives in landscape-painting and this could be easily misunderstood as a keen metaphor juxtaposing Western visual landscape art with that of Tang poetry or Song painting. Would not this open an outlook on how the “shifting perspective” in Chinese landscape painting changes, and wouldn’t that bring us closer to the cultural foundations of spatiality in East Asia? In fact, I intend nothing less. Not only do I question the fancy idea of quite a few critics to “identify” overcrossings and parallels that would allow to “compare” the classical periods of Chinese poetry and painting with Western romanticism of the 19^th century. This is an all too easy, thus superficial pseudo-method because one only needs to look close enough at the objects of that comparison and, despite evident similarities in formal character and inspiration deep differences in the workings of the minds become abundantly obvious. But I would also advise against the blind use of terms that clearly designate eminent Western concepts – as for example “nature” or “landscape” to refer to concepts of Chinese tradition as 山水 shan shui or 自然 ziran¹.

Anyone who dares a comparison must take the risk to loose its ground. And in the Chinese-East Asian – European-Western context of civilizations – quite untowardly from a “global point of view” – this happens with high likability. However, comparing is such a basic operation of the human mind that it always rests tempting and a failed comparison might become the jumping-off point for deeper, more complex investigations. So, let us turn back to “depth”. As you may have recognized, I used the word in plural. This was meant as a hint to intended references: not the specific depth in “perspective approach” of the Western art-historian but various principles of spatiality at the core of Chinese literati arts. These are basically the so called “three distances” (三遠 san yuan), defined by the Northern Song court painter and artist-official Guo Xi (郭熙, 1020 - ?1090) in his instructions for other court-painters, supposedly his disciples, under the title “The Lofty Message of Forests and Streams” (林泉高致, lin quan gao zhi):

From the foot of the mounting looking up to the peak is called ‘high distance’ (高遠, gao yuan). From the front of a mountain peering into the back of the mountain is called ‘deep distance’ (深遠, shen yuan). From a nearby mountain looking off towards distant mountains is called ‘level distance’ (平遠, ping yuan).²

The following exemplary paintings shall help to illuminate the general structure that reveals itself through this terminology. To contrast it by what is understood as “perspective approach” resulting in “distance” as a concept of Western tradition and modernity, I inserted a well-known work by Caspar David Friedrich.

The choice of the three chinese examples, only the first of which is a Song painting and close to the periods at stake here is justifiable by the object I refer to – the distinction of the three “distances” or the three categories of spatial depth, as I would call it. The obvious and quite substantial differences in styles of periods and of individual painters rather facilitate abstraction that is supposed to concentrate on the function of perspective in coordinating spatial perception. To understand the differences between the categories from an optical point of view we can concentrate on the level of the horizon (but not on the level of a supposed viewer!). In Guo Xi’s work (second line, first from the left in the above diagram) the horizon is “high” or “lofty” 高 above the center of the scene, a village. In Kong Xian’s work (second line, second from left) the disseminated horizon is wrought “deeply” 深 into the misty folding of a lower mountain. Depth reveals mountains behind mountains. Friedrich’s famous work “Einsamer Baum” (solitary tree) serves as an example for European romanticism. The position of the tree, at first sight, seems comparable to that of the trees (or tree and bush) in the center-space of Kong Xian’s work. However, this is an illusion, because the German painter clearly calculated perspective. His solitary tree is less part of the objective (real) landscape but rather centrifugal axis in a composition of landscape motïfs carefully wrought by the painter. Passing by the solitary tree’s dark trunk the view enters a distant space. The horizon, although dimmed in the blue-grey color of dawn, measures distance towards the tree in the center.

Coming back once again to Kong and now looking closer at this work, we recognize the point of convergence of the painting in the overcrossing of trunk and branch of two trees standing closed to each other. This tells us that the whole idea of the work emerges from an incidental eye-catcher, from a moment that might have passed long ago during times when the painter was a free roamer in a floating world. In other words, the nexus of viewer and space is not the former’s perspective composition but rather his experience. We are going to come back on this further down.

Finally, we look into Hua Yen’s distance widened by an abyssal water surface and converging into the vision of a mountain peak far off. But the loftiness of that peak, albeit its steepness seems surreal, doesn’t surpass the level of the tree top in the foreground and space unfolds between the even-leveled shores on either sides of the water. There is a hiker in this painting who contemplates the scenery. But beneath a bizarre tree that reminds somehow of a flower, the weight of this spectator’s presence is almost reduced to irony. He definitely is not a counterpart to what we call “Nature”, rather his mere presence seems to have happened almost by chance. Although he could not be erased from the painting he remains a minor part of a whole that consists of two almost even, opposite shores and an empty space between. This is what results in the “leveled” 平 kind of depth.

At this point we have to tackle the terminology in the translation of the word 遠 yuan. As shown above “distance” is an option accepted generally.³ Even without following the winding paths of philology we must be aware of the arbitrariness of this choice. Reading the word “distance” in an English text on arts, one is more or less compelled to follow a “perspective approach” to any object of distance – like in 遠地 or 遠方 – because distance is and remains what extends between subject and object or between two objects linked by a straight line. In literary Chinese, however, the character yuan is connotative of a nexus between inner and outer realm of human existence, hidden or retained in everyday’s life, but certainly effective within a charismatic and highly individual space. It often refers to the aura of the work [which may be a work of art but rather any other work of self-cultivation or of the cultivation of others].

One striking example for this use would be the combination 遠志 yuan zhi. Lexically the term is paraphrased as “deep longing”, 深思 shen si, but the earliest reference with high relevance for painters and poets is in the last song in the fourth chapter of Chuci, 悲回風 bei hui feng or “Mourning these agitating winds”. Commentators of the text claim the wind as a metaphor for calumnious and uneasy times, its omnipresent agitation disturbs the self-confidence of all beings – the animals become restless and nervous, the herbs and flowers do not smell anymore… – and all what remains unbowed and self-sufficient is the majesty of the “finest one”, 佳人 jia ren, of Qu Yuan, the tragic hero, or, according to other commentaries, of the ruler. We will have a closer look only at the first part that encompasses a quarter of the text as a whole. The two opening lines and the last four of the passage serve as references to a tension that brings about the shift in the meaning of “wind” in this passage, leaving out six phrases (twelve lines) in-between that elaborate on the motivating idea of agitating wind as metaphor for political turbulences.

As well-known, a main stylistic feature of the Chuci is the use of natural and mythological environment to subtly reveal what happens in the social and political realm without pointing directly to the latter, excluding names of events or individual key figures. This is a primordial strategy of traditional Chinese aesthetics. Supposedly it was developed by early commentaries of the Warring States Period (475 BC – 216 BC) and later influenced poetry at the court of Chu that continued to dominate aristocratic styles under the Han (206 BC – 220 AD). What is depicted by the poet as “natural” environment or scenery – the spatial dimension at the grassroots of Chinese poetry: 景 jing – thus seems to be inseparable from “namelessness” (無名 wu ming) or from “concealment/seclusion” (隱 yin). Any form for poetic meaning, thus, is preconditioned by “namelessness/concealment/seclusion” in the sense of outspokenness avoiding direct references to the objects and subject of speech.

The two opening lines introduce the gloomy, almost spooky mood in a world subjected to uncurbed forces of the wind. As the sensation of this mood depends on multifarious connotations and overtones clustering around each Chinese character, my English paraphrase remains a good distance aside:

悲回風之搖蕙兮 , 心冤結而內傷
O those agitating winds! How they rattle the fragrant orchid!
Its heart-mind must be depressed and deeply hurt! [transl. FK]

Twelve lines later the scenery, so far exposed to the devastating winds, suddenly seems superposed by an aura somehow exempted from that chaos:

惟佳人之永都兮 , 更統世而自貺 . 眇遠志之所及兮 , 憐浮雲之相羊.
Only from your eternal seat, oh, finest one!
You will continue yourself for generations.
Your deep commitment outreaches to far distance, oh!
We may but envy the clouds floating aloof. [transl. FK]

Independent of what interpretation of the text as a whole one would accept, this fragment displays an admiration for the “finest one”, an otherwise nameless, certainly secluded but charismatic person. As mentioned before in the previous lines, making about a first third of the poem, the “agitating wind” is bemoaned as troublemaker in the earthly realm. In these verses, however, not only the tune changes over to adornment of someone afar and high beyond nearby troubles yet still part of the scene, someone who obviously remains unimpressed and unmoved by these disturbances. The wind itself suddenly appears “above this scenery” where its appearance turns into a strikingly different and new image: Over there, beyond the horizon, it does not “agitate” anymore among the plants on earth but gently moves “clouds floating aloof”. This is a reassuring turn in the complex tension of the text that so far seemed to be built only on the frightening metaphor in the opening lines.

The transition from one into the other realm – from the restless earth into heaven where change and constancy become reunited – works through what is called 遠志 yuan zhi. In my words this is rather “deep commitment” than . As an adjective to zhi (“ambitions”, “whish”, “longing” or also “commitment”), 遠 yuan refers to spatial dimension; it implies awareness of a reality that reaches beyond common knowledge. But rather than commanding an outer, “objective” space (what is intended in the common sense of the word “distance”) yuan zhi refers to the moral commitment of a superior personality, to him being responsible for the totality of things in the universe 萬物 wan wu. Recognizing the “finest one” and his “deep commitment” to that totality, thus, tranquilizes the disturbances caused by uncurbed winds: these lower winds will never frighten him who will return the world to peace under that heaven where clouds gently drift forth.

A word on wind

We are here at the core of an imagistic system that regulates the creation of space and spatial order by poets and painters. Despite the fact that poetry produces images in the mind and literati-painting heavily relies on these pre-casted poetic images, the system that regulated imagination has never been an optical one. As Ernst H. Gombrich remarked at the outset of a study on shadows in Western art, the almost-absence of cast shadows in Chinese literati-painting obviously does not mean that Chinese were unable to see shadows.⁴ It means that Chinese artists made another choice from their sensual experiences. To understand this choice properly one must not ignore the function of wind in building a sensual space of perception not based on the eye alone. “Wind” 風 feng is a leading idea in early poetic and aesthetic theory. The word and character not only classify what is considered one of the archetypical subgenres of earliest Chinese poetry – the “winds of the states” 國風 guo feng in the Book of Poetry – but refer to poetic language (as spoken and sung language) in general. Francois Jullien discusses the concept extensively.⁵ At the beginning of a passage in “La valeur allusive” Jullien makes it clear enough that all his observations will be subjected to his own, by now well-known theory of Western “transcendence” versus Chinese “immanence”: “… Western thinking is concerned with ‘origins’ and turns itself towards transcendence. […] Quite different from that, Chinese thinking, when it conceives of poetic speech as ‘wind’, does not so much consider the origin of this speech (which is a natural origin [not a transcendental construct, FK] that therefore would not necessitate any doubt) but its capacity to influence and to propagate: the invisible wind manifests itself only through its influence which is sensible in such a sublime way that it cannot be fully comprehended, so much the influences of wind are diffuse and all-embracing.”⁶

This is a poignant remark based on precise observation of workings in Chinese poetic imagery rather than on analysis of abstract terminology (discourses in classical Chinese often lack). In the “sublime” influence of the gentle wind – not in the storm that deeply influenced Western poetic imagery since the “Sturm und Drang” epoch and throughout the dawn of modernity in the romantic age – the moral virtue and aesthetic nobility of the outstanding – exemplary – personality expresses itself. It is undeniable in any thing and detail of the outer realm – the world of things and single beings 物 wu -, but at once it remains intangible, not fully comprehensible with regard to its “origins”, its driving forces or its “raison d’être”. The influence of the wind is visible, the wind itself invisible. Peering into the world from this angle gives us another sense of depth than that which corresponds to the “perspective approach”.

Jullien hits the point also because he does not aim too far. What he says can be easily proved by many quotations from Chinese authors of classical periods. The following is a fragment from Liu Ji’s ( 劉基 1311 – 1375) “Record of the Pine-Wind-Pavillon” (松風閣記 song feng ge ji). “Pine-Wind” has been an established poetic code long before this text has been written. By applying the term poetic code here I refer to symbolic images that become meaningful to the reader familiar with conventional literary imagery because they connect the latter with the intention of an individual author. Thus the function of the poetic code in traditional Chinese literature lies in integrating individuality and convention, it lies at the core of a moral commitment of literary aesthetics that turned nature into an emanation of moral virtue. This truly comes out in the following parabolic eulogy on “pine-wind” which actually shall give us an idea of how the outstanding virtuous man, the one who “knows Dao”, can be detected among the myriads of less significant beings surrounding and concealing him. It would be only through investigation of the sounds of wind how one can penetrate depth and unfold a space of true perception that unfolds from the pine-tree as its center:

松風閣記
劉基

雨,風,露,雷,皆出乎天. 雨, 露有形,物待以滋. 雷無形而有聲,惟風亦然.

風不能自為聲,附於物而有聲,非若雷之怒號,訇磕於虛無之中也.

惟其附於物而為聲,故其聲一隨於物,大小清濁 ,可喜可愕,悉隨其物之形而生焉

[... , ... .]

而草木之中,葉之大者,其聲窒. 葉之槁者,其聲悲. 葉之弱者,其聲懦而不揚.

是故宜於風者莫若松.

Rain, wind, dew, and thunder are all produced by Heaven. Rain and dew have a form, and things depend on them for nurture. Thunder takes on no form but has a sound – only wind is simular. [in its appearance and „form” as sound wind „simular” to those things that producē its sound; FK]
Wind cannot create sound on its own [不能自為聲]: it sounds only in connection with things 物. It is unlike the ferocious clamor of thunder, which rumbles through the void. Since wind sounds only in connection with things, its sound depends on the thing: loud or soft, clear or vague, delightful of frightening – all are produced depending on the form of the thing. .
[... , ...]

Among plants an trees, those with large leaves have muffled sound; those with dry leaves have a sorrowful sound; those with frail leaves have a weak and unmelodic sound. For this reason, nothing is better suited to wind than the pine-tree. ⁷

In terms of literary Chinese it could not be explained more clearly and persuasive that only through the sounds of wind space can be recognized in its true dimension. And the pine – symbol of the exemplary and morally superior personality – is the only one among the „myriad things” 萬物 wan wu, whose sounds are sublime enough to “create sound” [為聲] that comes close to the invisibility of wind, bestowing visible things with a sense that reaches beyond their visibility – this is the sense for the true dimension of space that embraces all things and whose only transforming and acting force is „wind”.

The shan-shui as a map of experience

In general, the Chinese term 山水 shan shui is easily translated as “landscape”. However, there is not too much reason to support this translation term and even much less if the object of translation is located in the context of traditional literati language, as in our case. What the Chinese call shan shui is first of all related to the basic geomantic idea of space. It results from an aggregation of qi ( 氣 “breath”) in permanent transformation (氣化, qi hua), yet enduring as it manifests DAO into a concrete experience, for example that of a traveler. We may be told: “The ground of Shu is steep and narrowing, the shan shui is jagged.” (蜀土險狹 , 山水峻隔, 三國志…) In the sentence the first part actually delivers sufficient information on the place itself, the “ground of the state of Chu (Sichuan, most of Sichuan province)”. The second part clearly speaks about the traveler’s experience, because the shan shui as such could refer to any place on earth (or “under Heaven”). It is filled by the experience of the concrete place that could be either one of “jaggedness”, as here, or – to bring forward an example we will meet in its context further down⁸ – may be qualified as “wide-open” (平闊 ping kuo).

But the experience of the place always remains allusive of the one who experiences. It is not, in the first line, “space” as a categorical, thus objective, experience but space as experience through transformation of “inner” and “outer” or of emotional and sensual ( 情 qing 景 jing) influences. A dismissed ex-official of the Tang, full of bitterness and resignation, after having been banished into a remote exile, would resume writing poetry to find inner solace and to spur life in the ruins of his destroyed personality. In his verse shan shui may emerge as the ultimate experience of lonesomeness the author senses (景) in a natural environment and as cipher for equality and basic freedom he feels (情) in being exposed to a world that neither dismisses nor honors him. An archetype of this quality in the shan shui are these well known lines written by Liu Zongyuan (773 – 819) during his exile in Yongzhou in the early 9^th century:

煙銷日出不見人 , 欸乃一聲山水綠 (柳宗元 , 漁翁)
When the sun rises and the mists thin – there is no one in sight,
One sound – the creak of his oars – by the green hills and green stream. ⁹

No “wind” seems to blow into the depth of this landscape. However, is the rising of the sun the only movement of change set to work in the reader’s imagination? Obviously not – in this environmental setting the morning breeze goes without saying. It may be even to subtle to fill the sail of a fisher-bark – therefore the creaking of the oars resounds throughout the whole space – but it certainly ripples the green of the water surface and rustles in the bushes. Wind as the archetypical symbol for all kind of influences and transformations that may be experienced by living-beings also symbolizes “natural freedom” as a result of being exposed to these influences and enabled to participate sensually and intellectually in their unlimited transformations. This makes wind in Chinese aesthetics comparable to light and shadow whose changes transform the appearances of the outer world, because the latter becomes subjected to the choice of the Western artist whenever he creates a perspective angle. In the Chinese mind, when it refers to the shan shui mode, wind is the most sublime object in creating space and depth.

In the following poem by Wang Bo (649 – 676), an early exponent of what later became Tang sophisticated poetic style, wind explicitly is the object of perception, the invisibly transforming agent in a shan shui that realizes the poetic Self by completely absorbing it. This is perhaps the most creative and most original among the paradoxes inspiring Chinese traditional aesthetics: bestowing full reality to the invisible through an illusion of its visibility. Without directly referring to a concrete experience or place – the only direct reference is wind itself – the following poem is emotional and expressive. One might say the author borrows his name to the expression of emotions pouring out of a nameless shan shui – a no man’s land on the inner map of personal experiences.

詠風
王勃

肅肅涼風生 , 加我林壑清

驅煙尋澗戶 , 捲霧出山楹

去來固無跡 , 動息如有情

日落山水靜 , 為君起松風

Singing about the wind

Fresh comes the breeze – from everywhere
Besieging me with deep forests’ breath.
It traces the mists to the gorges’ gates,
It wraps up clouds to the top ouf mount stacks.
Comin’and goin’ without any paths
Yet stirred or relaxed, it seems moved by that.
At sunset mountains and waters calm down,
For you, then, pines in the wind resound.
[transl. FK]

For an understanding of the classical Chinese conception of space – at least in works of literati arts – one must be necessarily aware of depth as a quality the author or artist looks for and finds in an inner space before he becomes aware of it in the outer realm limited to his senses. As Michael Sullivan explains, this depth is not the result of conceiving of objective distances – and deducing from there an artistic space construct, as in the “perspective approach” – but of conceiving of things as sensual expression of a natural totality, the shan shui:

The composition of Chinese painting is not defined by the four walls of its mount as is a European painting within its frame. Indeed, the Chinese artist hardly thinks of it as a ‘composition’ at all. Those formal considerations to which the Western painter devotes so much attention, he takes very largely for granted. Rather is his picture […] a fragment – chosen as it were at random, yet profoundly significant of – eternity. What the Chinese artist records is not a single visual confrontation, but an accumulation of experience touched off perhaps by one moment’s exaltation before the beauty of nature. The experience is transmitted in forms that are not merely generalized, but also richly symbolic.¹⁰

The next text has been chosen as an outstanding example of such symbolism. The sequence of images in this classical regulated verse based on five syllable lines (chin.: 五言律詩 wu yan lü shi) reads as a poetic code enabling those who know it to disclose the personal memory of the author through an anonymous scene by the shores of the Yangzi. What the author may have experienced in his personal life thus is transformed into general experience, yet the symbolism of poetic imagery is so dense that the shan shui in this poem evocates precisely that kind of typical “Chinese” no-man’s-land where namelessness meets with rich creative individuality:

DU FU (712 – 770)
旅夜書懷
杜甫

細草微風岸 , 危檣獨夜舟

星垂平野闊 , 月湧大江流

名豈文章著 , 官應老病休

飄飄何所似 , 天地一沙鷗

Writing down thoughts while travelling at night

A faint wind
through the fine grasses
on the shore;
High mast
and lonely boat
in the night.
The stars reach down to the wide level fields,
The moon rushes on
in the swing of the Great River.

Shall I ever make a name in poetry?
Old and sick,
it is time for me to retire.
Driven this way and that like –
what shall I say?
Like a solitary gull
blown between earth and sky! ¹¹

To begin with Sullivan’s words, what „touches off” the experience here is the „faint wind”, 微風 wei feng. In the outer space, penetrated by the senses, it goes „through the fine grasses”, yet inwardly it subtly opens a window for an outlook on life as it suddenly unfolds in one’s memory. „Faint wind” evokes a deep retrospective into a whole life-span that remains bare of names or concrete events while the shan shui unfolds in frugal traits.

On the image of the traveller in a solitary boat (line 2) Eugene Eoyang many years ago wrote an essay that still is of relevance for comparatists.¹² Our poem though it is common knowledge to readers of Tang poetry is not among his examples. However, to me it seemed even more interesting to find an essential part of his interpretation of another famous work by Du Fu more or less applicable to the text we just read, especially when we attempt to disclose its conception of space. Interpreting the depiction of what the poet sees in „Climbing Yueyang-tower” 登岳陽樓 – a regulated verse based on five syllable lines, thus formally identical with our text – Eoyang writes (and we may listen to these lines bearing in mind the poem we just read):

Nothing about the actual place; no word about the time of day [or night, FK] or season of the year; no description of lakes and mountains in the scene. Once on the tower [or in the boat, FK], Tu Fu sees reflections of himself and of his melancholy. What he sees lies not in the foreground or even in the background, but in the mind’s eye... [...]. Having specified the place [...] he indicates nothing about the vista before his eyes. And the phrase, ‘Old and sick, I have a solitary boat’ [almost identical with our ‘Old and sick, it is time for me to retire’!, FK] is pure imagery and refers to nothing concrete [one may also say it is a codified exclamation that does not express the author’s personal resignation but is a conventional poetic gesture of resignation].¹³

There is no need here to elaborate on obvious disparities between „Climbing Yueyang-tower” and „Writing down thoughts while traveling at night”. What both texts have in common gives us a better idea on the meaning of depth in Chinese aesthetics. In the second couplet the environment appears „wide-open”, 平闊 ping kuo. This is a mighty image with the stars reaching down to the fields and the moon rushing on the swing of the Great river – as this translation has it, although the image has not been perfectly grasped. But leaving once apart this quite sudden intimacy between Heaven and Earth, there is no orientation in the outer space anymore. We may only guess that the solitary boat with its high mast is drifting on the Yangzi waves, but – who knows? Is there any further name? Any detail that at least would better characterize the specificies of the surroundings? No. Even in the last couplet when the poet seems to come back to what happens in front of his eyes, the „only” sea-gull is rather a reflection on himself in the „only” boat on the river than the sight of a bird.

In other words, the poet when he drafts the shan shui of this text draws on certain poetic codes he orders in a sequence:

• 1. „faint wind” - 微風
• 2. „lonely boat” - 獨舟
• 3. „wide-open” space - 平闊
• 4. „moon rushing on waves” of the river, - 湧流
• 5.-6. „failed literary and official ambitions”, - 名官
• 7. „Driven this way and that...” haltless - 飄飄
• 8. „sea-gull”, for solitariness and freedom. -沙鷗

These codified images are used in order to create through them a poetic vision of individual identity expressed in the anonymous shan shui. The basic intention seems to be disclosed in line 7, the only passage that „breaks” the literary code by directly questioning it: 飄飄何所似 „Driven this way and that like – what is it like?” [certainly not the helpless „what shall I say?” proposed by the translation I chose, FK]. And not by accident this question that claims for meaning in the whole sequence of images points to a state of being completly exposed to the wind. 飄飄 piao piao literally is the way how the solitary boat – symbol of the poet’s life – is tossed by the wind.

Conclusion

The shan shui, as Du Fu had it in mind, may be simular to a vision of the Yangzi painted by Ma Yuan (1160-65 – 1225). Birds – possibly gulls – cross the vaporescent river in the lower foreground. They replace a firm soil on the near side shore whereon a group of trees could otherwise match the remote mountain ridges. It would make the contours clear and tranquil the mind.

This painting, however leaves the space more open than needed and one who looks at the painting for a longer time cannot stay calm. Where is the river-bank the birds aim for? Where are the shores the mountains are based on? And are these mountain ranges located along the way of a traveller or just lost in the vapours that cover their foothills? Is this after all beauty above an abyss? One can hardly answer only one of these questions. But contemplating the painting or even one of the two previous poems doubtlessly gives space to a few more of their kind. All of them surge up from depths that are created by artists who read nature as a codified text to their inner world of experiences, decoding 情 qing through 景 jing and making the perception of the outer space a form of self-display and sympathetic participation in human fate. “Perspective approach” or cast-shadows seem quite unnecessary here as there is not a single among the few natural things (物 wu) that would located in an objective distance, as part of nature subjected to human perspective. Each is part of a gesture at once natural and subjective, physical and mental and whose proper name in Chinese would be “wind” (風, feng). This wind – in the pines, above the ridges, over the water surface, in the fine grass on the river banks – voices nature and individual experience not discriminating between subject and object. Its voice may change in nuances as countless as there are subjective minds – the sounds of Zhuang Zi’s myriad pitch-pipes (萬籟, wan lai) – but they all emerge from a nameless depth that is no-man’s-land under heaven, the space where for more than a thousand years Chinese intellectuals, who were educated to serve imperial despotism and to endure bureaucratic nepotism, rediscovered their in-born freedom.