These Words Are Dead
Jennifer Sloyan
These words are dead. Any animal in any infinity can toy with severed limbs.
Look at me. A keyboard rattles. An autopsy table. I am only trying to breathe.
Huang Tingjian draws. Su Shi paints. Mi Fu sweeps [1]. A trillion keycaps rattle in empty space, bones in dirt.
Huang Tingjian draws, Su Shi paints, Mi Fu sweeps. Can you see them? The only end is stillness.
A brush in ink on paper births cosmos. Nothing exists that is not its artist. Pangu still squirms. Watch the sky, can you see him?
This wound gapes so wide that nobody sees it. Between my fingers and your eyes, millions of pixels form invisible railing. Zoom in. A cell is a room in a jail.
Body torn from voice. Voice congealed into font. I throw myself at a screen and forget to fall. Vertigo slips from sensation to state.
There is something called impulse; potential; becoming. There is something called spirit; essence; god. There is something called breath and resonance and life and motion [2].
I have not written.
But this is a lie. I have read one book. I have spoken with my grandmother once.
When her voice was noise, we drew grass. All grass rises soil to sky: the left arc, the right arc, the small blade that punctures the void they enclose.
A book is not knowledge. It does not even move.
My tutor’s fingers sloped like roots into the end of her handle. Laoshi, did you know? Huang Tingjian keeps his palm round and hollow, but Mi Fu leaves his loose and free [7].
You cannot hear me. These stiff clauses muffle everything. Even now, when we smile, we are not quite listening.
My ancestors dance on silk. Their mouths move. Maybe they yell. Deafness gifts them to me as puppets.
Our eyes do not meet. Far away and up close, I am a foreigner.
Noises smear on silk. This is nothing special, but somewhere, a garden is crumbling.
Words without breath.
Can you see me?
Breath without words.
Choose a base unit. Any cell. Any principle. What you build is finite. When you break it down it breaks.
Lift a brush. It is your body; it is a mirror. Turn out towards creation and in towards your mind [8].
The eye sees true. Bring paper to pupil until it almost blurs. Look: fine edges, infinite nothing between line and canvas.
Aenesidemus wields painting as a weapon. If anything is realistic, we are blind. The Greek skeptic spears illusion through our eyes, mouths, skin, tears the rest away, crushes knowledge in their other fist [9].
It is retaliation. If art is cleaved from creator and viewer, frozen and flayed of process, there will be violence [10].
Often you can see the mind moving behind a shape, a palette, a pixel, as clearly as any brush behind any stroke. The modern world is many moving worlds, dispersed to infinity in blocks of metal smaller than your foot.
Words are the voice of the heart [13].What is a word?
A fish bites a hook and lacks the concepts to know. Now it hurtles to the market with its choking clones, swifter than ever before.
The sky through the mesh must look like water. Zhuangzi peers thoughtfully through the clouds [14].
Limp under nets, fish traverse the ocean;
on the train, speed and space fall away at the windows.
Electric dots on the screen above me read sentences like actors. I know how three drops of water [15] fit into a five by fifteen grid, how unevenness mimes complexity.
The ocean is no grid.
Anybody can draw a line. I want to draw a line that knows where to go; that reveals the whole body it still joins; that is whole; that begins before its ink, before its drawing.
I am in luck. Anybody can draw a line.
The universe smooths into a ring. Antiquity is neither above nor below us. There is one way around.
Stasis cedes to change. Change cedes to continuity. Whatever I am has been and will be again.
Ambushed on all sides by all there is to know, these dismembered thoughts sink to nowhere [16].
Eyes on me.
I present you my universe, cobbled together from stolen glances at strangers a thousand miles away, waiting patiently to shatter.
Behind the cracks could glint one unbroken stroke. The split ends of my brush feel for an opening, stumbling after Wang Xizhi into eternity [17].
1. ‘Asked by Emperor Hui-tsung to compare his own calligraphy with those of his famous contemporaries, Mi Fu had replied, “Huang T’ing-chien draws [描] his characters, Su Shih paints [画] his...[but] I sweep [刷] mine.”’ Wen C. Fong, Beyond Representation: Chinese Painting and Calligraphy, 8th-14th century (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1992), 155.
2. 势；神；气韵生动
3. See “Chao Meng-Fu (crater)” on Wikipedia.
4. See Zhao Mengfu’s “Twin Pines, Level Distance”.
5. ‘Because it was believed [in the Yuan dynasty] that the meaning of a painted subject, made complex by personal and symbolic associations, could no longer be expressed without language, the painter began to inscribe poems on his works. In a Yüan painting that is inscribed with poetry, the meaning of the word and the image was further extended by calligraphic brushwork. The multiple relationships between word, image, and calligraphy thus formed the basis of a new art, one in which there was a fusion of picture and thought, the concrete and the abstract.’ Fong, Beyond Representation, 4.
6. ‘As opposed to the Western vision of history as progressive development, the Chinese view of history as cyclical provided the Yüan literati painter with the possibility of restoring the harmonious unity of the past and of forging continuity beyond change.’ Ibid., 9.
7. ‘“Hold the palm round and hollow while the fingers grip the brush firmly and solidly,” [Huang Tingjian] wrote...While Huang gripped his brush, Mi believed the brush should be held easily, with a light touch: “Let the palm arch loosely and freely, so that the brush movement can be swift and natural, and can happen unintentionally...The pressure of the fingers on the brush should not always be the same; let it be natural and spontaneous.”’ Ibid., 150, 160.
8. ‘[Zhang Zao] described his own painting as “A reaching outward to imitate Creation / And a turning inward to master the mind.”’ Ibid., 76.
9. ‘Now, that the senses disagree with one another is clear. For instance, paintings seem to sight to have recesses and projections, but not to touch...Hence we will not be able to say what [a painting] is like in its nature.’ Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, ed. Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 25-26.
10. ‘[Chinese and European painting] bifurcate, from the beginning, at the point of deixis…[In Buddhist Monastery in Stream and Mountain Landscape], landscape is certainly the subject, but equally the subject is the work of the brush in ‘real time’ and as extension of the painter's own body…The temporality of Western representational painting is rarely the deictic time of the painting as process; that time is usurped and cancelled by the aoristic time of the event…Oil paint is treated primarily as an erasive medium. Whereas with ink-painting everything that is marked on the surface remains visible…with oil even the whites and the ground-colours are opaque: stroke conceals canvas, as stroke conceals stroke.’ Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: the Logic of the Gaze (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 89-92.
11. ‘Refraining from superficial brilliance, [Li Gonglin] preferred understatement. “The common artisan is sometimes able to imitate [Li’s] finely finished works,” noted Li’s biographer, “but when it comes to [those passages that are] sketchy and simplified, they can never come close.” Fong, Beyond Representation, 62.
12. ‘In an early calligraphic treatise attributed to Wei Shuo (272–349), one can read that: “一 A horizontal line—Like a cloud formation stretching a thousand li; indistinct, but not without form; / 丶 A dot—Like a stone falling from a high peak, bouncing and crashing, about to shatter; / [...] /丨 A vertical line—A withered vine, ten thousand years old...”’ Xiongbo Shi, “Chinese Calligraphy as Force-Form,” The Journal of Aesthetic Education 53, 3 (2019): 54-70.
13. ‘Zhuangzi and Huizi were strolling along the bridge over the Hao River. Zhuangzi said, “The minnows swim about so freely…Such is the happiness of fish.” Huizi said, “You are not a fish, so whence do you know the happiness of fish?” Zhuangzi said, “You are not I, so whence do you know I don’t know the happiness of fish?...You said, ‘Whence do you know the happiness of fish?’ Since your question was predicated on your knowing that I know it, I must know it from right here, up above the Hao River.”’ Zhuangzi, Zhuangzi: The Complete Writings, trans. Brook Ziporyn (Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 2020), 141-142.
14. The idiom 言为心声
15. The radical 氵, read as ‘三点水’, literally translating to ‘three drops of water’
16. See classical pipa piece 十面埋伏, “Ambush from Ten Sides”.
17. See Wang Xizhi’s “Lantingji Xu”.
Jennifer Sloyan studies Philosophy and French at the University of Oxford. She is thinking about her future.