Whatever may be the case, it certainly is quiet.
The spring breeze that wafts emptily through the vacant house comes neither to gratify those who welcome it nor to spite those who would bar it.
No, it is the spirit of the impartial universe, which comes of its own whim, and of its own whim departs again. Were my heart, as I sit here, chin cupped in propped palm, as empty as the room around me, the spring breeze would surely blow unbidden clean through it as wel .
Knowing that it is the earth that we tread, we learn to tread careful y, lest it be rent open. Realizing that it is the heavens that hang above us, we come to fear the echoing thunderbolt. The world demands that we battle with others for the sake of our own reputation, and so we undergo the sufferings bred of il usion. While we live in this world with its daily business, forced to walk the tightrope of profit and loss, true love is an empty thing, and the wealth before our eyes mere dust. The reputation we grasp at, the glory that we seize, is surely like the honey that the cunning bee wil seem sweetly to brew only to leave his sting within it as he flies. What we cal pleasure in fact contains al suffering, since it arises from attachment.
Only thanks to the existence of the poet and the painter are we able to imbibe the essence of this dualistic world, to taste the purity of its very bones and marrow. The artist feasts on mists, he sips the dew, appraising this hue and assessing that, and he does not lament the moment of death. The delight of artists lies not in attachment to objects but in taking the object into the self, becoming one with it. Once he has become the object, no space can be found on this vast earth of ours where he might stand firmly as himself. He has cast off the dust of the sul ied self and become a traveler clad in tattered robes, drinking down the infinities of pure mountain winds.
It’s not because I wish to put on superior airs to browbeat those who are tainted with the marketplace that I thus strive to imagine this realm.
My only intention is to tel the happy news of the salvation that lies there and to beckon those who have ears to hear. The fact of the matter is that the realms of poetry and art are already amply present in each one of us. Our years may pass unheeded until we find ourselves in groaning decrepitude, but when we turn to recol ect our life and enumerate the vicissitudes of our history and experience, then surely we wil be able to cal up with delight some moment when we have forgotten our sul ied selves, a moment that lingers stil , just as even a rotting corpse wil yet emit a faint glow. Anyone who cannot do so cannot cal his life worth living.
Yet the joys of the poet do not lie simply in immersing oneself in some moment, and becoming one with some particular object. At times one may become the petal of a flower or a pair of butterflies, or again like Wordsworth one may let one’s heart be tossed in the blessed breeze as a crowd of daffodils. But there are also times when the ineffable beauty around one, some presence one can scarcely grasp, mysteriously masters the heart. One person wil speak of being brushed by the shimmering winds of heaven and earth. Another wil say he hears in his soul the harmonies of nature’s ethereal harp. Yet another may describe lingering in some incomprehensible and inexplicable realm without boundary or limit, or wandering in the misty far reaches of the world. People may describe it as they wil . Into just such a state of mind have I fal en as I sit here at my desk, spel bound and with a vacant gaze.
Clearly I am thinking about nothing. I am most certainly looking at nothing. Since nothing is present to my consciousness to beguile me with its color and movement, I have not become one with anything. Yet I am in motion: motion neither within the world nor outside it—simply motion.
Neither motion as flower, nor as bird, nor motion in relation to another human, just ecstatic motion.
If I were pressed to explain, I would want to say that my heart is moving with the spring. Or that some spirit—compounded of al the colors of spring, its breezes, its various elements, and its many voices, condensed, kneaded together into a magic potion that is then dissolved into an elixir in the realm of the immortals and condensed to a vapor in the warmth of Shangri-la’s sunlight—such a spirit has slipped in, unbeknownst to me, through my pores and has saturated my heart. Normal y some stimulant provokes a sense of oneness, and this is why the experience is enjoyable. But in this experience of mine I can’t say what I’ve merged with, so it entirely lacks a specific stimulant. For this very reason, however, it produces a fathomless and inexpressible pleasure. I’m not speaking of some superficial and boisterous elation, waves tossed in the abstracted mind by a pummeling wind. No, rather my state is like a vast ocean that moves between one far continent and another above invisible depths of ocean floor. It lacks the vigor that this image suggests—but that is al to the good, for where great energy arises, a hidden fear of the time when that energy consumes itself and comes to an end is always present. In normal circumstances there is no such fear. And in my present, even more tenuous state, I am not only far removed from al such sorrow at the thought of a dwindling of sustaining energy, I am indeed quite freed from the everyday condition of man, in which the heart knows judgment of good and bad, right and wrong. I say that my state is “tenuous†only in the sense that it is ungraspable, not to suggest that it is unduly feeble. Poetic expressions such as “sated with tranquil ity†or “sunk in a halcyon calm†perhaps most ful y and finely express such a state of mind.
How might I go about expressing this state in terms of a picture? No ordinary picture could embody it, that’s quite certain. What we express with the word “picture†amounts to no more than the scene before our eyes, human figures or landscape, translated either just as it appears or through the filtering of aesthetic vision onto the surface we work on. If a flower looks like a flower, if water looks like water, and if human figures behave in the picture like humans, people consider the work of the picture done. A greater artist, however, wil impart his own feelings as he depicts the phenomena and bring them to vivid life on the canvas. Such an artist endeavors to imbue the object he perceives with his own particular inspiration, and he does not feel he has created a picture unless his vision of the phenomenal world leaps from the brush as he paints. He wil not venture to cal a work his own if he does not feel that he has seen a certain thing in a certain way, felt in a certain way about it, and expressed that way of seeing and feeling with al due respect to the masters of his art, drawing sustenance from the old legends while nevertheless creating a work that is both utterly true and thoroughly beautiful.
These two kinds of artist may differ in their objective and subjective approach and in their depth, yet before either one touches brush to paper, he wil wait for a clear stimulus from the outside world. But the subject I wish to depict is not so clear. Though I use al my powers of sensation in order to find an equivalent for it in the outer world, no form, no color, indeed no light shade or dark, no firm or delicate line, suggests itself. What I feel does not originate from outside; or if it does, it does not arise from any single scene present to my eye—I can point to no clearly visible cause for it. Al that exists is a feeling. How might I express this feeling in terms of a picture? Or rather, what physical form might I borrow to embody it in a way that would make sense to others? This is the question.