In an ordinary picture, it’s sufficient to portray the object; feeling is not in question. In the second kind of picture, the object must be compatible with feeling. In the third, al that exists is the feeling, so one is forced to choose some objective phenomenon as its expressive correlative. Such an object, however, is difficult to discover and, once discovered, difficult to make coherent. And even when it is coherently conceived, it often manifests itself in a form radical y different from anything found in the natural world. An ordinary person, therefore, would not perceive it as a picture. Indeed, the artist himself acknowledges that it is not a reproduction of some select part of the natural world; he deems it a success if the feeling evoked at the moment of inspiration in some way translates itself onto the canvas, imparting a certain life to the mood that lies outside the sensuous realm, which is the work’s true subject. I don’t know whether any master has ever completely succeeded in performing this difficult task. If I were to name a few works that have approached success in this way, I could point to Wen Tong’s bamboo, and the landscape painting of the Unkoku School. The scenes created by Taigado and the human figures of Buson also come to mind. 1 As for Western artists, their eyes are mostly fixed on the external phenomenal world, and the vast majority have had no truck with the higher realms of noble refinement, so I have no idea how many may have been able to impart some spiritual resonance to their depiction of an object.
Unfortunately, the sort of grace and elegance that Sesshu and Buson strove to depict is very simple and rather monotonous. 2 I could never approach these masters for their power of brushstroke, but the feeling behind my intended picture is more complex, and therefore difficult to summon and express within the single frame of a picture. I shift position, from chin propped on hands to leaning on folded arms on the desk before me, but stil nothing dawns. I must somehow find the hues, forms, and tones that wil stir in me as I paint, the sudden recognition that cries Ah, here it is! This is myself! I must paint with the lightning bolt of instantaneous and joyous discovery of a mother who has journeyed through al the realms of the land in search of her vanished son, never forgetting him for an instant, sleeping or waking, and then one day suddenly chances upon him at a crossroads. This is no easy task. If I can achieve it, the opinion of others wil matter nothing to me. They can scorn and reject it as a painting, and I wil feel no resentment. If the combination of colors I produce represents even a part of my feeling, if the play of the lines expresses even a fraction of my inner state, if the arrangement of the whole conveys a little of this sense of beauty, I wil be perfectly content if the thing I draw is a cow, or a horse, or no definable creature at al . I wil be content—and yet I cannot do it. I lay the sketchbook on the desk and gaze at it, deep in thought, until my eyes seem to bore right through the page before me, but stil no form occurs to me.
I put down my pencil and consider. The problem lies in attempting to express such an abstract conception in the form of a picture. People are not so very different from one another after al , and no doubt someone else among them al has felt the touch of this same imaginative state and tried to express it in eternal form through one means or another. If this is the case, what means might he have used?
As soon as I pose this question, the word “music†flashes before my inner eye. Yes, of course! Music is the voice of nature, born of this kind of moment, pressed into being by its necessity. Now I realize that one should listen to and study music; unfortunately, however, I myself am quite unacquainted with this field.
I next turn my attention to the third expressive domain, that of poetry. I recal the German writer Lessing saying something to the effect that events whose occurrence depends on the passage of time constitute the realm of poetry, and pro-pounding the fundamentalist theory that poetry and painting are essential y different.3 Seen from this viewpoint, the realm I am urgently attempting to present to the world seems likely never to find its expression in poetry. Time may certainly exist in the mental state that gives me my delight, but it contains no events that develop through time. My ecstasy is not produced by A’s ending and being replaced by B, which in turn disappears for C to be born. My joy is of a thing held motionless inside the one profound moment, and the very absence of motion means that when I try to translate the experience into common language, the material I use ought not to be arranged to flow within time. As with a picture, the poem should be composed simply by arranging objects in space.
But what scene ought I bring to the poem in order to depict this nebulous and insubstantial thing? Once I achieve that, the poem wil succeed even if it doesn’t fit with Lessing’s theory. Talk of Homer and Virgil is irrelevant. If poetry is a suitable vehicle for expressing mood, that mood need not be portrayed through chronological events; as long as the simple spatial requirements of a picture are fulfil ed, the language of the poem wil be adequate to the expressive task.
But what does theory matter? I have largely forgotten the contents of Lessing’s Laocoön, but if I were to look thoroughly into it, I imagine I’d only become confused. Since I have failed to produce a picture, I decide at any rate to try a poem, and pressing my pencil to the page of the sketchbook I rock myself to and fro, waiting for something to emerge. I continue in this way for some time, hoping somehow to be able to move the point of my pencil from where it rests on the page, but quite without success. The experience feels rather like suddenly forgetting the name of a friend, having it on the tip of your tongue but being unable to produce it. You know that if you give up trying, the elusive name is likely to sink forever beyond reach.
Imagine you set out to mix a gruel of arrowroot. At first your chopsticks merely churn the powder and feel no resistance from the liquid. If you persevere, however, the liquid slowly grows viscous, and your hand grows heavier as it stirs. Continuing to stir without pause, you final y reach the point where you can stir no longer, and in the end the arrowroot gruel in the pan wil , of its own accord, positively rush to glue itself to your chopsticks. This is precisely the process of writing a poem.
At last my lost pencil begins to find its way on the page, in fits and starts, gathering impetus as it goes, and after twenty or thirty minutes I have produced these few lines.
The spring is at its height,
My sorrow burgeons with the grasses.
Soundless, the flowers fal in the quiet garden.
The lute lies neglected in the vacant room.
In her web the spider sits unmoving.
An ancient scrawl of smoke curls at the eaves.
When I read it over, I realize it is in fact a string of images that could easily become a picture. I might as wel have made it a picture in the first place, I decide. Then I wonder why a poem was easier to create than a picture. Having reached this point in my poem, the rest seems likely to fol ow without too much effort, but now I feel the urge to write sentiments that are impossible to transpose into a picture. After much hesitation over the possible choices, I final y produce the fol owing: