#2 Why Calligraphy?

A journey in search of the roots of Yasumoto Kajiwara’s expression. In the previous installment, #1, I gave a brief outline of ceramics as an art and described the method of this series: moving back and forth between looking at calligraphy and looking at ceramics, and through that movement trying to come closer to the roots of Kajiwara’s work.

In this second installment, I would like to turn to calligraphy, which lies at the heart of this series. Why did Kajiwara become drawn to it? And in the first place, what kind of art is calligraphy?

Let us begin by thinking about calligraphy itself.

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Before that, however, let us briefly return once more to the particular nature of ceramics.

Ceramics use the power of fire to bring about an irreversible and decisive transformation in clay.

Pottery is a technology that gathers the immense timescale of the earth into human hands for a moment, and, through fire—the civilizing force—transforms it into another mode of being.

Put another way, it is a technique for drawing nature, in the form of clay, toward the side of culture, in the form of fire. Ceramics give another life to earth—to nature—through fire, through culture.

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Calligraphy involves no fire of this kind. In its place there is only the movement of the body—or rather, the trace of that movement.

The brush held in the hand is quite literally an extension of the body, an extension of the hand itself.

And the ink carried by the brush is less a medium than a kind of camera, recording in minute detail the movements of body, hand, and brush.

The brush touches the paper, and the ink settles. The movement of the hand, its speed, pressure, turns, momentum.

Each movement proceeds forward while continually receiving feedback from the movement immediately before it, and from the trace that movement has left behind. The movement of calligraphy becomes the trace of an event thought through by the body in the very moment of its making.

A continuous line flowing like water. It is movement in which the nature of the body is laid bare.

Our bodies are, for the most part, disciplined and trained to belong to society and culture. And yet, naturally enough, they also contain within them a part that does not belong to society or culture—a part of nature.

Calligraphy is an activity that allows this nature within us—water—to appear, paradoxically, through the discipline of calligraphic training. If that is so, it is hardly surprising that ink traces have long been so highly valued in chanoyu.

And calligraphy, in fact, contains another kind of “nature.”

What is it?

Writing itself—the written character.

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According to the theoretical cognitive scientist Mark Changizi, written forms developed so as to resemble the kinds of shapes the human visual system had already become accustomed to seeing in the natural world. (This quotation and the discussion that follows are based on Mark Changizi, The Vision Revolution: How the Latest Research Overturns Everything We Thought We Knew About Human Vision, BenBella Books, 2009.)

What does this mean?

We—and our ancestors—have always relied heavily on vision in order to recognize the world around us. According to Changizi’s argument, the human visual system itself evolved over a vast span of time to process efficiently the contours and junction patterns found in the natural environment.

Overlapping tree branches. Bends and turns. Animals partially concealed behind rocks and other objects. Near objects overlapping distant ones.

Within such visual information, structures resembling L, T, Y, and X shapes repeatedly appear: corners of objects, branching forms, occlusion, the intersection of contours. Over the course of evolution, human beings acquired the ability to recognize objects and space by using such structures as visual cues. Changizi and his colleagues place particular importance on the topology of these “contour junctions” in object recognition.

Much later, when human beings came to invent writing, the brain did not simply construct an entirely new region devoted exclusively to reading and writing. From the standpoint of cognitive efficiency, it instead reused resources already developed for recognizing the natural world: the topology of contour junctions.

In this sense, writing is not an artificial system of signs detached from nature. It is a form of culture built upon the very workings of the human eye as it looks at nature. (*)

If we strip away the visible differences between alphabets and Chinese characters, and then strip away their cultural differences as well, what remains beneath them are shared human perceptual structures: lines crossing, branching, extending.

At the foundation of writing as culture, then, lies something natural as its origin: the human body encountering the natural world, beyond cultural difference. Through written characters, we continue to look at a place where culture and nature touch one another across a membrane no thicker than a skin.

Writing is the ghost of a landscape: an apparition of the nature we once dreamed, reduced into units of form and returning again before us.

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If we　put tthe argument above into order, it comes to something like this.

Writing is culture with nature at its foundation; it is abstraction given concrete form.

Calligraphy is an art that exposes the boundary at which nature is becoming culture—or culture is being returned once again to nature. It is spring water rising through the surface of the earth.

Playing with water.

As though playing at the water’s edge between nature and culture, the art of calligraphy opens, with a single black flash cutting through space, a site in which the meeting and separation of this shore and the other shore are suddenly laid bare.

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Culture and nature.

Abstraction and representation.

Within a single line, these four things unravel and bind themselves together again.

Calligraphy may be the place where that complex intersection appears most nakedly.

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Why, then, was Kajiwara drawn to such an art, and why has he continued to practice it for so many years?

Ceramic artists traditionally write inscriptions on the wooden boxes that accompany their works, and many study calligraphy for precisely that reason.

But Kajiwara has never practiced calligraphy merely out of necessity. Long before he held his first exhibition of calligraphy—at least ten years earlier—he had already been writing almost every night, without showing the work to anyone.

Why?

Was ceramics alone not enough for him? Was there some kind of expression available in calligraphy that ceramics could not provide?

If there is one thing I might say, perhaps it is this—

the pleasure of the angle, and the depth, at which the self is thrown back at you from calligraphy; the peculiar pleasure that comes precisely from its difficulty.

In ceramics, especially in work involving wood-fired kilns and anagama kilns, there is always an element of tariki—of power other than one’s own.

That power is fire.

Of course, the rise in temperature, the duration of the peak, the process of cooling, and the countless adjustments made throughout can, to a certain extent, be understood and controlled through the ceramic artist’s accumulated technique.

And yet the kiln fire—and everything being fired within it—belongs ultimately to nature.

To put it another way, no two clays are exactly the same, whether in the way they form or in their composition. The species and condition of the wood vary. The weather, humidity, wind direction: every firing presents circumstances encountered for the first time.

It is an unexplored route navigated with experience as one’s guide, and some residue of uncontrollability inevitably remains behind with the charcoal. (It should also be said that certain areas of some wood-fired kilns—for example, particular chambers of a climbing kiln—can in fact be controlled to a considerable degree.)

To entrust one’s work to something other than oneself, to a force that exceeds the self, is at a certain point to let oneself go. It is to place the ego in the hands of another; to set one’s own existence temporarily aside.

The world contains things that simply cannot be made to obey us. There is a futility in resisting nature. The person standing before the kiln does not look like its ruler so much as a host diligently welcoming an unpredictable visitor.

Ceramics is not an art whose pleasure lies in bringing everything “under control.” Accepting a result that exceeds one’s own calculations—something fundamentally uncontrollable—is itself part of the work of ceramics, particularly of the anagama kiln.

By comparison, calligraphy is almost startlingly simple.

Ink, brush, paper. That is all one needs.

With ceramics, one must levigate the clay, knead it, allow it to rest, and spend considerable time before even sitting down at the wheel. In calligraphy, one lays down the paper, loads the brush with ink, lowers it—and one is already in the decisive moment.

A swift movement.

Finished.

There is, of course, chance here too. The movement of the brush changes completely according to the condition of the body that day. Weather and the condition of the ink vary as well. A brush may unexpectedly leap in another direction, and an improvised movement may suddenly appear as the hand instinctively tries to recover the lost ground.

Even so, compared with ceramics, calligraphy remains a remarkably direct form of work.

Calligraphy is perhaps a medium in which the self one has written reflects the self who wrote it at a sharp angle and with considerable force. The response from action to result appears almost instantaneously, in fractions of a second. What appears is immediately fed back to the person writing, which then becomes the next line, and the next—a continuous repetition out of which the work emerges.

One cannot blame the fire.

One cannot blame the kiln.

And there is only one color.

Good or bad, everything appears in the line. If you strain, the strain appears. If you think, “I’m going to make it do this,” the smell of ego and contrivance appears as well.

Calligraphy also contains a dangerous trap: through a positive feedback loop, one’s own voice—and the “proper way” one has been taught—can grow larger and larger and larger. Calligraphy that becomes excessively self-conscious as calligraphy—work that “reeks of calligraphy,” so to speak—has long been widely disliked, except perhaps by those already immersed in that particular world.

But Kajiwara had already spent many years in ceramics training himself to let go of the self.

To entrust something to fire.

Not to insist too strongly that things turn out exactly as intended.

To put oneself aside.

Through years of working with the anagama kiln, he had continually practiced these things. And perhaps for that reason, he did not so easily fall into such a trap—although this may also owe a great deal to Kajiwara’s own temperament.

Perhaps he simply wanted to find out.

With simple tools.

Within a world of black and white alone.

The shape, the mode of existence, of his own “spirit.”

Perhaps, through such a simple medium, he wanted to enjoy his own freedom: a way of living in which even what refuses to obey can itself be affirmed as part of freedom.

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Perhaps what Kajiwara had always tried to make in ceramics was not beauty floating on the refined surface of culture, but something closer to the ground: something found at the beginning, at the place where nature and culture first meet.

To step away from contrivance.

To suppress the self-conscious desire to say, “I will make it this way.”

To make things as a child plays.

To return once again to the boundary between nature and culture.

Seen in this light, Kajiwara’s attraction to calligraphy, and the fact that he has continued writing for so many years, no longer seems accidental.

Ceramics and calligraphy are very different in method. One requires clay, fire, and time, and in the end opens itself toward forces beyond the maker’s control. The other is settled on the spot with nothing more than brush, ink, paper, and body.

And yet beneath that difference, the two practices seem to be searching for something in the same place.

Perhaps in the art of calligraphy Kajiwara discovered something connected to what he had long been searching for through ceramics.

And there is one person in the world of calligraphy whom Kajiwara has admired and studied from afar for many years.

Ryōkan.

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Ryōkan, too, was a man who lived across many boundaries.

A Buddhist monk, yet without a temple of his own.

A man of profound learning in Chinese poetry and calligraphy, yet someone who played ball with village children.

He stood at the very heart of culture while remaining open to something much larger lying only a thin skin beneath it: nature.

If so, there must also be some reason why Kajiwara was drawn to Ryōkan.

Next time, let us dig a little deeper into the world around Ryōkan.

(To be continued. The next installment of Reading the Calligraphy of Yasumoto Kajiwara, #3, will be “Ryōkan.”)

(*) Changizi’s argument is not that “Chinese characters and the alphabet look alike.” What interests him is not the overall shape of a character, but the underlying structure by which its lines connect—for example, fundamental L-, T-, X-, and Y-like structures in which lines bend, intersect, branch, or terminate against another line.

Chinese characters and alphabetic writing differ greatly both in appearance and in the histories through which they developed. Yet across such cultural differences, certain common tendencies can be found in the way the lines composing written forms connect. ABC and Chinese characters may employ entirely different “architectural styles,” but Changizi proposed that the basic ways in which their “columns” intersect, branch, or terminate against one another are related to patterns found in nature: the contours of objects, their overlaps, and their branching structures.

In other words, while the concrete forms of writing vary according to culture and history, beneath them lies a deeper layer: the long experience of the human eye learning to distinguish the contours of the natural world. Writing is not a direct copy of nature. Yet at its foundation lies the very mechanism through which human beings see nature.

In their research, Changizi and his colleagues examined roughly one hundred non-logographic writing systems separately from Chinese writing. Because Chinese characters are highly complex, rather than treating each character as a whole they extracted all of the smaller configurations made from two or three strokes. They found that the frequency ranking of thirty-two types of three-line configuration correlated substantially between non-logographic writing systems and Chinese characters (rank correlation R = 0.69), while also explicitly noting statistically significant differences between the distributions themselves.