Sea of Ink

by Richard Weihe

  Beginning halfway down, his gleaming black brush drew five parallel lines at variable intervals from the left-hand edge of the paper, an area which was barely damp. He then added seven vertical and diagonal strokes until the outline of his hut was recognizable, though half of it was cut off by the paper’s margin.

  He took the brush with the cropped bristles. He turned it several times in the ink and guided it down the length of the still-moist paper, now using just the side, now pressing it down like a scrubbing brush, twisting it slightly before lifting the brush at the bottom of the paper. He thus painted a succession of column-like light and dark grey shapes which blended fluidly into one another as the damp paper dissolved the contours.

  His tiny house, however, stood clearly and solidly on the mountainside, its back turned to the lamenting world and the desolate mountain behind a curtain of rain.

  Fine streams of ink ran down the mountain; indeed the entire mountain seemed to flow away as if it were nothing more than a large wound of the world.

  He wrote his name on the picture and added the date: Painted on the night of the 27th day of the ninth month. He did not put the year. His pictures did not exist in the calendar of the new dynasty.

  Landscape with hut

  35 Some years had passed since that September night. Bada Shanren had reached the age of seventy. He addressed a letter to a friend in which he described his daily routine: I have a clean table beneath a light window. I read the ideas of dead masters from a past dynasty. I close the book and light an incense stick while contemplating what I have read. When I feel I have understood something I am happy and I smile to myself. With a brush and some ink I express my thoughts and empty my mind. An important guest arrives, but we put formalities aside. I make some green tea and together we enjoy the wonderful poems he has brought with him. After a while, deep yellow rays from the evening sun illuminate the room, and in the door frame I can see the rising moon. The visitor leaves and crosses the stream which flows into the lake by my house. Then I close the door and lie down on my mat. Lying on my back, I watch the moon through the window. I remain lying there, motionless, feeling carefree and content. I listen to the sound of a solitary cricket. Who is outside composing an elegy for me? My thoughts are carried far away.

  36 It was spring. Bada Shanren was sitting on a narrow veranda, thinking of his wife. Where might she be now?

  Despite the sun it was raining heavily.

  The embankment was a pale green.

  A pair of herons flew past, brushing the weeping willow.

  A swim, then joyful leaps in the naked light.

  The curtain of rain lifted, the view extended as far as the jade horizon, along lathe-turned balustrades of cloud without end.

  The water in the lake mirrored the fading sky, the trees held the fog like censers, gradually allowing the eye to make out their forms once more.

  Bada was absorbed by the distant view to the south.

  This tiny heart, he thought, and eyes which gaze into the infinite.

  And he could hardly tell whether he was painting this picture in his mind or whether he was really looking at it.

  He waited and observed every change. The clouds looked so dense, it seemed as if he could carve great blocks out of them.

  He imagined a house in the sky built from blocks of cloud.

  37 As the years passed, life in isolation became too arduous. Bada Shanren decided to return to his home city of Nanchang.

  He rented a shabby room in Xifumen, a poor area in the southern part of the city.

  Tall plants covered the façade, coiling around doors and windows and darkening the room.

  Bada liked these plants; he wanted to live beside them and so moved in, even though the houses were desolate and run-down.

  The room was in a wretched condition: the window frames were rotten and everything was thick with dust.

  But he had immersed himself so deeply into the spirit of Chan that his external surroundings were practically immaterial.

  The dust and lack of light could not impair his brushes.

  38 He did not remove the spiders which had made themselves at home in all corners of his room. In the morning, when sunlight fell through the windows, the spiders’ webs caught the rays and he could make out every single thread. In the evenings the threads became lost again in the dimness and the spiders’ bodies seemed to float in the room like black dots.

  How easily I could squash them, Bada thought.

  If, in the mornings, he saw the little spider waiting stock-still in the middle of its web above the window, he felt as blissful as a child. It waited as if this waiting could end at any moment, if a fat housefly got caught in the web.

  But that seldom happened.

  One day he noticed that the right-hand side of the web by the window was torn and the spider was missing, too. Was this due to the night-time storm?

  Later, however, the spider reappeared. It was busy weaving a new web, a bit further to the right and also closer to the window frame, leaving a small space between the new web and what remained of the old one.

  Unable to take his eyes off the spider, Bada watched the slow process of spinning a web. But now he saw that it must be another spider creating this web, as industrious little legs were crawling again around the shredded rigging of the old, slightly higher one. Surely this was the old spider returning to assess the damage to its web.

  How horrified it must be! A fellow member of its species had turned up, no doubt ready to net the entire supply of flies in this corner with a new web. The second spider moved straight to the centre of its web, awaiting in irritation the approaches of the first.

  When the first spider likewise reached the centre of its web, still intact, it was thus confronted by another, only a few body lengths away, which had already spun its own web. The spiders no longer seemed to be waiting for flies, only for the next move their rival was going to make. But neither stirred. Merely the faintest of quivers ran down their thin legs onto the threads.

  Bada looked away and excitedly prepared to paint. He placed a small, square leaf of paper from his album on the table and rubbed some ink. He wet the brush and smoothed it on the peach stone to make the tip as fine as possible.

  One finger length above the centre of the page and a little to the left, he very carefully drew the fine outline of a spider, about the size of his thumbnail, two minute dots as eyes and, radiating from the centre of the body, four pairs of legs that mirrored each other. The tips of these eight legs together described an exact circle. The insect’s body pointed to the lower right-hand corner of the paper.

  Below this spider and a touch to the right he now drew a second spider whose body was oriented so that the line of its axis crossed that of the first spider in the centre of the paper. All that distinguished the second spider from the first was that its back right leg was at an angle rather than stretched out, hinting that it would be likely to make the next move.

  Bada had drawn no webs, only spiders’ bodies with outspread legs the width of a hair, yet a fine network of silver threads appeared to span the picture.

  But neither the first nor the second spider sat in the centre of this web, for it was the centre of the paper. An invisible spider sat there, mesmerizing the eye and spinning a web of meaning across the whole picture.

  Neither of the two spiders could compete with the third. They did not see it. All they noticed was that the centres of their webs were too close to each another. They would never reach the spot where their paths intersected.

  And so they were frozen in perpetual anticipation.

  Two spiders

  39 Bada Shanren received a letter from someone who signed his name as Shitao. The man wrote that he had been born in the province of Guangxi. When he was three years old his father, the Prince of Jingjiang, had died in an internal power struggle between the last Mings. His father was a descendant of the eldest brother of the founder of the Ming dynasty. He and Bada were thus distant relatives.
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  After his father’s death he had lived in anonymity for many years, Shitao wrote. He had called himself The Survivor of Jingjiang. Eventually he had entered a Buddhist monastery, where he gave himself the name Monk with the Gourd. In the monastery he had started painting with ink. Many years later he had abruptly left. For a time now he had been living as a vagabond in the southerly provinces.

  I have many existences, but in painting I am always myself, he wrote.

  Then Shitao addressed Bada: In Yangzhou, the artistic and economic centre of our age, I had the opportunity to discover your work. This induced me to write and make contact with you.

  Bada read on: Master Shanren, your paintings and calligraphy are the greatest and most accomplished I know. Your pictures exist for eternity. Under many different names they are in circulation or in the possession of fools, but I am one of the few who know they were all painted by the same hand which now holds this piece of paper. It was a monk who confided in me, a monk who had been under the tutelage of Abbot Hongmin and who could not stop talking about you. If this letter ever reaches you, stick it to your door so that those who pass by can read it and learn just how great a master lives amongst them. For my sake I beg you to do me this favour. Your admirer and cousin, the humble Shitao.

  Bada did not like attracting people’s attention and having his peace disturbed. But he did as the letter-writer wished and stuck Shitao’s letter outside on the door to his home.

  And, in fact, some passers-by did stop briefly. But they could not understand how the master this letter talked about could live in such poor circumstances, and so thought the whole thing was the self-glorification of a harmless old man who had gone a little mad.

  40 Bada Shanren thought it great serendipity when a fellow traveller from a past he had believed dead and buried turned up out of the blue, as if somewhere a huge eye were looking out for people who belonged together, ensuring that their paths crossed.

  He had forgotten the dustiness and sparseness of his lodging; ever more his thoughts took him back to the fisherman’s hut, to the water.

  A fine rain was falling, then the sun broke through again. The wet branches and rocks glistened. The mountains shimmered blue, birds flew down onto the hut and sang. He awoke, went outside onto the dewy grass and sang with them.

  Still immersed in past pictures, he rolled out the paper on the low table. He filled the hollow of the rubbing stone and rubbed some ink. He blackened the brush and wiped it across the curve of the peach stone until it no longer dripped.

  With quick, unerring strokes he made a slender fish appear from the white surface in the upper third of the long rectangle. Five small blobs sufficed to give it fins. He inked in its back and tail fins, leaving the belly white. He painted a dot in a small oval.

  That was the fish’s eye.

  He filled the bottom third of the paper with the round contours of a rock, the form of which was cut off by the bottom right corner of the paper. With a few broad and firm, slightly curved strokes of the brush, he gave the boulder depth.

  On the rock he placed a bird that had turned its head around and was resting its heavy beak on its back feathers. He suggested the two halves of the beak with a line which he drew back, gently curving it upwards beneath the eye, so that the bird appeared to be smiling.

  The bird’s eye was no different from that of the fish. But the fish’s gaze was lost somewhere beyond the paper’s margin, where nothing was to be seen, whereas the raven held in its gaze the fish floating above. Or was it a duck? Or was the raven watching the fish swimming below?

  Finally he signed the paper with the characters that denoted his name. For this he used the upper left corner of the paper. Lower down, by the edge, he put his seal.

  Now the characters ba da shan ren sat directly in the fish’s sights. So something had caught the attention of its eye after all – it was no longer looking into nothingness, but at a man on the mountain of the eight compass points.

  Bird, fish, rock

  41 One morning Bada Shanren heard a knocking at his door. Opening it, he saw before him a man with fine facial features wearing an expensive robe. The stranger greeted him with exceptional politeness.

  ‘Master Bada? My name is Fang Shihuan, I’m an art agent from Yangzhou. I have just read the letter on your door written by the great Shitao. I knew, therefore, that I had found my life’s goal!’

  Without saying a word, Bada made tea for his guest.

  They sat on the cushions on the floor.

  Bada did not ask whether his cousin Shitao had sent the man here. In any event it was virtually impossible to ask questions, for Fang spoke like a waterfall.

  ‘Master,’ he said, ‘so many famous collectors and art-lovers have approached me to enquire about works by your hand. Should I be permitted to represent you as your agent, my greatest wish would come true!’

  Bada asked him to remain sitting.

  He opened the sandalwood boxes and took out his collection of loose-leaf albums. He put the pictures on the mat in front of the art dealer, one after the other.

  Fang Shihuan’s eyes shone.

  Not another word passed his lips.

  42 Bada Shanren was sitting beside a blank piece of paper, his brush at the ready, and was about to start – but he was held captive by one thought.

  How can it be that, from a dismal sky, this bitter world can suddenly show us that we love it, in spite of everything; and that in spite of everything it will be hard to take our leave of it? We cannot embark on the journey of death by ourselves, but perhaps the sum of the wise man’s learning lies in the decision to go, to set off, to leave.

  With determination he dipped the brush into the well of ink and wrote on the paper in one flowing movement: I will go into the mountains, where the trees are old and withered as I am, and the ravines will rise up into the emptiness.

  Then, on the piece of paper next to it he drew a mule in simple lines. On its back crouched a man with a broad-brimmed hat.

  Bada took a clean brush, dipped it into a bowl of clear water and wet the paper around the figure of the rider.

  He returned to the brush with ink. Holding it just above the paper, he squeezed out the ink with two fingers of his left hand. It dripped onto the damp paper, where it quickly spread.

  Now he took the brush with the cropped bristles, which was as spiky as a broom. He rubbed it on a tablet of ink that he had moistened lightly. With jittery movements he smeared it across the paper. What appeared were the outlines of a path, a tall tree and some branches.

  The mule was leading its rider into a hazy bank of fog. The good beast had turned its head to the side. Its ears were pricked up. It was staring with large wide eyes at Bada, who had painted it. The world is behind us, but what kind of dream are we riding into, O sunken one? When shall I carry you?

  Landscape with rider

  43 Many months had passed when he was handed a letter by a stranger who said he was a friend of Shitao’s. He read: Cousin Bada, I have kept your letter. I have not answered before now as I’ve been ill. The same goes for letters I’ve received from other people. Today a friend is returning to Nanchang. I have asked him to bring you this letter, with which I’ve enclosed a small picture. The picture shows the Pavilion of Great Clarity on the bank of a river, surrounded by trees. In the upper half sits an old man in the middle of a bare rock. There is still space on the paper. Would you please add a few words? For me the picture would then be – how should I put it? – indispensable. It would be the most valued treasure in my possession.

  Bada Shanren unrolled the enclosed picture and studied it for a while. Then he read on: From everything that I’ve heard, it seems as if you are still skipping up mountains, in spite of your seventy-four or seventy-five years. You are like an immortal! As for me, Zhu Da, I am close to sixty and no longer able to undertake any major activity.

  Bada put down the letter, reached for the ink and rubbing stone and took hold of his brush.

  He complete
d the picture with a little waterfall and leaves that emphasized the autumnal mood. Then he painted the following words in the remaining blank space: Above the Pavilion of Great Clarity bright clouds are opening, infinitely high, as the new register of immortals is carried from the violet chamber. The sky has already unfurled its wings and nothing of the old dust and muck remains in the world.

  When the picture was dry he rolled it up and gave it to a messenger who would be sure to get to Shitao at some point.

  44 Nobles and rich men everywhere began to venerate the creations of his brush. He received invitations and was easily persuaded when good wine was promised.

  Naturally the hosts anticipated that, once sufficiently lubricated and in the right mood, Bada Shanren would reach for his brush and leave behind a magnificent ink drawing. So long as Bada was sober, any collector after even just a page from an album with a few drawings would not get a thing. They could place a gold bar under Bada’s nose and still have no success. Thus these people tried other ways of acquiring his pictures, such as pretending they were not keen on his work.

  When one evening he was invited to what he thought would be a perfectly harmless drinking session, next to his seat Bada found a bucket full of ink and endless rolls of paper. Paintbrushes of all sizes hung down from the ceiling within his reach.

  To begin with he ignored the equipment. They drank lots of wine, laughed, slapped their thighs. He forgot himself.

  But much later in the evening one of the men present, who was said to be a famous actor, took the largest brush and started caressing it as if he were stroking his lover’s hair. The brush was the size of a broom and he held it upside down, singing to it in a deep, rattling voice.