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Bruce Chatwin said of his
first book that it was a cubist travelogue: continually shifting
viewpoints and styles to give a complete view of Patagonia. I read
that sentence before I appreciated what it meant, but as I
began to look long and hard at what I wanted my writing to do and
feel like, I went back to that sentence and tried to visualise what
it meant, as a writer to approach a subject as a cubist; or a
surrealist; or a landscape painter. A day kept coming back to me,
from my first summer in Xian, the ancient capital of China, when I stood in
a shaded room and watched a Chinese master painter at work.
He was a short plump man with
dyed ink black dyed hair. He smiled as he welcomed me, took a white
sheet of paper, drew in a single bold movement three green lines up
the page. These were the stem of the bamboo. The next sweep of his arm
added the shaded side of the bamboo. The next added the notches
that connected each section of bamboo, and the twigs to either side,
and the leaves. The bamboo grew with breathtaking speed. In less than a minute
it was done.
The brush had touched the page no more than twenty times.
It was so sudden I laughed, with the same surprise and mistrust as if he
had performed a magic trick before my eyes. But to achieve
that level of skill had taken him decades of perfecting.
Traditional Chinese painting
differs not only in the techniques, but also in the artists’
aspiration. Chinese master painters specialise: bamboo; fish;
chrysanthemums; tigers. Painting is a kind of meditation, performed
without conscious thought, like meditation, in a moment, letting the
feeling guide the arm and the brush. They leave almost all the page
blank, a fact that astonished me at first, because looking at the
picture the painting seemed to fill the paper. And Chinese artists
do not paint a specific fish or tiger, but – in the same way that
Borges writes of his tiger – they want to paint a tiger that
holds the essence of all tigers. They do, in short, attempt
to paint the universal in the specific. These ideas resonated for
me as a writer trying to define for myself what I was trying to
achieve.
How to translate these ideas
into writing? It works, for me, in the attempt to make each detail
as clear and efficient as possible, to distil the language as finely
as possible and – and this is the finest balance to make – to leave
as much white paper on the canvas as possible, whilst leaving the
reader with the impression that they are looking at a picture as
detailed as any photograph. To achieve the illusion that the reader
is sharing the lives of characters as real and feeling and strange
as any other person we might pass in the street.
See also:
on writing, and
plastic horses |
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