FT: Strokes of inspiration

Strokes of inspiration

By Harry Eyres

Published: March 27 2010 00:19 | Last updated: March 27 2010 00:19

Tong Yang-Tze’s ‘Contemplate My Life (Guan Wo Sheng)’ (2007)

I’ve just come back from Taiwan, where I met a UK customs official who spends up to four hours a day practising Chinese calligraphy. I gather that he finds it relaxing and calming, like a form of meditation. Searching for parallels in my own experience, I likened his calligraphy to my daily piano practice; but of course it has the advantage of being silent, and the results, from what I could judge, were finer. There is also the fact that I tend to get rather excited when trying to play Beethoven’s Pathétique Sonata and make all sorts of mistakes – neither of which is at all appropriate in calligraphy.

We western writers, and westerners in general, as I’ve remarked before, tend to pay very little attention to the actual act of writing, which nowadays consists mostly of fingers tapping plastic keys, leaving no trace of any physical gesture. But handwriting, of which calligraphy is the most refined expression, is all physical gesture: a series of traces bearing the stamp of a unique individuality that are at the same time aimed at the widest legibility.

When I was young, I viewed handwriting as the expression of personality. I was particularly aware of the different styles of handwriting in my own family: my mother’s fluent and beautiful but not very legible hand; my father’s small and somewhat spidery script; my sister’s artistic italic style. Of course I wanted mine to be different: artistic, too, but in a more free-form style. I remember thinking that italic writing was too regimented.

Assessing my handwriting now, I don’t feel particularly satisfied. Although I think my handwriting has a certain elegance, it’s not always easy to read (perhaps a bit more legible than Gordon Brown’s), and I often lose concentration and make mistakes, as in most things I do, I fear.

Everything about the way I write bears the marks of an occidental (rather than oriental) approach and education. There is a strange combination of instrumentality and hyper-individualism. Handwriting in the west is regarded as a means to an end, not an end in itself; it’s what you write that’s important, not how you write it. Any way that reaches the goal of intelligibility will do. This allows a freedom that might seem attractive (to many in the east as well as the west), but I am beginning to wonder whether it could be a short cut to expression that ends up impoverishing expression itself.

In the traditions of the east, the way to freedom is through discipline. There is no short cut to learning the thousands of Chinese characters, each consisting of up to 30 strokes, each one of which must be executed in precisely the right way. That doesn’t just mean from left to right, say, or up to down, but in a fundamentally artistic way.

My partner Ching Ling tells me that soon after learning to write with a stick in the sand and then pencil, she started to practise using brushes, and the old-fashioned ink made in moulded blocks. From a western perspective, this laborious method seems absurdly wasteful of time and effort. Brushes are more difficult and treacherous to use than biros or pencils and take time to clean; mixing the ink is another labour. Probably few children enjoy it at first, though a warm memory of mixing ink with your mother could stay with you for life.

What is the point? Mastering the use of brushes for calligraphy facilitates an artistic mode of expression that can become more and more enriching as you get older. In traditional Chinese culture, calligraphy has been considered a higher art form than painting or drawing. Many contemporary Chinese and Taiwanese artists use calligraphy, though often in innovative or questioning ways. My favourite among such artists is Tong Yang-Tze, whose calligraphic works in an extreme cursive or free-form style, based on ancient texts, come close to abstraction.

Tong, now in her late 60s, is hardly a traditionalist, but the exhilarating freedom and individuality of her work (shown recently at Michael Goedhuis’s gallery in London) comes out of deep knowledge of the calligraphic, literary and philosophic tradition. She strongly supports the traditional teaching of calligraphy and laments its decline in modern Taiwan and China, sacrificed to the obsession with money-making and the passing of exams.

But the reasons it might still be worth teaching calligraphy, not just in the east but also in the west, go beyond its value as artistic expression. T’ai chi masters in Taiwan sometimes insist that students spend as much time practising calligraphy as the t’ai chi forms themselves. The reason is that the smooth, continuous energy and concentration required for the forms is also required for brush-strokes.

Calligraphy, or just writing better, might help us find more peace and joy in our lives, which seems a good argument for including it in the syllabus. Sadly it is not one which would ever persuade the utilitarian commissars who control our education systems.

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