branchwork.
When Bada stuck the rolled-out picture to the wall and viewed it from the other side of the room, it had changed. It no longer looked just like a collection of apparently meaningless dots, lines and blobs, but like a section of a garden in bloom with boughs full of fruit, luxuriant round shrubs, wild orchids, a squat, withered tree trunk and branches spread out wide with fine petals.
He could not help laughing.
His cousin had almost put one over on him.
46 Over time Bada was a less frequent visitor to drinking sessions, and after a few years he even kept his distance from them altogether.
With each year that he got older, he found the present less important and flat. Memories of events that lay far back in the past popped up in his mind. He tried to recall how, as a young man, he had thought about the world. He remembered his father’s eyes and his lips, which moved without a word ever falling from them – the father who he always understood nonetheless.
It was the first time he had gone weeks without painting . Instead he sat in a corner almost motionless for hours, buried in his thoughts.
He suddenly remembered the balls of ink that Abbot Hongmin had given him. He had never touched them. He found them straight away in a casket. Now he rubbed, for the very first time, the ink of the great ink-maker, Pan Gu. Then he set out a small piece of paper and dipped his brush.
In the centre of the paper he painted a fish from the side, with a shimmering violet back and a silver belly, the tail fins almost semicircular like the bristles of a dry paintbrush. The fish’s mouth was half open, as if it were about to say something. Its left eye peered up to the edge of the paper with an expression combining fear, suspicion, detachment and scorn.
The eye was a small black dot stuck to the upper arc of the oval surrounding it.
The fish swam from right to left across the paper.
Bada painted this one fish and no other, then put his name to the paper.
He had perished long ago, but he was still alive. All he feared now was the drought, when the ink no longer flowed and life had been worn down to nothing.
That is how he saw himself.
Fish
47 As rubbing the ink was increasingly becoming a strain, Bada would sometimes just make movements with the dry brush.
And yet he painted every day, even if no pictures were produced.
He was not yet satisfied with his art; he wanted finally to do away with the chattiness of his earlier pictures.
Now he used only Pan Gu’s ink, albeit very thriftily.
How many more strokes could he manage before the last of the ink had been worn away? Innumerable?
Truly, he thought, it is no mere empty saying that ink wears the man down and not the other way round.
Deep night, the oil lamp was smoking.
The sound of heavy rain, the wind rattling the window.
He could not find sleep. He thought of the fine, polished jade clasps in his wife’s hair.
Why did this memory never grow old?
48 Or he would dip the brush into a bowl with clean water and paint invisible figures on the paper.
He had set himself one final goal.
He wanted to paint flowing water.
For hours he practised with only the brush and no ink, until his arm hurt. He began in the upper right-hand corner, bringing the paintbrush downwards and describing a long curve to the left while reducing the pressure on the brush. Then he let the stroke peter out by slowly lifting the brush and drawing it towards his chest. At the point where the line turned to the left he started a second line which he took downwards, veering slightly to the right, then let it run parallel to, and below, the course of the first one, before joining the end of both strokes with a semicircle.
When he had taught his hand these three movements, he put down his brush and for several days carried them out just using his fingers on the blank paper.
He spread out many pieces of paper on his desk. At night, in the darkness, he dipped the tip of his
When Bada stuck the rolled-out picture to the wall and viewed it from the other side of the room, it had changed. It no longer looked just like a collection of apparently meaningless dots, lines and blobs, but like a section of a garden in bloom with boughs full of fruit, luxuriant round shrubs, wild orchids, a squat, withered tree trunk and branches spread out wide with fine petals.
He could not help laughing.
His cousin had almost put one over on him.
46 Over time Bada was a less frequent visitor to drinking sessions, and after a few years he even kept his distance from them altogether.
With each year that he got older, he found the present less important and flat. Memories of events that lay far back in the past popped up in his mind. He tried to recall how, as a young man, he had thought about the world. He remembered his father’s eyes and his lips, which moved without a word ever falling from them – the father who he always understood nonetheless.
It was the first time he had gone weeks without painting . Instead he sat in a corner almost motionless for hours, buried in his thoughts.
He suddenly remembered the balls of ink that Abbot Hongmin had given him. He had never touched them. He found them straight away in a casket. Now he rubbed, for the very first time, the ink of the great ink-maker, Pan Gu. Then he set out a small piece of paper and dipped his brush.
In the centre of the paper he painted a fish from the side, with a shimmering violet back and a silver belly, the tail fins almost semicircular like the bristles of a dry paintbrush. The fish’s mouth was half open, as if it were about to say something. Its left eye peered up to the edge of the paper with an expression combining fear, suspicion, detachment and scorn.
The eye was a small black dot stuck to the upper arc of the oval surrounding it.
The fish swam from right to left across the paper.
Bada painted this one fish and no other, then put his name to the paper.
He had perished long ago, but he was still alive. All he feared now was the drought, when the ink no longer flowed and life had been worn down to nothing.
That is how he saw himself.
Fish
47 As rubbing the ink was increasingly becoming a strain, Bada would sometimes just make movements with the dry brush.
And yet he painted every day, even if no pictures were produced.
He was not yet satisfied with his art; he wanted finally to do away with the chattiness of his earlier pictures.
Now he used only Pan Gu’s ink, albeit very thriftily.
How many more strokes could he manage before the last of the ink had been worn away? Innumerable?
Truly, he thought, it is no mere empty saying that ink wears the man down and not the other way round.
Deep night, the oil lamp was smoking.
The sound of heavy rain, the wind rattling the window.
He could not find sleep. He thought of the fine, polished jade clasps in his wife’s hair.
Why did this memory never grow old?
48 Or he would dip the brush into a bowl with clean water and paint invisible figures on the paper.
He had set himself one final goal.
He wanted to paint flowing water.
For hours he practised with only the brush and no ink, until his arm hurt. He began in the upper right-hand corner, bringing the paintbrush downwards and describing a long curve to the left while reducing the pressure on the brush. Then he let the stroke peter out by slowly lifting the brush and drawing it towards his chest. At the point where the line turned to the left he started a second line which he took downwards, veering slightly to the right, then let it run parallel to, and below, the course of the first one, before joining the end of both strokes with a semicircle.
When he had taught his hand these three movements, he put down his brush and for several days carried them out just using his fingers on the blank paper.
He spread out many pieces of paper on his desk. At night, in the darkness, he dipped the tip of his
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