A long blog post that's not about ponies (again) · 1:32pm Mar 8th, 2018
Hey folks. Gonna talk about something other than ponies again. Japanese calligraphy! Model airplanes (ran out of space)! And then, at the very end, a little about ponies.
But first, a horizontal line.
Okay, Japanese calligraphy! Otherwise known as 書道, or shodo. The two characters there mean 'writing' and 'way,' or literally "the way of writing." The suffix -do (pronounced like 'dough') is the same suffix you see in 柔道 (judo), 剣道 (kendo), 武士道 (bushido) and many other Japanese art forms or martial arts. It's also the character for 'road' when it appears by itself, though it is pronounced michi rather than do in those cases.
道
Remember that character. We'll come back to it.
About a year or so ago I put up a blog post with some Japanese calligraphy I'd done for an exhibition at our base. I forgot to mention in that post that the reason I was in the exhibit at all was because I take a weekly calligraphy class with a shodo master who offers classes for us gaijin.
Our teacher is in his 80s. He has fully formed memories of living through World War II on the side of Japan, though he was too young to enlist in the Imperial Army until the very end of the war, when the military government began training schoolchildren in the basics of combat using sharpened bamboo poles. The war ended, fortunately, before he was drawn into it in any meaningful way.
Learning from a Japanese teacher, especially one of the older generation, is a humbling experience. Though slowed by age, his hand is steady as a rock when he writes, and the grace with which he forms each character is both inspiring and intimidating. My favorite parts of his class are watching him write -- the worst when he hands me the brush and asks me to imitate him.
His control over the brush is almost inhuman. I've watched him take a thick brush, loaded with ink, and drag just the tip of it across the page, leaving a hair-thin line that looks like it was drawn with a razor. The same brush, if you press just a bit harder, leaves a line as thick as my pinkie finger. The way he balances strokes with empty space, aligning each element perfectly with its neighbors, managing not just to write but interpret every single character – using fast, loose strokes for 走, 'to run,' or flowing, vague lines for 霧, 'fog,' is enough to make a beginner like myself despair. My own writing comes out clumsy and sloppy and uniform in the dullest, bland way. It's looks like I'm fingerpainting.
He is a patient teacher (thank god). But he is not American – he does not lard his students with praise for every attempt. He doesn't care how hard I tried. He just looks at the results.
In a typical class, he will show me a character at the beginning and go over the stroke order a few times. Then it's my turn. I might write that character twenty, thirty, fifty times in a single class. And if I'm lucky he'll take my best effort out of those dozens, load up a special brush with vermilion ink, make a few corrections, circle the parts I got right, and pronounce it "almost okay."
Almost okay.
It sounds almost backhanded. If you told most Americans that their best effort was "almost okay," there's a strong chance you'd offend them. We don't like hearing that. We prefer to hear that we did great or awesome or really well or whatever, even if our efforts are middling at best. What matters is that we tried, and that expenditure of effort colors the evaluation of our results.
Not in this class. "Almost okay" is high praise. It means I'm close to a standard he would consider acceptable. It's meaningful! And before tonight, it was the highest compliment I'd received from him.
For some reason, I asked to write 道 tonight. It had some elements I'd never attempted before, and it was a reasonably simple character, which was good since I was late for class due to last-minute surprises at work. I figured it would be a fun, easy character to spend the hour-or-so we had left practicing.
There are many different styles of writing in shodo. The most common is known as kaisho style, commonly called 'block writing.' It is the most basic form of each character, written using exacting standards for each stroke. Most Japanese computer-based fonts are imitations of kaisho style, and it's what Japanese school children are first taught. It is the standard, 'correct' way of writing every character – every other modern style is simply a derivation of kaisho.
This is 道 in kaisho style. This was my third or fourth attempt at the character, and it shows a certain level of understanding. The equally spaced horizontal lines in the center, the alignment of the elements and the adequate use of white space are... acceptable. When I finished it and handed it over for inspection, the result wasn't just "almost okay," it was almost good.
I've never heard him say that before. Is 'good' better than 'okay'? In Japanese it is, though Japanese people love the word 大丈夫, which translates perfectly as "okay" into English. Or maybe he was just tired of saying my best efforts were okay, and I needed something more.
Anyway, it was enough to graduate to the next style, gyosho. Gyosho, written as 行書 in Japanese, is usually translated as 'semi-cursive,' and the characters there literally mean "going script." Gyosho is looser than kaisho, and tends to look a bit sloppier as well, like it was written in a hurry. But it offers a good combination of speed and legibility.
That is 道 rendered in gyosho style. It's still recognizably the same character. Gyosho is, in my opinion, not a beautiful script – it lacks the admirable, rigid order of kaisho, but retains too much of its regularity to feel loose and artistic. I avoid gyosho when I can, though this particular piece earned only a few corrections before we moved on.
The loosest style of Japanese calligraphy is called sosho or grass script. It is loose, flowing and elegant, but often so abstract that it cannot be read by someone who doesn't already know what it's supposed to say. Much of what we consider the exemplars of Japanese calligraphy are written in sosho style. It is the easiest to write poorly and the hardest to master. It is the script that offers the most expression and interpretation. Everyone can write sosho in their own way. All that matters is that you make it beautiful.
This was my first attempt to write 道 in sosho style. It felt... natural, for once. Sosho is a quick hand, with even the most complex characters complete in just a few seconds. A character like 道 has 12 separate, individual strokes when written in kaisho, but as you can see in this image I wrote it with a single long, flowing motion of the brush.
I knew as soon as I finished the final long sweep of the brush across the bottom that I'd done "almost okay." Maybe even a bit better! But that wasn't the response I got from my teacher.
Instead, before my brush had even left the page, he exclaimed "Yes!" In almost three years of classes, I've never heard him respond that way. He plucked the paper away before the ink had even begun to dry, and set it off to the side.
We practiced a few more characters afterward. Full words that include several characters, or busy, difficult characters just for fun. But all night I've been thinking about that sosho 道, perhaps the best character I've ever written. Just one stroke, done in less than four seconds.
Three-day weekend starts tomorrow. I've been slacking on my pony-writing, so I intend to buckle-down and get out the next chapter of The World is Filled with Monsters. It's finally over the 100k word mark, and there's a lot left to write. I just need to focus!
In other pony news, I still have two completely written short stories from last year, just waiting for revision before I post them. One I will probably get around to publishing in the next week or so, because it's pretty close to its final form. The other story, The Archetypist, will take some more serious rewriting to become what it needs to be. I really should get around to it, though. I think it's one of the best stories I've ever written.
More to follow. If you managed to read all this way, thank you! Be sure to post in the comments about what kinds of art you enjoy.
CiG: I bet lots of people would love for you to brand their best fic as "almost okay". Then, you could get out a red pen and circle everything that needs correction. I'm sure that would make you a popular guy on here!
I love the 道 you wrote in 楷书 style. The one you had in 行书 was slightly too vertical in my opinion. (By the way, 行书 is my favourite because it's what most handwritten documents are in. I supposed it's an acquired taste.) I barely ever see 草书 so I can't comment on that, but I'm sure you were very happy when your teacher reacted as he did.
As for my favourite art, I love music! I've had a series of music teachers that told me to listen not only to whether I was making the right pitch at the right volume etc., but also if it sounded agreeable. There're these words my old teacher used -- a note could either be "dead" or "alive". I didn't know what that meant! But recently, I "got" it. And my music has never sounded more alive.
I guess this is just one more area where your artistic skills rock! I only did one year of Chinese - with writing - thirty years ago. I also wrote a traditional Chinese text editor, and I still recall quite a lot about the construction of characters and stroke order. In my admittedly amateur estimation I think you’ve got a fine hand. But your Sosho version of road just blew me away. Wow!
Wow. You’re a man of many talents.
i.imgur.com/62Zw0e7.jpg
Thank you for sharing this. There's something about even hearing others efforts being recognized that's so satisfying. Maybe next time you can tell us about model airplanes yeah?
Well that was cool. :D
I had a similar experience recently. I have been focusing more seriously on my singing for about one year now, and my teacher certainly follows that American style of constant praise, which I don't care too much for – after all, it can be hard to distinguish genuine praise from more general encouragement. But, during my latest lesson, there was this twenty seconds segment of the song we are working on where things clicked together beautifully.
For reference, it was during the key change on the second chorus of Con Te Partiró. I managed the right amount of vibrato, the notes were precise, there was no uncertainty when reaching any of them, and it just had this kind of understated intensity and genuine emotion I had been trying to achieve for a while. That finally got from my teacher something I hadn't seen yet: a genuine physical response of surprise, followed by an "Yes, that's it!" I'm not where I want to be by any stretch of my imagination, but getting to see something like that simply makes everything worthwhile.
Thank you for sharing a part of your life with us. It was fun to read, certainly. As another person who is learning Japanese, I can certainly admire a pursuit such as 書道. I have enough trouble memorizing kanji in the typical kaisho style, (there are just so many) my head hurts trying to imagine learning them all over again in another style, especially one like the sosho style.
You have an excellent teacher
That is super fascinating. I know a very small amount about Japanese calligraphy, and it's really neat to hear a deeper delve from an outside perspective. Seeing the progression from a rigid kaisho to the flowing, interpretive sosho style actually made me understand the difficulty and have a deeper appreciation for what you'd done.
Thanks for sharing! My favorite kind of art is probably writing, for obvious reasons, though music is a close competitor. I often listen to music while writing, so the two are a bit entwined in my mind.
Best of luck on progressing on The World is Filled with Monsters!
I'm super glad everything is in Kaisho typically, because oh god trying to learn Gyosho would be painful. And if I try it won't be for a few years because hah, learning the 常用漢字 list even at ~30 a week is enough for now.
I find it kind of funny that blog posts like these usually have a piece where the author says "sorry I haven't been writing recently," and you've actually been writing more than ever! (In Japanese Calligraphy).
But seriously congratulations on mastering (or at least journeymanning) this delicate and challenging artform.
I'm about to be a boring workaholic, and it isn't quite art, but this is how I feel about analysis.
I like to think I'm pretty sharp. I grasp things quickly. But sometimes, one of the actually brilliant people at work will pick up what seems like an entirely random set of data and in a moment perceive the most subtle and profound insights. To see something that is at first glance so complex reduced to something to simple yet meaningful feels like art. Those people also hand out praise sparingly, and I treasure it when they give it.
Wisdom as contained in security analytics.
Like, I don't want to spark any exstenial crisis or anything, but ,like, are you sure you are real human being? I'm really suspecting you may be a advanced cyborg experiment programmed to be awesome.
Maybe an experiment of the US army to creat super-humans?
The title feels like it's aimed at me, a bit. Just to clarify that, my recent criticism was aimed at the pretentious notion that original fiction is better than pony fiction. And at the ignorance towards the fact that both kinds of fiction have their own challenges, which makes them equally hard to write, just hard in different regards.
I don't have anything against non-pony blog entries about general (non-fandom) stuff like that. After all, who goes to say that Equestria doesn't have "japanese" calligraphy like that or something similar, as well?
We now know that haikus exist in Equestria, thanks to Skeedaddle and Kettle Corn. So calligraphy can very well exist there, too.
And the same can really apply to most things that exist on Earth, so I don't mind such blog entries of that type, wether you write about calligraphy, ramen restaurants or japanese gods.
This gave me a surprisingly accessible look into a subject I knew literally nothing about. Just wanted to note the excellence of your nonfiction approach as well.
the sosho one is quite expressive. beautiful.
for art, I like to do watercolors, and carving blocks for stamps and prints. never had a teacher, so I just ended up teaching myself everything.
Looks like an art form I'd be interested in. Very expressive, not too creatively paralysing, and a bit of that faux-mysticism you get from all logographic writing systems.