Speaking Bones, page 74
* * *
In his old age, Üshin Pidaji, Ra Oji’s biographer and student, retired to the mountains of Rima to brew tea from dew, to converse with the monkeys and wolves, and to put together a collection of epigrams and stories about his master that would eventually become the foundation of an entire school of philosophy.
Pidaji’s manuscript was composed in an idiosyncratic hand that exhibited his unconventional character: novel logograms devised to express new ideas whose meaning could only be deciphered by context; simple logograms chosen for their phonetic values substituted in place of complex, traditional logograms (in effect, a kind of writing-by-punning); free-flowing verse forms that followed no known antecedents; semantic roots and motive modifiers abstracted into shorthand that could be carved with fewer strokes; an emphasis on adapting the knife stroke to the natural flow of the solidifying wax rather than proper sharp corners and clean edges.
It was as if Üshin Pidaji’s thoughts flowed too quickly for the heating brazier and the writing knife, and he needed to write like a passing spring breeze or the flash flood after a summer thunderstorm. The ornate, formal clerical script, prized by Moralists, was no match for his wild, rebellious mind that viewed hierarchy and decorum with contempt, and he had to invent his own “torrent script.”
It was sometimes said that in torrent script could be found the roots of the zyndari letters that, in a later age, would be invented to write the vernacular.
After his death, Pidaji’s book, copied and memorized by his students, spread around Dara along with the Fluxist school of philosophy. Compared to the other Ano Classics, the preservation of Pidaji’s works, written in a script unfamiliar to most scholars, posed an even greater challenge. The fragments of his compositions that survived were shorter, and there were fewer copies.
* * *
With a frustrated sigh, Thasé-teki scraped away the remnants of his latest failed effort at imitating the hand of the ancient scribe.
Calligraphy had always been his least favorite subject. It wasn’t that he didn’t understand the importance of the art; Master Nazu Tei had told him many tales of how writers are judged by their script, in the same way actors are judged by their looks. But more than that, for the truly cultured and erudite, calligraphy was a way to unify form with function, medium with message: a reader knew the spirit of a writer by the proportions of the logograms in a manuscript, the sharpness of the corners, the straightness of the edges, the smoothness of the curves. A messy mind led to a hesitating hand.
But the young Kinri—already, the name felt strange to Brother Thasé-teki, as though a summer grass were recalling its time as a winter worm—could never summon enough patience to reproduce the logogram models carved by his master with exactitude. What was the point of practicing calligraphy so long as his master could decipher what he meant (albeit with some trouble)? He preferred to hear stories of Mata Zyndu’s matchless strength and the magnificent cities of the Tiro kings, gleaming with a splendor that he longed for as well as feared, filled with sword dancers, debating poets and philosophers, and windmills that labored like giants with vaned arms.
In contrast, calligraphy was boring, repetitious, rote. To write properly, each logogram had to be carved through an exacting sequence of knife strokes. To shape the logogram for “king,” for instance, the scribe was supposed to start with a block of dripped wax and shape it into a cube with five cuts that embodied the Moralist worldview: front, back, left, right, and then top (“first, bow to the sovereign seated before you; second, show reverence to the ancestors standing behind you; third, pay respect to your family, who bring comfort and aid to your sinister hand; fourth, honor your friends, who stand ready to fight on your dexter hand; last, you praise the heavens above so that the gods may bless your righteous deeds”). Next, the scribe was supposed to chisel the side of the block of wax facing the reader into four parallel layers—matching the four stacked realms of fire, water, earth, and air—but leaving the back of the block intact. This should be done with three long swaying horizontal strokes, moving from the bottom of the block to the top. Finally, the scribe would bevel the edges with seven quick strokes, again moving from the bottom to the top, before adding inflection glyphs—though in artistic calligraphy such marks were often omitted.
By following the correct stroke order, it was easier for the scribe to write with beauty and economy, resulting in logograms with classic, standard proportions. For reasons such as aesthetics and history, different schools of calligraphy employed different stroke orders, and there were variations in diverse locales across Dara as well.
Thasé-teki never memorized the stroke orders—though he understood that they followed patterns, the patterns felt to him obscure and confining. His mind was always racing to the next idea, the next piece of the puzzle, and he wrote as though he were hacking and whittling blocks of wood: a chop here, two whacks there, desperate remedial cuts to cover up his mistakes…. The resulting logograms looked like bones gnawed over by a hungry dog or shacks erected carelessly by underpaid laborers: uneven columns, slanted roofs, crooked walls, misplaced doors and windows.
“You have good ideas,” Master Nazu Tei used to say as she sighed. “But I’m afraid only I can bear to read them.”
Thasé-teki had to agree that she was right. When he occasionally tried to read over one of his earlier compositions, even he had trouble recognizing the misshapen logograms and had to puzzle them out like some secret code.
Though he was now working in the Hall of Snowy Feather, his script hadn’t improved much. No matter how much he meditated or tried the patience exercises taught by the senior monastics, his clerical script remained barely legible. Instead of the delicate work of mending ancient manuscripts, most of his assignments had been copying already repaired books. But even so, the senior brothers and sisters often had to stay up late to redo the passages he had copied, and Thasé-teki felt terrible about the trouble he caused.
But the abbot didn’t give up.
“Sister Covet-No-More tells me that you are as impatient as a colt, always running to the next clump of grass before the one in front of you has been thoroughly grazed,” the abbot mused. “That wildness in your nature should be channeled rather than dammed…. I understand that Pidaji’s torrent script gives many brothers and sisters trouble, but perhaps the unrestrained thought trails of the Fluxist master require an equally restless book doctor.”
Thasé-teki assented, though not for the reasons suggested by the abbot. He couldn’t care less about Üshin Pidaji, but torrent script was the favorite calligraphic style of Fara, who saw in it a match for the tendency toward the expressive rather than the representational in her own art.
To write like her, he thought, is a little like being with her.
The experiment, however, wasn’t going so well. Replicating the loose, flowing script of the Fluxist sage (and the young Dara princess) had been just as difficult, if not more so, than writing in the neat clerical script better suited to other Ano classical masters.
Weeks had passed since that first excited cry in the Hall of Snowy Feather. Thasé-teki had devoted all that time to mending a single manuscript retrieved from the grave of a duke of Cocru who had died six centuries earlier. Sometimes it took him all day to re-create a single column of logograms, and still the result felt dead, clumsy, without any of the liveliness of the original scribe.
Having cleaned off the last residue of wax, he set down the knife, leaned back, and took a deep breath. Almost time for lunch.
The kitchen was preparing something he hadn’t tasted before, and his mouth watered at the delicious aromas. There was a fruity scent—maybe a rose-pip-and-monkeyberry coulis—as well as something richer—perhaps roasted pine nuts sprinkled with sea salt and Faça lantern peppers stuffed with stone ear mushrooms and cacanut flakes. His stomach growled in anticipation. The summer breeze carried other scents that painted vivid pictures in his mind: flat bread pockets filled with taro paste, lotus roots, and dried berry chunks; lightly toasted seasonal wild vegetables; hearty soup made from eight types of gourds and four herbs….
No matter how much frustration he encountered in his work, the pleasures of good food always cheered him up.
He swallowed and closed his eyes, savoring the names of the dishes: Listen, Ye Faithful, the Master Awaits; the Shepherd’s Cornucopia; Wandering in the Divine Garden; Eight Delights and Four Strictures….
The names were allusions to Rufizo Mender’s deeds and teachings. At first, he had been confused by them, for they didn’t reveal the ingredients or methods of preparation.
In fine cuisine, the key is to invoke all five senses. But the best dishes must draw upon a sixth sense, often described as “mind-pleasure.”
How right Fara had been. Now that he understood the stories behind the dishes, just reciting their names was like meditating upon the god’s wisdom, a delight that transcended the merely sensual.
He smiled as he recalled scenes from his life at the Splendid Urn: chopping and bringing in firewood in the morning; running to the market to purchase something Mati needed at the last minute; busing the dishes and even helping out the waitstaff when Lodan needed him; learning to play the zither with Fara; the contest against the Treasure Chest…
Wait, he thought. Wait.
Images of Rati Yera’s machines chopping, dicing, carving, stirring, frying, flipping in the kitchen of the Splendid Urn filled his mind.
One of the recipes had called for cubes of winter melon that would then be marinated in sauce and wrapped in dough for frying. It was important that the winter melon pieces be identical so that they’d be cooked to the same degree. Mati had been worried that the Blossom Gang’s mechanical assistants couldn’t accomplish the task with sufficient precision.
“Anything you can do, my machines can be taught to do,” declared Rati with pride. “The trick is to decompose your motion into its most basic constituent pieces.”
On the night of the second competition, the winter melon cubes had been perfect, more uniform even than Mati herself could have made them.
Master Nazu Tei had taught him to engineer ideas with Ano logograms; Master Rati Yera had taught him to engineer deeds with mechanical contrivances. Might there be a way to marry the two to reproduce the beauty of Fara’s hand?
Thasé-teki’s eyes snapped open, the mind-pleasure of lunch forgotten as a torrent of new ideas took its place.
* * *
“You’ve been absent from the Hall of Snowy Feather for the last three weeks,” said Abbot Shattered Axe.
The abbot had found the missing novice in the carpenters’ workshop. Like any community away from the bustle of large cities, the brothers and sisters of the Temple of Still and Flowing Waters had to craft the necessities of life with their own hands, making well-stocked workshops a requirement.
Scattered around the floor now was evidence of a furious bout of construction: adzes, saws, planes, chisels, nails, hammers, squares, sticks of charcoal, plumb lines, bubble levels, rulers… bits of lumber of various sizes and wood shavings. On a workbench in the middle of this mess sat a contraption about the size and shape of a nine-stringed zither. Thasé-teki knelt next to it, filing the rough edges.
“Sorry,” he said, a smile of apology on his sweaty face. “Been busy.”
Instead of berating the young monk for his dereliction of duty, the abbot nudged aside tools and lumber to clear a space for himself and sat down in géüpa. “Tell me.”
“Well,” began Thasé-teki hesitantly, “I’ve been having trouble with writing in torrent script….”
Thasé-teki thought of his own mind as a swallow in spring: comfortable with sharp turns and quick dips into the warming water, but incapable of long, sustained flight. He became bored soon from repetitive tasks that required precision and endurance. He far preferred to create the new than to refine the old.
These habits of the mind were at the root of his poor handwriting, but likewise, they provided the solution.
Rati Yera’s motion-copying machines had allowed Chef Mati to chop twenty winter melons at once by having the mechanical arms replicate Mati’s own expert movements exactly. Her instructible carts had allowed a skeletal staff to run a full dinner service. Could these seemingly unrelated machines come to the aid of Master Yera’s disciple? Could he teach a machine to write in beautiful torrent script, and therefore save the world from his own clumsy writing knife?
Though Thasé-teki was no master calligrapher, he had plenty of examples of the best calligraphy at his disposal (including one in the letter box next to his heart). He began by studying these specimens not as artifacts, but as solidified motion.
The process of writing could be analyzed into constituent parts. Each logogram was a compound machine composed from sub-logograms, sub-sub-logograms, and so on until you reached the basic semantic roots, motive modifiers, phonetic adapters, and inflection glyphs. These, in turn, could be broken down into individual knife strokes: the vertical chop, the horizontal slice, two types of diagonal slashes, a twist to hollow out a hole, a turn to sculpt a protrusion, a scrape to smooth a surface, a swipe to bevel an edge, and about a dozen additional flourishes for incising, carving, scoring, slitting, roughening, and so on.
In the same way that each fall of the cleaver brought the cook closer to the finished dish, each knife stroke brought the writer closer to the completed logogram. If he could replicate the individual movements, he would have the raw ingredients for the long sequences needed to build logograms, sentences, paragraphs, books.
He experimented. By consulting the monks and nuns in the Hall of Silver Fleece, he studied the anatomy of the human hand and arm as well as the principles of joints and degrees of motion. These he then reproduced through mechanical linkages, springs, gears, ropes, silk strands, wound-up sinew. Many failed prototypes later, he was in possession of a mechanical hand that could, when the right ropes were pulled and the right levers pushed, replicate the movements of a knife-wielding scribe.
Next came the matter of control. Locking gears and escapements confined the motion of the hand to precisely measured gradations; twisted sinew and compressed springs stored energy for metered release. By coordinating the tensing and relaxing of multiple control lines, his mechanical hand could be made to perform various predetermined gestures: a slow back-and-forth motion to saw a wide horizontal gap in the wax; a powerful, quick downward chop to leave a clean vertical face; a gentle, slow twist to gouge a perfect circular hollow.
The cheremes of this language of motion in hand, Thasé-teki now had to devise a way to transmit the will of the writer-with-no-knife to the hand-with-no-mind.
“You’ve been trying to replicate a scribe in wood and silk?” the abbot interrupted the novice’s excited presentation in disbelief. “But why? You have hands of your own!”
“Because the mechanical hand can write with more beauty than my own,” said Thasé-teki, looking at once embarrassed and proud. “Watch. I’ll show you.”
Moving with suppressed excitement, he placed an empty silk scroll on the tilted platform at one end of the machine, melted and dripped a lump of wax onto it, and swung the writing arm—fashioned out of wooden dowels and bundles of cords in place of muscle—over the wax.
Then, Thasé-teki walked to the other side of the machine and sat down in front of a contraption that resembled a zither—except that instead of the common nine strings, this one had many more. Grinning at the abbot, Thasé-teki began to pluck at the strings.
Gears clacked and meshed, twisted sinew snapped and groaned, silken cords tensed and loosened, and the mechanical arm swung through the air, wielding the knife against the solidified wax.
Much as martial arts masters taught students to combine basic punches and kicks into set forms and poses, calligraphy masters taught students to combine basic knife strokes into compound strokes such as the box form (four vertical chops and a horizontal slice on top), the ladder form (two chops with two, three, or four slices), the cross form (a dexter-to-sinister diagonal slash followed by another, sinister-to-dexter), and so on.
Thasé-teki realized that the compound forms were similar to chords composed of basic notes, and the musical metaphor inspired him to adapt the standard nine-stringed zither for a new use. The strings of the zither, tied to the silken sinews of the mechanical arm, translated the musical notes into the cheremes of the writing hand: while plucking the first string led to a hard chop, fretting the string halfway resulted in a half chop; strumming the eighth string swung the knife to the right, but strumming the ninth string swung the knife to the left; playing a chord on the first, eighth, and ninth strings, with fingers positioned at the correct frets, then resulted in a box-form stroke that carved the nascent wax logogram into a perfect cube.
As the abbot’s jaw dropped in amazement, Thasé-teki played on the zither the opening bars of the tune for “The Silk Maker,” a popular work song among spinners and weavers.
Pick the cocoons, soak, boil, stir, reel.
Spin the wheel, sister, spin that wheel!
Whirring, clacking, groaning, creaking, the knife at the end of the mechanical arm danced through the air, leaving a perfectly formed logogram for “silk” in torrent script on the scroll.
The abbot approached the logogram gingerly. Though Shattered Axe was no scholar, even he could tell that the curves were smooth and flawless, the edges undulating with grace, and there were none of the chips and notches that even the best scribes sometimes left on a logogram.
“I doubt anyone has ever written torrent script with such perfection, perhaps not even Üshin Pidaji,” declared Thasé-teki with pride.
He had deliberately avoided the word “beauty.” It was believed that a great calligrapher wielded the knife with their spirit, so that part of their soul was captured in wax. The best calligraphy specimens, therefore, were celebrated as much for their imperfections and seeming “flaws” as for their adherence to standard aesthetic rubrics. The mechanistic logogram produced by the machine was indeed perfect, though that perfection also removed it from the realm of the human.
