Word power
The isle is full of noises, says Caliban, by way of challenge. It is also full of sights. The writer's job is to use words so skilfully that what is out there - actual, but actually unseen - should be seen, fixed and preserved. Great literature allows us to quote reality. This is Seamus Heaney on the noise and feel of a spade hitting an obstacle: "The plate scrabs field-stones / and a tremor blunts in the shaft / at small come-uppances meeting / the driven edge." This is Kipling on the noise of the bell at Kyoto in Japan: "A knuckle rapped lightly on the lip of the bell - it was not more than five feet from the ground - made the great monster breathe heavily."
(...) "Behold a bunnia's shop. He sells rice and chillies and dried fish and wooden scoops made of bamboo. The front of his shop is very solid. It is made of half-inch battens nailed side by side. Not one of the battens is broken; and each one is foursquare perfectly. Feeling ashamed of himself for this surly barring up of his house, he fills one-half the frontage with oiled paper stretched upon quarter-inch framing. Not a single square of oil paper has a hole in it, and not one of the squares, which in more uncivilised countries would hold a pane of glass if strong enough, is out of line."
(...) "And the bunnia, clothed in a blue dressing-gown, with thick white stockings on his feet, sits behind, not among his wares, on a pale gold-coloured mat of soft rice straw bound with black list at the edges. This mat is two inches thick, three feet wide and six long ... By the bunnia's side is a pouch of green leather tied with a red silk cord, holding tobacco fine cut as cotton. He fills a long black and red lacquered pipe, lights it at the charcoal of the brazier, takes two whiffs, and the pipe is empty. Still there is no speck on the mat."
(...) "A room floored with pale gold and roofed with panels of grained cedar. There is nothing in the room save a blood-red blanket laid out smoothly as a sheet of paper. Beyond the room is a passage of polished wood, so polished that it gives back the reflections of the white paper wall. At the end of the passage and clearly visible to this unique bunnia is a dwarfed pine two feet high in a green glazed pot, and by its side is a branch of azalea, blood-red as the blanket, set in a pale grey crackle-pot. The bunnia has put it there for his own pleasure, for the delight of his eyes, because he loves it."
(...) a Japanese emperor at the Nikko river, trying to compose the scene, feeling it lacked "a dash of colour". First, he tries "a little child in a blue and white dressing gown under the awful trees". Interrupted in his aesthetic pursuits by a beggar, the king absent-mindedly sweeps off the beggar's head with his sword. The blood spilt solves the problem and the king orders a vermilion lacquer bridge to be built. It is a purely aesthetic decision - emphasised by the king's instruction that no one is to step on this red bridge and that another utilitarian grey bridge should be built for his subjects.
The aesthetic instinct is autonomous and imperious. It is also curious and tasteless. Let me explain that last adjective "tasteless": in the interests of aesthetic taste (that vermilion bridge), conventional taste, that is to say, "good" taste, with its moral dimension, has to be set aside. At least initially.
Read what is it all about in The Guardian
The isle is full of noises, says Caliban, by way of challenge. It is also full of sights. The writer's job is to use words so skilfully that what is out there - actual, but actually unseen - should be seen, fixed and preserved. Great literature allows us to quote reality. This is Seamus Heaney on the noise and feel of a spade hitting an obstacle: "The plate scrabs field-stones / and a tremor blunts in the shaft / at small come-uppances meeting / the driven edge." This is Kipling on the noise of the bell at Kyoto in Japan: "A knuckle rapped lightly on the lip of the bell - it was not more than five feet from the ground - made the great monster breathe heavily."
(...) "Behold a bunnia's shop. He sells rice and chillies and dried fish and wooden scoops made of bamboo. The front of his shop is very solid. It is made of half-inch battens nailed side by side. Not one of the battens is broken; and each one is foursquare perfectly. Feeling ashamed of himself for this surly barring up of his house, he fills one-half the frontage with oiled paper stretched upon quarter-inch framing. Not a single square of oil paper has a hole in it, and not one of the squares, which in more uncivilised countries would hold a pane of glass if strong enough, is out of line."
(...) "And the bunnia, clothed in a blue dressing-gown, with thick white stockings on his feet, sits behind, not among his wares, on a pale gold-coloured mat of soft rice straw bound with black list at the edges. This mat is two inches thick, three feet wide and six long ... By the bunnia's side is a pouch of green leather tied with a red silk cord, holding tobacco fine cut as cotton. He fills a long black and red lacquered pipe, lights it at the charcoal of the brazier, takes two whiffs, and the pipe is empty. Still there is no speck on the mat."
(...) "A room floored with pale gold and roofed with panels of grained cedar. There is nothing in the room save a blood-red blanket laid out smoothly as a sheet of paper. Beyond the room is a passage of polished wood, so polished that it gives back the reflections of the white paper wall. At the end of the passage and clearly visible to this unique bunnia is a dwarfed pine two feet high in a green glazed pot, and by its side is a branch of azalea, blood-red as the blanket, set in a pale grey crackle-pot. The bunnia has put it there for his own pleasure, for the delight of his eyes, because he loves it."
(...) a Japanese emperor at the Nikko river, trying to compose the scene, feeling it lacked "a dash of colour". First, he tries "a little child in a blue and white dressing gown under the awful trees". Interrupted in his aesthetic pursuits by a beggar, the king absent-mindedly sweeps off the beggar's head with his sword. The blood spilt solves the problem and the king orders a vermilion lacquer bridge to be built. It is a purely aesthetic decision - emphasised by the king's instruction that no one is to step on this red bridge and that another utilitarian grey bridge should be built for his subjects.
The aesthetic instinct is autonomous and imperious. It is also curious and tasteless. Let me explain that last adjective "tasteless": in the interests of aesthetic taste (that vermilion bridge), conventional taste, that is to say, "good" taste, with its moral dimension, has to be set aside. At least initially.
Read what is it all about in The Guardian
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