There is a connection between poetry and painting. Perhaps the words "image" and "language" will help us pay attention to the relationship between them, and also let us notice the difference between them. Painters create images, and poets also create images; Painters also have language, although it is not as clear as the poet's language to some extent; For a landscape, the color palette is like a negative grammar, which excludes some colors from the possibility range; Similarly, it is also a positive type of grammar, indicating the gradual possibility from the earth to rivers, forests and the sky.
Both poets and painters want to achieve the silence behind the language and the silence inside the language. Painters and poets want their works to shine not only in the sun, but also (by any magic) in the sun; Perhaps even the light from the inside of the sun is not just shining in the sun, because many of their works never aim to be seen in the sun. Their goal is to cast magic on caves, graves and the dead, perhaps as a substitute for the sun.
The poet walked into the museum. Among so many different ideas and ways of dealing with them, two things are special: silence and light. Looking at the picture frame as a window, he saw the room inside and the scenery outside-what China people call "landscape painting"-and he knew from the silence that what he saw was the past, death and immutable things; He also knows something else, that is, what he saw is not only the past, the dead and the unchangeable, but also what he intended to be from the beginning: that is, what has become the past from the beginning. Therefore, there is silence in so many different themes and techniques; As a result, the solemnity of the museum is full of loneliness; The glory of painting stands in some enchanted space between life and death.
He also found that the light in these rectangles seemed to come from the inside. In the works of an unknown master, he saw the thin veil of a small waterfall in the sun-how shocking! He leaned over and looked carefully, and the water turned into white pigment, mixed with a little gray, on a gray background-which surprised him again, but it was different from last time. At the intersection, the exact distance, within that distance, the illusion becomes the pigment, beyond that distance, the pigment becomes the illusion again. In the river painted by Flamenco, the thin gray surface of the river bears the thinnest and most trembling gray reflection, but it is done by the heaviest, coarsest and roughest coloring method, and its exquisite skills can make the pigment produce light effect. Once again shocked.
Comparatively speaking, his own poetic art began to appear the most pitiful chatting, mixed with impatience and various opinions. With this in mind, the poet found it best to leave the museum and the magical tomb and temple, where the living have the right to look at things that no longer exist and experience their own death with solemn silence; This "depth observation" is carried out on a plane.
Back in the daytime, he continued to think about this problem. The first is several poems of his contemporaries, especially those related to painting, which he pays attention to. Among them, Auden's art museum relies on Bruegel's The Fall of Icarus and The Slaughter of Babies. There is John Bhajman's "The Hunter Returning at dusk", which is also related to Bruegel; There is a famous poem inspired by Langdon jarrell in Diu Lei's Knight, Death and the Devil. There is even a poem of his own called "The Human Condition", written by René Margaret. These poems are all related to painting, but they are not painting. It should be very interesting to speculate on the relationship between the two.
Of course, poetry is not about the paintings they involve; No, because the description provided by poetry is relatively rare and selective; No art student who was sent to the museum dared to come back with such a description. No, poetry is about the silence of painting; If the poet is lucky enough, he will directly tell the silence of painting; Poetry can only say so much: that's it, that's it. When poetry works, it is also a concentrated form illuminated by internal energy; The point of view in poetry is not important, but the poem itself. Here, he also observed that everything that happened in poetry, like painting, happened on a plane (page).
On the other hand, he believes that there are so many paintings from poetry, which involve poetry, and its essence is as poetic as its theme. For example, there are not only biblical themes, but also various thoughts and styles that distort the theme, poetizing the sufferings of Christ, gaining eternal glory in the works of many medieval masters, Michelangelo's superman's glory, Grunewald's pain and Bruegel's ordinary day.
Therefore, painters and poets are image shapers, and there has always been a correlation between the images they create. When we say that they "create" imagination, our attempt is not to distinguish the components of this invention.
Both painters and poets write in language. At first, this seems to mark a key and difficult communication difference, the difference in the language they use. But this needs further thinking.
The painter's language certainly has the glory of the oldest written language. Minerals, plants, body fluids and even blood have given up the essence of thousands of years ago and given way to the reappearance of perceptual symbols, which are based on fear, desire, anger and dreams, with decorative geometric distance and some indifference. However, writing appeared much later. According to the alphabet, the origin of characters completely independent of painting elements is generally considered to be no earlier than the middle of the second Millennium BC.
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Maybe everything in the alphabet can be seen in nature: O is a cave, W or M is a distant bird, Y is a branch, and so on. But that doesn't matter. What really matters is that no letters can exist, as long as these symbols are regarded as belonging only to nature; They must get rid of nature, so that you can write C without considering the bend of the coastline, S without considering the snake, and write any letter without considering anything else, except that you can imagine it as the letter itself-an unprecedented thing that seems "meaningless" but can be "meaningful" in its huge combination range. Think about the reaction of conservative forces in the society to the armory exhibition in 19 13, and you can imagine people's deep hatred for the invention of the alphabet: "It's different from anything I've ever seen", "A child can do that as long as he thinks it's worth it" and so on.
When it comes to painting, Gombrich, who is incompatible with the abstract era, once wrote about the magic of reappearing art. He thought that painting might be produced by natural coincidence-just like letters, but in the opposite direction. He speculated that the earliest cave painting might be a special kind of rock. The rock itself is first identified as similar to an animal, and then processed by artistic means to increase this similarity. The earliest portrait sculptures also used human skulls as scaffolding.
The development and evolution of painting can be understood as three main dimensions. The first is to reproduce this direction more accurately, and the last is the unique magic of wax figure, which immediately separates itself from the magic of art. The second dimension is the direction, rhythm, form and modeling of decoration, which is an abstraction. The third is the direction of language, letters and symbols, and finally the magic of writing. This process can be felt in China's calligraphy; In Egypt, although writing and painting are obviously different, writing has always been a kind of figurative painting, although the introduction of special language and acyclic symbols makes it abstract and conditional.
What is worth remembering is the viewpoint elaborated by Coomaraswamy in Christianity and Oriental Art Philosophy. He said that in the religious and artistic tradition, Christians in the Middle Ages, like Hindus, regarded painting as a language art; The characters in icon paintings are dominated by the coding language of monks to the same extent as observing the visible world; This answers a question: in a world without photography, how can the images of God and Savior be fixed so quickly?
Therefore, in the two languages of writing and painting, the form and essence of the earth have risen and gained a psychological and spiritual quality, which, in the eyes of people before the existence of these two languages, has an amazing power to leave the world.
Maybe this comparison must end. Because writing and painting "real" are separate. Did they meet as one person? Should they be one? If they are different but great forces, they are melted into something different from both-what would it be?
We already have an example: drawing maps, charts, tables and blueprints ... where the reproduction of tangible things that painting is best at is realized in parallel with strict abstract writing grammar, which can convey endless information without changing its own nature, which is an outstanding contribution to the writing language. Is there any other way in the world to present this mixture of writing and painting?
On this issue, I am willing to make a rather wild jump and hope to keep moving forward. Writing and drawing can meet, although I don't know what will happen when they meet. Maybe the product is completely invisible. Here I get a vague hint from music or ideas about music. Proust touched on the idea, but almost immediately gave up:
"Just like some creatures are the last surviving proof of life forms abandoned by nature, I ask myself, if there is no invention of language, no writing, no analysis of thoughts-is music the only example of possible means of communication between souls? It's like a possibility of ending in nothingness. "
Another writer, Franois Leleones, also inspired this kind of thinking in the Book of Oriental Time, but there are no examples. When he said that some music-his examples are the Elizabethan Virginia pianists, Bach, Schumann and Weber-"is not only composed of sound patterns that please the ears, but also composed of uncoded psychological hieroglyphics."
At least for now, I can't continue to discuss the vaguest hints I mentioned, although some of my readers may dig further. Because this "hieroglyph" and "code" have their own charms, because besides popularity, art is always deeply related to mystery, and only experts can understand that the secret itself is sacred.