Something’s been running around my mind since I started reading this book: the idea of the scholar-painter. Each of the early Chinese dynasties had court painters, but its during the first centuries AD, after the fall of the Han and during the successive Wei, Jin, Tang, Song, Five Dynasties that you have individual “artists” emerging, and then you have the idea that they are not just painters, but men of letters, scholars — you see it in the development, during the Song and Yuan and afterwards, of paintings that have poems written on them. The written word and the image are, thereafter, wed both in art and artist. It seems that they loved to sing and play various instruments as well.
Jiang Xun mentions that now familiar trope in Chinese high culture: the men of letters that go into seclusion, the wandering (and often drunk) poets, they of considerable talent who, for whatever reason, refuse their services to the new regime, preferring the consolations of nature and poetry.
What follows next might alienate some people (if, that is, anyone is actually reading this): I sometimes think of myself in this light. I might not be completely fit for that lifestyle, but given my druthers I would spend more time wandering, and more time writing than I do now … the parallel interests in writing, poetry, painting and music also seem to describe me. Of course, related to this apposition of various arts is the spiritual crisis or drama of alienation: of course these poets from a millennium ago could not really have experienced the anomie and alienation of we moderns: but there is, of course, much we have in common with them as well, perhaps a certain intellectual aloofness and even disdain from both masses and elites. They are not one with them. They are not for these types of games. They want an exit strategy from the mess, an escape route that can instantly take them far from the madding crowd.
In times of great turmoil or rapid social change, their ontological security is in our intellectual/artistic lineage, our belief that we are part of a loose collection of individuals and groups over human history that have shared this particular orientation. Outsiders, to use Colin Wilson’s concept anachronistically. They offer succor and sustenance to each other, through the centuries.
Grandiose, perhaps. Pompous, arrogant, poncey, overwrought, etc. It’s nothing I use to puff my ego up, to big myself. It’s just a small thought that somehow, for whatever reason I mean, gets me through the day a little easier and gives much-needed rest to the frazzled neurons that are, like those myriad background processes in any computer operating system, constantly eating up my mental and spiritual resources, insidiously and invisibly making the task of making it through the day just that much harder.