A thickening flurry

 

Determined now to rid ourselves of Netflix and save some money, we have started watching a few last films that we hadn't got round to before cancelling: last night it was Charlie Kaufman's I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020). At some points in this, Jessie Buckley's character is a landscape painter (I won't spoil the story by explaining why I say "at some points"). There is an awkward conversation over dinner at the parental home of her boyfriend Jake (Jesse Plemons), where she tries to explain that she imbues landscapes with "interiority". David Thewlis, Jake's father, says he wouldn't understand a landscape to be sad unless there was a sad person in the painting looking at it. Elsewhere in the house there is a reproduction of Friedrich's Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818) - a man looking at a landscape, but one that is so obscured in mist that it may not even exist. Jake's father will descend (or has descended) into dementia, gradually forgetting everything. Plemons and Buckley spend a lot of the film surrounded by darkness and a blizzard of snow.  

When Jessie Buckley pulls up some images of her paintings on her phone to show the parents, they are actually by Ralph Albert Blakelock (1847-1919) - later we see posters of his work in Jake's basement. Blakelock was a fairly obscure painter until late in life when his work began attracting attention and started selling for high prices. But he never got to enjoy the recognition - he had succumbed to mental illness in the 1890s and spent his last two decades in institutions suffering from schizophrenic delusions. There are echoes of this in I'm Thinking of Ending Things, with Jake's feelings of paranoia and the way he slips into an elaborate fantasy at the film's climax (winning the Nobel prize on the set of Oklahoma!) 

Ralph Albert Blakelock, Moonlight, c. 1885-89 
Source: Google Art Project
 

This Blakelock painting in the Brooklyn Museum also features in Moon Palace, a novel by Paul Auster, whose work occupies a similar territory to Kaufman (I've been an admirer of Auster since New York Stories and was sad to read of his death in April).  'A perfectly round full moon sat in the middle of the canvas - the precise mathematical center, it seemed to me - and this pale white disc illuminated everything above it and below it: the sky, a lake, a large tree with spidery branches, and the low mountains on the horizon...' I won't quote the full ekphrasis, although you can find the extract on a website for German English teachers. Instead I'll end here with the moment Auster's protagonist starts to notice something odd about the painting.

The sky, for example, had a largely greenish cast. Tinged with the yellow borders of clouds, it swirled around the side of the large tree in a thickening flurry of brushstrokes, taking on a spiralling aspect, a vortex of celestial matter in deep space. How could the sky be green? I asked myself. It was the same color as the lake below it, and that was not possible. Except in the blackness of the blackest night, the sky and the earth are always different. Blakelock was clearly too deft a painter not to have known that. But if he hadn't been trying to represent an actual landscape, what had he been up to? I did my best to imagine it, but the greenness of the sky kept stopping me. A sky the same color as the earth, a night that looks like day, and all human forms dwarfed by the bigness of the scene - illegible shadows, the merest ideograms of life...

Industry on the Riverside

Thomas Bewick, Industry on the Riverside, 1804

'The unframed scene casts landscape into a new kind of subject.  The view is not given an off-the-peg edge, independent of and indifferent to its contents.  It is given a bespoke edge that responds to and defines the character of the scene.'

Tom Lubbock makes this interesting observation in his essay 'Defining the vignette', written to accompany a 2009 exhibition Thomas Bewick: Tale-pieces and reprinted in his posthumous collection, English Graphic. You can see in the image below of a thirsty traveller how the vignette's edges are defined by branches, leaves and tufts of grass. Lubbock saw this as 'place-portraiture', with Bewick isolating a site's distinctive features, 'those elements by which you would know it again'.
 

Thomas Bewick, Tail-piece - apparently of Thomas Bewick himself

as a thirsty traveller drinking from his hat, 1797

In his essay Lubbock includes a vignette of a hunter in the snow and then, underneath, the same image with a rectangular frame added.  Without the frame, the snow's whiteness feels stronger, drawing into itself the whiteness of the surrounding page. Charles Rosen and Henri Zerner had previously described the way light in Bewick's landscapes 'changes imperceptibly into the paper of the book, and realises, in small, the Romantic blurring of art and reality.'  Unfortunately I cannot convey the effect here because the background of the JPEG is a different white to the computer screen and thus creates its own frame.  

Thomas Bewick, Hunter in the Snow, 1804

When Bewick drew something like the sea, he had no clear border to give the vignette its outline and so his lines seem to fade and blur at the edge of the image.  Bewick's soft and hard edges draw attention to the ontology of perception, the distinction between things that can be delineated, like a tree, and things that cannot, like the sky.  Sometimes the sky is given shading, as in the view of sea-cliffs below, and sometimes it is left blank, to give a feeling of clear open air.  

 

Thomas Bewick, Bird's Eggs from Sea-Cliffs, 1804

Lubbock concludes his essay by drawing attention to the way vignettes differ from traditional window-like landscape views.  Their figures cannot pass out of view, they are rooted in their scenes. You cannot imagine the man below ever coming to the end of his piss and walking away - if he did, he would 'start to dematerialise or break up'.  (NB: this pissing figure is my example - Lubbock has a much more idyllic scene of a man on a grassy bank looking up at the sky!)  Bewick's vignettes remind us how the world shrinks to what we are conscious of at a particular moment. 'They communicate what it's like to be in the middle of something, to feel things in the now, to be entirely absorbed in your sensations.'

Thomas Bewick, That Pisseth Against a Wall, 1804

All images from Wikimedia Commons

Driving with Greenland Dogs

In these days of forced isolation, lots of people are turning to film streaming sites.  If you are interested in silent movies, I can highly recommend the Danish Film Institute's new site which so far has 64 good quality videos from the Golden Age of Danish cinema, including classics like The Abyss and A Trip to Mars.  The first Danish film, Peter Elfelt's Driving with Greenland Dogs (1897), can also be seen there in all its 40-second glory.  It is like a haiku in its brevity, single memorable incident and strong seasonal imagery.  Of course this film's original viewers would have been amazed by the way motion is captured, but viewing it now, what I like is the moment of stillness half way through, after the sled has left the shot and before it enters again from the other side (see image above).  For a second or so you just see a winter landscape with a line of trees like musical notes on the high horizon and fresh tracks written in the snow.

Another film you can see on Stumfilm.dk is Løvejagten (The Lion Hunt, 1907) made by Ole Olsen's Nordisk Film and directed by Viggo Larsen.  It is an extraordinary eleven minutes - a catalogue of tasteless moments that I can't really do justice to in a short description (do all hunters enjoy a sort of post-coital cigarette with the carcass?)  Attitudes change, but even back then the film caused an uproar because the two lions (bought by Olsen from Hamburg Zoo) were actually killed.  Even before these poor creatures and the film they starred in were shot, the Danish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was protesting in vain to the Minister for Justice.  The publicity just helped the film become a success. 

Most stories from the early years of cinema with external scenes were set somewhere easy to simulate with local scenery.  But Denmark is not well-endowed with jungles and so one was recreated in Jægersborg Dyrehave near Copenhagen, a beautiful deer park (as I recall from visiting it once) but not an obvious setting for a lion hunt.  There's something a bit Douanier Rousseau about the scenes filmed there, with unnatural looking tropical plants sticking out of woodland paths.  The shore on which the lions met their end (see above) doesn't exactly bring to mind a tropical beach either - this scene was filmed on the island of Elleore in Roskilde fjord and watching it you can almost feel the cold wind whipping off the sea.

I will end here with something more uplifting, two lovely tinted photographs which can be found in an article on Danish art cinema by Vito Adriaensens.  He speculates that early non-dramatic travelogue films (now lost) may have had 'atmospheric exteriors' resembling picturesque postcards,

'as could possibly be demonstrated by one of the two Nordisk films Fiskerliv i Norden [literally: Being a Fisherman in the Nordic Countries] (Viggo Larsen, 1906) or Ved Havet [literally: By the Sea] (Ole Olsen, 1909). These two fisherman tales only survive in a Swedish distribution copy in which the two were cut together, but what remains contains two beautiful tinted atmospheric inserts of a moonlit and sunset seascape though it is unclear in which of the two these are featured.'

This footage is not yet available on Stumfilm but perhaps under current circumstances the Danish Film Institute will be able to add more titles like this soon.

The Shore of Sumiyoshi

Tawaraya Sōtatsu, The Beach at Sumiyoshi,
from the 'Tales of Ise', c. 1600-40

The Cleveland Museum of Art

In the highly refined Heian dynasty culture of ninth century Japan, landscape was admired in ways that would not be seen in the West for nearly a thousand years.  Consider the 68th episode of The Tales of Ise (c. 900), concerning the journey to Izumi of the poet Ariwara no Narihira (825-80).  At Sumiyoshi beach, 'he was so moved by the scenery that he dismounted from his horse and sat down again and again to enjoy the lovely views.  One of his party proposed: 'Compose a poem with the phrase "the shore of Sumiyoshi" in it.'  The resulting poem in its five brief lines combines autumn and spring imagery, chrysanthemums, wild geese and the sea.

Katsukawa Shunshô, Snow Scene Like a Flowering Grove, 

from the series 'Tales of Ise in Fashionable Brocade Prints', c. 1770-73 

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Peter Macmillan's recent (2016) translation of The Tales of Ise is a pleasure to read and includes fascinating explanatory material.  He notes, for example, that 'Episodes 66, 67 and 68 are all set along the shores of Osaka Bay and feature beautiful poems on the local scenery.'  In the 66th tale, 'The Sea of Life', Narihura stops with his friends by the shore and composes a poem on the boats in the bay, 'carrying us across / the sorrow-filled sea of life.'  And in the 67th, 'Snow Blossom', they see Mount Ikoma, revealed when the sky cleared.  Only then were he and his friends able to see 'the woods in snow blossom', the 'pristine white snow ' on the branches of the trees. I have included an eighteenth century illustration of this scene above.

Tawaraya Sōtatsu,  Noblemen Viewing the Nunobiki Waterfall,
 from the 'Tales of Ise', c. 1600-40

Minneapolis Institute of Art

Another episode involving admiration of scenery is 'Travels in Ashiya' (no. 87) - its theme, according to Peter Macmillan, is 'how excursions and the pleasures of the landscape can fill the heart with delight.'  The hero and his companions decide to climb the mountain to see the Nunobiki Waterfall. 

'The rock face was a good two hundred feet high and fifty feet wide, and the water pouring over it made it look as if its whole surface was covered in rippling silk.  A rock the size of a round straw mat jutted out from the top of the falls, and water cascaded over it in huge drops the size of chestnuts and mandarin oranges.  The man invited everyone there to compose a poem on the waterfall...'  

The resulting poems are good, but not as beautiful as the poem composed on their way home, as night fell and they could see firelight on the sea:

Are those stars on a cloudless night
or fireflies on the riverbank,
or are they the lights
of the fishermen's fires
in the direction of our home?

Apotheosis

It could be argued that John and Yoko made a form of landscape art in Apotheosis (1970), their seventeen minute experimental film of the view from an ascending balloon.  It was shot in December 1969, on a snowy day in Lavenham, Suffolk.  At the beginning you hear the balloon being inflated and see John and Yoko in hooded outfits.  It then becomes clear that the camera is mounted in the balloon, which rises out of the market place until you can see white fields and black trees that could have come from a Bruegel  painting.  This landscape gets progressively whiter and more indistinct until it eventually disappears.  After several minutes, the balloon emerges above the clouds which, in the words of Jonas Mekas, 'opened up like a huge poem, you could see the tops of the clouds, all beautifully enveloped by sun, stretching into infinity.'

Back in 2010, The East Anglian Daily Times published an article about the film and interviewed people who were there that day, such as Roger Deacon, manager of a local building firm, who remembers helping to lift the famous couple out of their balloon.

'John and Yoko didn’t take off on the flight, climbing out of the basket after the photographs to oversee the launch – to shouts of “chicken!” from the gathered crowd – while their collaborator and cameraman, Nic Knowland (himself a Suffolk man, originally from Debenham), ensured the shoot was carried out to their requirements.'

In his essay 'Walking on thin Ice: The Films of Yoko Ono', Daryl Chin compares Apotheosis to the contemporary work of Michael Snow (La Région Centrale, Snow's celebrated three-hour film of an uninhabited mountainous landscape, made with a robotic camera, was shot in September 1970).  However, The East Anglian Daily Times was not impressed by Apotheosis. 

'The best thing you could say about it is that it left the people of Lavenham - and Yoko - with some bizarre and brilliant memories (“We always have a laugh about it,” says Roger Deacon. “Not many people can say they’ve had their hands around Yoko Ono!”)
Other than that, it was a lot of hot air.'

Farther hills as hills again like these

Pieter Breugel the Elder, The Hunters in the Snow (Winter), 1565

Source Wikimedia Commons

To follow up my previous post, drawing on Joseph Leo Koerner's Bosch & Bruegel: From Enemy Painting to Everyday Life (2016), and also to provide some mental respite from this oppressive heat, I thought I would write here today about Breugel's The Hunters in the Snow.  It is a painting I have mentioned here before, in the context of poetry about landscape art ('Jagg'd mountain peaks and skies ice-green / Wall in the wild, cold scene below...' - Walter De La Mare).  It is also a painting loved by Tarkovsky fans as it features in both Mirror and Solaris.  Koerner discusses it in his final chapter, 'Nature', along with Bruegel's other paintings of The Seasons of the Year.  In a rare personal aside, Koerner says that he had a poster of The Hunters in the Snow on his wall right through his college and graduate school years.  Then, despite having a flat in Heidelberg with an 'expansive view of the Neckar Valley' through his window, he was happier losing himself in the depths of Bruegel's painting. 

Koerner imagines the viewer of this painting beginning by focusing on the pack of dogs, before being drawn towards 'one of the deepest depths in European art.'  And yet, 'the paw prints in the snow and the gigantic cliffs are part of the same continuum. Bruegel structures his painting to make our launch into space unavoidable.'  The distances made visible here recall contemporary Flemish atlases. Landscape features like trees and houses are shown in elevation but roads, rivers and valleys are depicted as if in elevation, offering us routes to be followed.  Bruegel reconciles near and far.  As he paints mountains and seas suggesting 'territories yet to be discovered, he pictures them as lifeworlds like our own, those farther hills as hills again like these.'

In the far distance (see above), a procession of figures can be discerned walking towards the horizon over the ice from a harbour town.  The winter before Breugel painted this view, the Scheldt at Antwerp had frozen over.  This flattening of the landscape into a single medium, ice, has effectively 'turned the world into a Borgesian one-to-one map of itself.'  The whiteness of the snow links different parts of the composition, from the hunters marching into the painting to the distant figures heading out of view.  It also dazzles the eye with an overabundance of light.  The roofscape of the mill, covered in snow, is hard to work out at first.  Here, 'Bruegel reverses the elucidating effects that snow has at a distance.'  Thick icicles hang from the buildings. It is a cold village to which the hunters return.  Everyone seems to turn away from us in this picture, 'as nature itself does in winter.  ... Through the mere resources of white paint, Bruegel shows home and the human from the indifferent perspective of the world.'

Plum blossoms, green willows, warblers, and wine

Cherry Walk, Kew Gardens

Last weekend at Kew Gardens the cherry trees were in full bloom.  It prompted me to organise for last night a small blossom viewing gathering at our house (we actually have a crab apple tree, but it's a perfectly good stand-in).  During the week, the weather had turned from bright sunshine to wind and showers, so our tree, though still in bloom, had begun to shed its petals over the lawn.  I didn't really mind.  There was plenty of sake and good conversation to be had inside and spring rain is, in any case, almost as frequently encountered in Japanese poetry as cherry blossoms, sometimes in the same poem.  A 9th century poet, Ōtomo no Kuronushi, asked whether the gentle rains of spring are tears shed for the scattering of the cherry blossoms.

I have written here before about blossom viewing in Japan, but today I thought I would highlight one particular party, held as long ago as 730.  In the first month of that year (February 8th by the Western calendar), Ōtomo no Tabito, the Governor-General of Dazaifu, invited guests to a gathering in his garden to see the plum blossoms, whose flowering precedes the cherry season.  The tanka poems they composed feature in Edwin A. Cranston's anthology The Gem-Glistening Cup.  He describes their verse as 'decorous expressions of the pleasure of being together in spring, along with the occasional twinge of anxiety that spring will not last forever.  The principal images are plum blossoms, green willows, warblers, and wine.  The tone is celebratory, shadowless as the diffused light of a spring day.'

The poets at the gathering were mostly obscure, just the local talent in a remote outpost (Dazaifu is on the southern island Kyushu, far from the Japanese capital of Nara).  Their poems are simple and generally lacking in artifice.  The participants are identified by their job titles - a junior secretary, a senior judge, an assistant governor, a 'master of computation' etc.  Here is one of the poems, in Cranston's translation, written by the host himself.

   In my arbor now
Petals scatter from the plum -
   Or is it snow
That floats down drifting over us
From the boundless sky?

This is one of several poems comparing blossom and snow; it is an example of 'elegant confusion', a technique taken from Chinese poetry.  Later in the sequence one of the other guests, Tanabe no Makami (identified as 'Clerk of Chikuzen') adds mist to this poetic equation.  As his contribution could be classified as landscape poetry I will conclude by quoting it here too.

   Over spring fields
Mist rises, spreads across the ground,
   And snow sifts down -
Or so we see it as we watch
Plum blossoms scattering.

Sleeping Dragon Ridge

 

Yosa Buson, Liu Bei visited Zhuge Liang in his hermitage three times, 18th century

Source: Wikimedia Commons

This beautiful winter scene was painted by the great Japanese haiku poet and artist, Yosa Buson.  It depicts a famous moment in Three Kingdoms, the epic Chinese novel describing real events at the end of the Han Dynasty.  The warlord Liu Bei has come to the 'thatched hut' of Zhuge Liang, the 'Crouching Dragon', to ask whether he will join him as an advisor.  Liu Bei is accompanied in this painting by his two oath brothers, Guan Yu (traditionally depicted with a red face and luxurious beard) and Zhang Fei.  These three and Zhuge Liang (also known as Kongming) have been depicted over and over again in books, plays, films, comic books and video games, along with their adversary Cao Cao (whose poetry I wrote about here last year).  Zhuge Liang was revered as a Chinese Ulysses, a great tactician, minister and inventor.  Moss Roberts, the translator of Three Kingdoms, describes him as a combination of Machiavelli, Clausewitz and Leonardo da Vinci.  But when Liu Bei came to call on him in the year 207, he was just a young scholar with a brilliant reputation.

Dai Jin, Looking Three Times at the Thatched Hut, Early Ming Dynasty

Source: Wikimedia Commons

The painting above, is by Dai Jin (Tai Chin) and dates from roughly the same period as the Three Kingdoms. Dai Jin's hanging scroll shows the same three characters being met at the gate by a boy, while Kongming can be glimpsed inside.  The titles of these pictures refer to the fact that Liu Bei made three trips to the thatched hut before Kongming made an appearance.  The first time he was told by the young boy that the master was not around and that his movements were uncertain.  On the second attempt, in the dead of winter, he encountered Kongming's brother but again was told that the master was away.  On the third, Liu Bei and his brothers were kept waiting while the scholar slept, but finally got to talk to him.  They found him to be a tall man 'with a face like gleaming jade and a plaited silken band around his head.  Cloaked in crane down, he had the buoyant air of a spiritual transcendent.'
 

 

Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Xuande (Liu Bei) Visits Kongming Three Times in the Snow, 1853

Source: Musuem of Fine Arts, Boston

This story is as well known in Japan and Korea as it is is in China, as can be seen by two more Japanese images of Liu Bei's journey.  The woodblock print above is by Utagawa Kuniyoshi, from a series called A Popular Romance of the Three Kingdoms.  The one below is by the last great master of the ukiyo-e print, Tsukioka Yoshitoshi ('Gentoku' and 'Kômei' are the Japanese versions of  Liu Bei and Zhuge Liang).  The Fitzwilliam curators note that Kongming is shown by Yoshitosi 'on the right poring over learned texts: in the absence of lamps, diligent scholars in ancient China were supposed to have read by the light of fireflies or by the reflected luminescence of snow, which they brought in from outside.' 

Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, Gentoku visits Kômei in the snow, 1883

Source: Fitzwilliam Museum

I will end this post with some lines from the novel itself, in Moss Roberts' translation.  On their first journey, Liu Bei and his brothers are directed to Sleeping Dragon Ridge:

'The twisting, turning ridge bears heavy clouds;
The frothing, churning stream is liquid jade.
Caught between the rocks, this dragon winds;
Shadowed by the pines, this phoenix hides.
A wattle gate half-screens a thatched retreat:
Undisturbed the recluse sits within.'

On their second journey, 'dense, somber clouds covered the sky.  The brothers rode into a cutting northern wind.  A heavy snow made the mountains gleam like arrowheads of white jade and gave the wood a silvery sheen.'  After being disappointed again, Liu Bei sets off back.

'Pear-petal flakes descending from the skies,
Antic willow puffs darting at his eyes,
He turns and halts to view the scene behind:
Banked with snow, the silvered ridges shine.'

On the third visit, he finally gains admittance and talks to Zhuge Yiang, who describes to him a three stage plan to reunite the Han empire.  Liu Bei rises from his mat and joins his hands together in gratitude, saying 'Master, you have opened the thicket that barred my view and have made me feel as if clouds and mist have parted and I have gained the blue sky.'

Frail songs by torrents

Yesterday evening I listened yesterday to a recent episode of 'Late Junction' in which Anne Hilde Neset was taken by Jana Winderen to a snowy forest just outside Oslo to discuss field recording. I have embedded a clip of this below, although I'm not sure how long it will be available.  I would actually recommend listening to the whole programme while you can (among other things it includes a wonderful Morton Feldman tribute on what would have been his ninety-second birthday, David Fennessy's 'Piano Trio - Music for the pauses in a conversation between John Cage and Morton Feldman').  Winderen talks about the way the sounds of the forest change completely day by day - sound like light has to be captured instantly or it is gone forever.  She has been waiting many years to catch a particular lake when it is just about freezing.  At that moment the ice is like a drum skin and if you tap it you can hear the sound flying over the surface.  But on the rare occasions when the lake has been in this state, she has happened to be without her equipment. "Then I just have to listen to it with my ears and remember that, recorded in my memory".

After listening to this programme I took up a book, the latest collection of Thomas A Clark's poems, Farm by the Shore.  As I read it, I kept thinking of the deep listening and close attention to landscape that Jana Winderen describes.  Poems refer to the drone of the wind, the water song in leaves, the lapping of little waves, unquiet on quiet.  A small brown bird hidden in glancing light seems to vanish when it stops singing.  There is often a focus on such moments, when what is observed offers an insight into the processes of thought.  'Quicker than tadpoles / in pools the shadows / of tadpoles in pools / or the notion of shadows / of tadpoles in pools.'  There are places, these poems suggest, to which you can retreat to tune the mind or simply find repose in the shadows of trees.  Jana Winderen's recording includes the sound of tadpoles at rest, hibernating in their cold winter pools, waiting for spring.  Waiting is essential for her too, as she "concentrates into the environment" and begins to notice small things or experience chance phenomena like snow falling from a tree.  It is easy to picture Thomas A Clark walking the winter woods and listening to them with similar quiet patience: 'snowflakes on eyelashes / frail songs by torrents.'

This snow has never melted

Anon (once attributed to Guo Xi), Mount Emei under Heavy Snow, 17th century

Mount Omei, or Emei, in Sichuan province, is one of the Four Sacred Buddhist Mountains of China and has often featured in Chinese poetry.  Li Po spent the early part of his life (before 725) in Sichuan and wrote a 'Song of Mount Omei's Moon', that would later be quoted by Su Shi in one of his own poems.  Su Shi was actually born near the foot of the mountain, in 1037, but spent his life being moved from one post to another, getting further and further away until he eventually found himself living on the island of Hainan (he died, back on the mainland, four years later).  Fan Ch'eng-ta, one of the 'Four Masters of Southern Sung Poetry', specialising in the field-and-gardens genre, described Mount Emei in his Diary of a Boat Trip to Wu (1177).  The higher he got, the colder it was - intensely so at night.  Reaching Brilliant Cliff he looked down into the clouds and glimpsed halos of coloured light.  Further on he could see the mountain range that stretches West, until it eventually becomes the Himalayas:

'Lofty, rugged, carved, sliced; scores, perhaps a hundred peaks in all.  When the rising sun first illuminates them, the snow glistens like shiny silver, shimmering in the light of the dawn.  From antiquity to the present, this snow has never melted.  These mountains extend all the way to the land of India and to tributary kingdoms along the border for a distance of I don't know how many thousands of li.  It looks like it is spread out on a table before one.  This spectacular, unique, unsurpassable view was truly the crowning one of my entire life.' 

Last month I was surprised to encounter a fragment of Mt Emei, perched on the summit of a mountain in Switzerland.  This 8 ton lump of basalt, the Emei Stone, was installed on the top of Mt. Rigi in 2015, a year after a Rigi Stone was 'inagurated' on Mt Emei.  They are meant to 'symbolise the cultural and touristic collaboration' between the two mountains.  An explanatory board refers to these landscapes like global corporations, with the exchange symbolising 'the valuable and long-standing partnership between RIGI and EMEI.'  I had not been to Switzerland for a while and was surprised by the number of Chinese tour groups.  There are visitors too from other parts of Asia.  At the bottom of Mount Titlis, a high, snow-capped peak near Rigi, you encounter the inviting smell of Indian street food on sale at the Spice Bistro.  And at its summit, you can take a selfie with cardboard cutout stars of the famous Bollywood film Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995), which was set in Switzerland (though not actually on Titlis).  The appeal of the Alps for Bollywood directors is discussed in an article for The Smithsonian and the Indian fascination with Switzerland is explored in an interesting piece by Anuradha Vikram's for Hyperallergic.

Mount Rigi became a major tourist destination in the nineteenth century, in part because it is easy to get to from Lucerne.  A Telegraph article on this phenomenon made the connection with Turner's Blue Rigi, a centrepiece of the Tate's 2014 Late Turner show (looking back I see I wrote at the time about Turner's Italian landscapes rather than the exhibition's views of the Alps).  Rigi developed a special appeal, and

'so great was this charisma, that within a couple of decades of Turner’s visit, a stay in Lucerne and an ascent of The Rigi were among the most desirable experiences for any traveller to Continental Europe. In 1857 the first grand hotel opened at the summit, and by 1860 there were 1,000 horses and numerous guides and sedan chairs stationed at the foot of the mountain in Weggis. The highlight of Thomas Cook’s first group tour to Switzerland, in 1863, was an ascent of The Rigi to watch the sunrise, and in 1868 Queen Victoria herself came here, to be carried up to the hotel in a chair, and woken before dawn for the same view.

J.M.W. Turner, The Blue Rigi, Sunrise, c. 1841-42

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Mount Emei has a much longer tradition of tourism than Mount Rigi, centred on its temples and the 'silver world' - a sea of clouds - visible from its summit.  In the Qing Dynasty, the poet Tan Zhongyue named ten scenic attractions, including 'Blue Sky After Snowfall on the Great Plateau', 'Crystal Waters and Autumn Winds', and 'Felicitous Light on the Golden Summit'.  Today, the UNESCO World Heritage site acknowledges the threat posed by visitor numbers ('there are numerous drink stands and souvenir stalls which detract from the natural atmosphere of the mountain'), but also notes that 'as a sacred place, Mount Emei has benefited from a long-standing and traditional regime of conservation and restoration.'

A thousand years ago, back in the Song Synasty, Fan Ch'eng-ta's does not mention encountering any other sight-seers.  Perhaps he had the view to himself.  Turner never tried making the ascent of Rigi, possibly put off by the prospect of tourists.  In J. M. W. Turner: A Wonderful Range of Mind, John Gage suggests that 'it may be that he felt the Rigi was already too popular a vantage point, and he did not want to share his experiences with the two or three hundred other tourists who were said to congregate daily on the summit for the dawn.'  Gage quotes an earlier traveller, Henry Matthews, who did make the ascent and what he saw is reminiscent of Fan Ch'eng-ta's vision of dawn on Mt. Emei.  Matthews found it a 'magnificent spectacle' and concluded that experiencing a sunrise on Rigi 'forms an epoch in one's life, which can never be forgotten.'

J.M.W. Turner, The Red Rigi, 1842

Source: Wikimedia Commons

When the two essences of nature are bright and clear

A scholar playing the guqin, Ming Dynasty

Reproduced in R. H. van Gulik's The Lore of the Chinese Lute

I have written here about guqin music twice before: once in relation to two compositions of the Song Dynasty by Kuo Mien (Guo Mian) and more recently in a post about the Japanese guqin player, Uragami Gyokudō.  Here I am adding some more information on landscape and the art of the guqin via some quotations from the seminal Western book on the subject, R. H. van Gulik's The Lore of the Chinese Lute, first published in 1940.  This essay explains the evolution of the instrument into one of the scholar's most important possessions.  Artists and writers often depicted the poet wandering through mountains, accompanied by his lute, usually carried by a servant boy, so that he could play when moved by the beauty of the scenery.  Even when indoors, the lute player's 'mind should dwell with forests and streams'.  But ideally he would be outside, 'near an old pine tree, admiring its gnarled, antique appearance. In the shade of the pines some cranes should be stalking, and the lute player should admire their graceful movements, modelling on them his finger technique.' 

Here is a lovely sixteenth century description of the place of the lute in scholarly life.  Its subject is Ni Tsan (Ni Zan, 1301-74), the great Chinese landscape painter who I have referred to several times on this blog. 

'Where Ni Tsan dwelt there was the Ching-pi pavilion, breathing an atmosphere of profundity and remoteness from earthly things.  There he had assembled several thousand books, all of which he had corrected with his own hand.  On all sides there were arranged antique sacrificial vessels and famous lutes, and the abode was surrounded by pine trees, cinnamon trees, orchids, bamboos, etc.  It was fenced off by a high paling of poles and bamboo, suggesting aloofness and refined delicacy.  Every time the rain had stopped and the wind had abated, Ni Tsan used to take his staff and wander about, just going where his steps led him. When his eye met with something which particularly struck him, he played his lute, thus finding aesthetic satisfaction. Those who saw him then knew that he was a man who dwelt outside this world.'

An enviable life - I particularly like the way he 'corrected' the books in his library!  Playing the lute was seen as an almost priestly ritual: it could only be undertaken under the right circumstances.  The Lore of the Chinese Lute quotes a list from the Ming period in which over half of the fourteen rules relate to making music outdoors.  The lute may be played:

1. When meeting someone who understands music.
2. On meeting a suitable person.
3. For a Taoist recluse
4. In a high hall.
5. Having ascended a storied pavilion.
6. In a Taoist cloister.
7. Sitting on a stone.
8. Having climbed a mountain.
9. Resting in a valley.
10. Roaming along the waterside.
11. In a boat.
12. Resting in the shadow of a forest.
13. When the two essences of nature are bright and clear.
14. In a cool breeze and when there is a bright moon.

Finally here, I will highlight van Gulik's subdivision of the lute repertoire into five thematic groups: (1) The Mystic Journey; (2) Tunes of a Semi-Historical Character; (3) Musical Versions of Literary Products (e.g. poems from the ancient Book of Odes); (4) Tunes Descriptive of Nature; (5) Tunes Descriptive of Literary Life.  Elements of landscape may be evoked in any of these categories, but it is the fourth group that is of most interest here.  One such composition is the Song Dynasty tune I described here previously, 'Clouds over the Hsiao and Hsiang Rivers'.  Another is 'High Mountains and Flowing Waters' (for the story of Po Ya, to whom it was ascribed, see my earlier post).  This exists as two separate pieces, one of which, 'Flowing Waters', is now the best known qin composition  - a version was sent into space on the Voyager golden record (see clip above and, for more information, John Thompson's incredibly informative qin site). 

The third example of nature description van Gulik gives is by Ts'ai Yung (Cai Yong 133-92), a polymath of the Eastern Han period whose daughter also became a renowned poet and musician.  It is a tune which evokes in nine sections the end of winter and the coming of spring. A Ming Dynasty lute handbook says of this that 'it takes its inspiration from the snow, describes snow's purity and freedom from all earthly stains, and expresses contempt for the world and elevation to empty clearness'.

1. Heaven and earth breathe purity.
2. A clear, snowy morning.
3. Snow and sleet fall together.
4. Mountains and water merge in each other.
5. The brilliant sun in the sky.
6. The wind blows through the luxuriant forest.
7. River and mountain are like a picture.
8. The snow melts on cliffs and in vales.
9. Spring returns to the world.

Wind at Walden Pond

The artwork on the cover of this January 2008 edition of Art in America is by Spencer Finch: Sunlight in an Empty Room (Passing Cloud for Emily Dickinson, Amherst, MA, August 28, 2004).  Emily Dickinson once famously wrote of 'a certain Slant of light' - 'when it comes, the Landscape listens...'  On his visit to her home, Finch took precise measurements of the level of sunlight and then tried to recreate the effect using a cloud of blue gels suspended in front of two rows of fluorescent lights.  Finch is fascinated with light and has made various similar cultural pilgrimages to record it: heading, for example, to Ingmar Bergman’s Stockholm residence at the ‘magic hour’ when the director did much of his filming, to Time Square, the inspiration for Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie, and to Giverny where he was looking for a shadow similar to the one Monet captured in the painting reproduced below.  Things don't always go to plan: in 1996 he travelled to Rouen only to find that the cathedral Monet had painted in different lights was under scaffolding; undaunted, he did a piece instead based on the colours of his hotel room.  The artworks arising from these trips range from drawings to sculptures and installations.  Eos (Dawn, Troy, 10/27/02), for example, resembles a Dan Flavin light piece, but is designed to match the measurements Finch took at Troy during the hour of Homer's ‘rosy-fingered Dawn’.

Claude Monet, Grainstacks at Sunset (Snow Effect), 1890-91

The Art in America review by Stephanie Cash describes two works Finch had recently completed that were inspired by Thoreau.  The first of these concerns wind rather than light - I have drawn a diagram below to show how the gallery installation worked.  ‘For about two hours the fans periodically create a gentle, intermittent breeze from various directions and at various speeds, determined by Finch’s measurements using a digital anenometer and weathervane while standing on the shore of Walden Pond, where Thoreau spent two years, two months and two days.  Viewers standing at the work’s centre can experience the approximate breeze that Finch, and presumably Thoreau, did.’ Not having experienced this work I can only imagine it from Cash's description, another level of mediation which only goes to emphasise the impossibility of feeling the wind that rippled the surface of the water during the years 1845-7.  

Diagram showing Spencer Finch's

Two hours, Two minutes, Two seconds (Wind at Walden Pond, March 12, 2007)

The other work, Walden Pond (morning effect, March 13, 2007), sounds less appealing because it mixes together Thoreau and Monet, although it is hard to tell from photographs.  The finished work was  

'a wall collage comprising 139 reproductions, arranged in the shape of the pond, of aqueous paintings by Monet.  From 20 spots around the pond’s perimeter, Finch noted the hues of the water and ice, then located their matches in the Monet reproductions.  Each image bears a notation with an arrow pointing to the particular colour, and the time, location on the shore and direction he was facing.  It’s a rather complicated enterprise, and visually and intellectually engaging, but atypically for Finch, it doesn’t present a coherent, unified effect.’

There was a Spencer Finch show at Turner Contemporary in 2014, which regrettably I didn't get to see.  In the video clip above he talks about the influence of Turner and installs a sculpture which resembles the Emily Dickinson one, called Passing Cloud (After Constable).  [Incidentally, I did get to go to the previous exhibition at Turner Contemporary in 2014 - which was also inspired by clouds, including Constable's - and wrote about it here.]  Finch has done cloud studies himself, as well as drawings of ice, wind, sunlight and water.  The colours of the surface of the Hudson River were his raw material for The River That Flows Both Ways, an installation on New York's High Line that could be seen last year.  His website has some other examples of recent work but I will end here with a piece he made some time ago, described in the Art in America article.  It sounds preposterous but also rather magical.

‘Resembling an amateur science project, an early installation that also looks to the cosmos, Blue (One second brainwave transmitted to the star Rigel), 1993, comprises a tattered orange armchair, a TV set, an old Apple computer, electrodes, an antenna and a tripod-mounted transmitter.  Using these jury-rigged components, Finch recorded his brain wave for one second as he watched the huge blue wave in the opening sequence of the 1970s TV show Hawaii Five-O, a still of which appears on the TV screen.  His brainwave was then translated by the software and projected into space by the transmitter.  It should reach its destination, the bluest star in our sky, in the year 2956.  With the ‘real’ work supposedly somewhere in the cosmos, modern-day viewers are left with a scrappy installation that belies the beauty of the concept.’

The Golden Island

Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Nichiren going into exile on the island of Sado, 1835-6

Exile has been a spur to some of the greatest literature: would we have The Divine Comedy if Dante had not had to leave Florence and learn 'the bitter taste of others' bread'?  It could be said that the whole 'rivers-and-mountains' tradition in Chinese poetry stems from the exile of Hsieh Ling-yün in 422 to the wild southern coast.  Literary heroes from Prince Rama to Prince Genji have found themselves sent into exile.  Just recently I was looking round the National Gallery's Delacroix exhibition which includes his painting Ovid Among the Scythians.  Beyond the small group coming to the aid of the poet, there is a dark, inhospitable landscape.  The banishment of a writer like Ovid can evolve into a kind of legend itself, the historical facts having become lost to us.  Here I want to write about the exile of Zeami Matokiyo, banished in 1434 at the advanced age of seventy-one by the shogun for reasons that are also no longer fully clear.  He was sent to the island of Sado, a place that already had a long history as a place of banishment - the great Buddhist monk Nichiren, for example, was exiled there in 1271.  Zeami is famous for in the West for his Noh plays and writings on aesthetics, but 'The Book of the Golden Island' (Kintosho, 1436), which describes his journey to Sado, deserves to be better known.

Arthur Waley, in his anthology The Nō Plays of Japan, wrote that Zeami's Kintosho 'bears the same relation to his plays that Basho's prose-sketches bear to his hokku.'  It is shorter than Basho's travel sketches, only fourteen pages in the translation Susan Matisoff published in the Winter 1977 edition of Monumenta Nipponica, and structured in eight sections.

Jakushu: Leaving the capital, Zeami reaches the port of Obama where he looks across the bay to the mountains.  He had visited this place before, many years ago, but now his memories of it are uncertain.  

Sea Route: His boat sets sail across the northern sea to Sado.  Far to the east, the mountain of Shirayama (now called Hakusan) is visible, wit hits lingering snow patches.  Other landmarks are sighted as the boat travels day and night.  Finally, he sees pine trees amid dawn waves: Sado.

Plaec of Exile: Zeami makes his way inland and stays at a small temple where water trickles through moss and the walls are damp and weathered.  He looks at the moon, a lingering connection to the capital for it can be seen from there too.

Hototogisu: This section contains a story that Arthur Waley translated.  The hototogisu (Japanese cuckoo) can be heard everywhere on Sado but at a certain shrine.  Minister Tamekane, exiled to Sado, had composed a poem there asking the singing birds to leave because they reminded him of Kyoto.

Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Hototogisu, mid-nineteenth century

Images source: Wikimedia Commons

Izumi: At this place in Sado Zeami is reminded of another exile, Emperor Juntoka, whose poetry he quotes.  Juntoka lived with the pure heart of a lotus and at Izumi 'must have walked the refreshing path', the road to the Pure Land paradise.

Ten Shrines: Time passes: autumn, winter, and in the spring of 1435, Zeami composes a poem to the gods of the Ten Shrines.

Northern Mountain: Zeami meets a man who tells him of this golden island's origins.  Here on the highest peak the 'light of the moon of Buddha's nirvana' has shone unceasingly.  Zeami comes to accept that he must live for a time this unsettled life of clouds and water.'

Firelight Ceremony: The last section of the Kintosho focuses on the traditional ceremony marking the beginning of the cycle of the seasons.  It concludes with these beautiful lines:

'Look on these words,
The plover tracks
Of one left on the Golden Island,
To last as a sign, unweathered,
For future generations.'

Tall Mountains and Flowing Waters

In an earlier post, 'Clouds over the Xiao and Xiang Rivers', I discussed landscape imagery in Song dynasty music for the qin (Wade-Giles: ch'in).  The ch'in, a type of zither but sometimes confusingly referred to as a lute, is the great instrument of Chinese history, played by scholars, emperors and poets.  There was T'ao Yüan-ming for example, whose fondness for it, along with books and wine, I once referred to here (T'ao was the founder of 'fields-and-gardens' poetry).  Indeed, 'T'ao was ultimately so imbued with ch'in music that he removed the strings from his instrument, writing that "I have understood the deeper meaning of the ch'in, why should I need the sound of the strings?"  This may help to explain why certain inaudible effects executed on the ch'in are admired, as both the performer and the educated listener can imagine the sounds even when they cannot hear them.  T'ao's statement also provided an excuse for later scholars who owned an instrument but could not play it.'

 Uragami Shunkin, A Portrait of Uragami Gyokudō, 1813

This quotation actually comes from a book about a Japanese ch'in player, Uragami Gyokudō (1745-1820).  In Tall Mountains and Flowing Waters: The Arts of Uragami Gyokudō, Stephen Addiss covers not just his music, but also Gyokudō's poetry, calligraphy and landscape painting.  It was music that came first though, as Minagawa Kien made clear in the preface to a collection of Gyokudō's poems, suggesting that this ability on the ch'in enabled Gyokudō to evoke the 'craggy and vast'.  In this he resembled the ancient Chinese ch'in player Po Ya, who could convey in his music the qualities of 'Tall Mountains' and 'Flowing Waters'.  Kien was referring here to a story in the Taoist text Lieh-tzu that became proverbial as an example of the understanding between friends.  Po Ya's friend Chung Tzu-ch'i was so in tune with his mind and music that he always knew what Po Ya was thinking when he played.  When Chung Tzu-ch'i died, Po Ya broke the strings of his ch'in and never played again.

Uragami Gyokudō, Snow Sifted Through Frozen Clouds, c. 1810

Gyokudō epitomised the bunjin ideal: an amateur artist who painted 'without knowledge of the six laws', who loved to play the ch'in but did not 'know the rules', who read for pleasure and detested scholarship.  Nevertheless it is easy to imagine that as the years went by his daily work as an official would have been increasingly tiresome.  In 1794 political circumstances prompted him to resign and devote himself entirely to the arts.  He seems to have had no regrets.  In 'Shutting My Gate, I Play the Ch'in' he writes of having left his concerns behind.  In another poem he finds that 'fifty years have passed / like a whistle in the wind,' and now 'among the short-tailed deer, / I strum my ch'in.'  Elsewhere he describes  himself like a figure in a painting: an old man playing his instrument as night deepens, illuminated by a moon above Dragon Mountain.   Or he can be found listening to the autumn wind in the forest trees and chanting his poems to the accompaniment of a waterfall.

You ask the plan of my life?
At roof's edge a strip of clouds,
inside the walls a ch'in.

Stephen Addiss performing 'Hito - Man's Nature' by Uragami Gyokudō

Plum blossom on snow

A friend in Japan normally posts photographs of deep snow around now, although not this year.  Interestingly, heavy snow does not appear in the classical literature of Japan.  This partly reflects the fact that the climate of Nara and Kyoto is relatively mild.  It was only later, with writers like Issa, who came from Shinano, north of the old capitals, that the experience of severe winters enters poetry.  Another reason, as Haruo Shirane explains in his book Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons, was that literature idealised nature, so that the unpleasant extremes of summer and winter were avoided in favour of spring and autumn imagery (it also gives a misleading impression of landscape, since writers of poetry rarely ventured beyond their gardens into farmland or wilderness).  The early Man'yōshūi anthology included 785 seasonal poems written in the first half of the eight century but only 67 of these concerned winter.  This pattern continued: winter poems are the least numerous of the four seasons' in each of the first six Imperial Waka Anthologies, beginning with the Kokinshū, compiled around 905 by four court poets led by Ki no Tsurayuki.

Section of the earliest extant complete manuscript of the Kokinshū

Source: Wikimedia Commons

The winter book of the Kokinshū begins at the turn of the season with a sight synonymous with autumn: bright leaves at Tatsuta River.  There follows a set of snow poems evoking feelings of coldness and loneliness, and then four poems about plum blossom on snow.  The sequence ends with the year's end, snow having given way to blossom.  Autumn and spring had many more nature topics associated with them: in spring for example, in addition to lingering snow and plum blossoms, there were mist, bush warblers, returning wild geese, green willow, yellow kerria, new herbs, wisteria and, of course, cherry blossoms.  But, as Shirane explains, winter became more popular in the late Heian and Kamakura periods, where we find poems on waterfowl like the plover, mallard and mandarin duck, which was 'thought to sleep on water so cold that frost and ice formed on its feathers.'  The plover originally became associated with winter when it was mentioned in a poem by Ki no Tsurayuki, crying in the cold river wind as the poet searched for his love.  By the time of eighth Imperial Anthology, the Shin Kokinshū (1205), there were almost as many winter poems as spring poems and the light of the winter moon was being celebrated for its cold purity, in contrast with the world below.

Sesshū Tōyō, Landscape of Four Seasons: Winter, 15th century
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Winter topics, Shirane explains, 'constructed a monochrome landscape
 that shares much with Muromachi ink painting', 
an art form of which Sesshū was the greatest exponent.

Jagg'd mountain peaks and skies ice-green

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Hunters in the Snow (Winter), 1565

According to Robert D. Denham's, Poets on Paintings: A Bibliography (2010), Brueghel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus has been the subject of at least sixty-three poems.  In addition to the well-known ones by W. H. Auden and William Carlos Williams, there have been others by, for example, Dannie Abse, Gottfried Benn, Allen Curnow, Michael Hamburger and Philip Whalen.  However, it is clear from this bibliography that Bruegel's Hunters in the Snow has also drawn an interesting range of writers: Williams again, John Berryman, Anne Stevenson, Walter De La Mare (and they keep coming: the new edition of Granta has one by Andrew Motion).  Berryman considers the hunters frozen at a moment in history and Stevenson imagines their moment of arrival as they 'pull / off their caked boots, curse the weather / slump down over stoups. . .'  Williams describes Bruegel's artistry, beginning matter-of-factly - 'The over-all picture is winter / icy mountains / in the background...' - and ending by noting the way he chose 'a winter-struck bush for his / foreground to / complete the picture.'  Walter De La Mare begins in ekphrasis, starting like Williams with the distant landscape: 'Jagg'd mountain peaks and skies ice-green / Wall in the wild, cold scene below'.  His poem ends on a mysterious note:

But flame, nor ice, nor piercing rock,
Nor silence, as of a frozen sea,
Nor that slant inward infinite line
Of signboard, bird, and hill, and tree,
Give more than subtle hint of him
Who squandered here life's mystery.

William Carlos Williams' Bruegel poems appeared posthumously in Pictures from Brueghel and other poems (1962).  Denham's bibliography lists other examples of poets who have written extended sequences or whole volumes devoted to painting.  Perhaps the most prominent of these is, R. S. Thomas, whose ‘Impressions’ in Between Here and Now (1981) include landscapes by Monet, Pissaro and Gauguin.  One of them is devoted to Cézanne’s The Bridge at Maincy which was featured in one of my earlier posts here.  There have also been whole books devoted to single artists, such as Turner and Monet.  Robert Fagles, best known for his translations of Homer, published one of these in 1978: I, Vincent: Poems from the Pictures of Van Gogh.

Denham has compiled a long list of individual poems but my impression on leafing through it is that relatively few of them have been about independent, unpeopled landscape paintings.  It is though unsurprising to find that writers have been more attracted to paintings suggesting drama, complexity or ambiguity - in the last century artists like Edward Hopper and Marc Chagall were common subjects.  Even in paintings where landscape dominates the composition, people exert a fascination (Czeslaw Milosz, reflecting on a painting by Salvator Rosa, writes of 'figures on the other shore tiny, and in their activities mysterious.')  Simple unadorned description of a what a painting shows is rare, although William Carlos Williams, advocate of 'no ideas but in things', does this in 'Classic Scene', recreating in words Charles Sheeler's 1931 view of the new Ford plant near Detroit.

Although Denham explicitly excludes from the book examples of reverse ekphrasis (paintings inspired by poems), the variety of poems listed invite speculation on ways of combining writing, painting and landscape.  It occurs to me that you could use a kind of algebra (which would need to allow for poets painting and painters writing poems): if, say, the combination of a poet, P, writing, w, about landscape, L, gives rise to a landscape poem, P.w(L), and, similarly, a landscape painting arises from an artist creating a landscape, A.c(L), then a poet writing about a landscape painting is P.w(A.c(L)).  Reverse ekphrasis involving a landscape poem would then be A.c(P.w(L)).  Here's an example of something more complicated.  John Hollander (whose visual poetry I have mentioned here before) wrote a poem about another Charles Sheeler painting, The Artist Looks at Nature (1943).  Sheeler's painting is a kind of landscape - there are grassy slopes and the walls of battlements - but it also contains an artist working on a canvas.  And though apparently painting from nature, his canvas depicts the interior of a studio.  Thus Hollander's poem could be represented as P.w(A.c(L+A.c(L'))).

Being thirsty,
I filled a cup with water,
And, behold!—Fuji-yama lay upon the water,
Like a dropped leaf!

This is Amy Lowell's imagist poem inspired by Hokusai's 'Hundred Views of Mt Fuji'.  Denham's book doesn't really get into the subject of Japanese or Chinese poetry about landscape painting, although he does mention Su Shi's ‘Two Poems on Guo Xi’s Autumn Mountains in Level Distance'. In Chinese art where the 'three perfections' (poetry, calligraphy, painting) are combined in one object, we are often not sure what came first: the poem or the painting.  Where artist and writer are one and the same, my algebraic distinctions would be meaningless. I will end here with part of another poem inspired by a Hokusai, 'Lightning Storm on Fuji' by Howard Nemerov.

Katsushika Hokusai, Rainstorm Beneath the Summit, c. 1830

                        ... the serene mountain rises
And falls in a clear cadence.  The snowy peak,
Where the brown foliage falls away, is white
As the sky behind it, so that line alone
Seems to be left, and the hard rock become
Limpid as water, the form engraved on glass.
There at the left, hanging in empty heaven,
A cartouche with written characters proclaims
Even to such as do not know the script
That this is art, not nature. ...