Go Through the Door, and Find (Bring) Your Magic

[Image: untitled landscape by Ma Yuan (c. 1160-1225); spotted it here This is almost certainly not the painting referred to in the Alan Watts passage below; on the other hand, his “reference,” as though to a specific painting, was only glancing/ambiguous. So we can choose, right?]

From whiskey river:

I live in a world that is completely seamless between the two. Fantasy is the real story. The world in which we live is structured from notions that are completely fabricated; your clothes, your wallet, that we all agree that pieces of paper are worth something. Geography is a complete fabrication. Where does Mexico start and America end? From space, nowhere. We agree to kill each other, to tax each other, to shame each other from notions that are complete fabrications. To me, those are harmful fantasies. Whereas my fantasies are liberating.

(Guillermo Del Toro [source: nothing canonical])

…and:

The Farm When I Was Five

The most magic thing
was the pump in the backyard.
And a dipper to drink from.
For a long time the pump
was as tall as I was
and I used to make it do its magic
even when I wasn’t thirsty.

The sound of the water
coming up from a dark somewhere
was a hollow roaring noise
that broke suddenly loose
and splashed a crystalline miracle
on the darkening cement.

Grandma always said,
“Stop wasting the water!”

I didn’t waste it, Grandma.
There is this poem.

(Grace Butcher [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Where the Poems Come From Now That I Ride a Motorcycle

They don’t come from the sun
so much anymore—
or not from the sun alone
but from he glint of sun on chrome.

And not so much
from the dark roads
as from the unrolling
of the roads with a sound
like wind.

And sometimes now from
the way the quiet stars
blow back behind me
and I have no thought at all
till later.

I notice how everything is changing:
nothing comes from where it used to.
I make decisions at crossroads
I have never seen before.
So does the wind.

The directions we are heading
have not yet even been named.

(Grace Butcher [source])

…and:

We feel, from a Western standpoint, that haiku are unfinished. They are simply titles; first lines of something that could go on to elaborate and express everything. But in this kind of artistry, one leaves the best part unsaid, because the work of the poet is not to impress everybody with how clever he is, and leave them speechless, but to evoke something in the listener. In exactly the same way, the art of the painter–in the tradition of Sung Chinese painting–is to leave something to the beholder’s imagination; hence, there is what is called “one-corner painting.”

A painter like Mahiwon [i.e., Ma Yuan]–or Byon, as he is known in Japanese–is a master of one-corner painting. He indicates a line of hills somewhere near the top, and down at the bottom there is a single drifting boat and a fisherman. This is all there is. The path, as it were, comes to an end in the parsley. To understand this, you have to go back to childhood. Remember how as a child you loved to explore paths and get right down among the stalks of grasses and weeds, to see where it all goes? One of the eternal children’s stories is that you were one day walking along a little lane and discovered a door in a wall that you had never seen before. You opened it, and it led into a magical garden where all the bushes were covered in jewels, and there were marvelous birds and fantastic songs. And you came out because you had to get home in time for dinner, and the next day you looked for that door again but you couldn’t find it anywhere. You knew it was there–it was just between this fence and that fence. But today it isn’t there. And yet somehow it is always there.

So, for every child there is always a kind of funny place that leads to somewhere else, and you don’t figure out exactly where it leads because that would spoil it. You mustn’t know. And all this haiku poetry, and this kind of painting that the Sung artists so marvelously mastered, seeks to evoke that sense of what I would call possibility or potentiality, without actually filling in any details. And that is real magic.

(Alan Watts [source])

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