Ian Robertson Duncan

The narrator in the Mexican poet Octavio Paz’s prose poem, The poet’s works III, leaves his writing desk on a cold, windy, winter night to go in search of cigarettes:

when suddenly I felt – no, I didn’t feel it: it passed, quickly: The Word. […] I reached and grabbed it by the tips of its floating hair. I pulled desperately at those threads that stretched toward the infinite, telegraph wires that inevitably recede in a glimpsed landscape, a note that rises, tapers off, stretches out, stretches out…I was alone in the middle of the street, with a red feather between my livid hands.

The red feather is only a trace of the Truth, but it allows you to imagine the bird, and the possibility of flight. The telegraph wire receding in the distance expresses a connection to the spiritual, and the possibility of communication. The feather also symbolizes a quill, a writing tool. In the poet’s hands it conveys the ability and the responsibility to articulate or share his experience. The Word or the Truth is something that we can glimpse or maybe even know well, but it seems to always hover just beyond the possibility of expression. Art is a poem, painting, or piece of music that has the ability to connect us to this Truth.

In 2007 I began to study Qigong, Taiji, the Dao. When I first heard my teacher, Master Wu Zhongxian, play the qin, I was amazed by the sounds and textures. Its subtle and naked beauty moved me. I knew immediately that I wanted to learn to play.

A few months later, traveling in China with Master Wu, I had the opportunity to meet and become a student of the qin under his teacher, Master Li Mingzhong. I believe he accepted me in part because I am a painter, and because of the traditional relationship between painting and the qin.

I am still very much a novice qin player. I do not speak Chinese, or play other instruments, so learning the qin has some challenges. The more I am able to hear the language of the qin, the more I see the connection to the language of painting. In a painting I will establish a theme based on color, form and brushstroke; then I develop that theme with harmonies, repetition, and variation. Qin songs seem to develop in the same way. In both cases, each time a pattern or melody repeats, this time with a slight variation, it leads you to understand more clearly the original theme.

Painting and qin playing also teach each other about Time and Space. A painting presents itself as a single moment, but it also takes you on a journey over time, guiding your eye and mind with rhythm and color relationships. A qin song presents itself as a melodic journey, but if you can hold the whole song in your mind as if it is a single moment, it is interesting and rewarding to see the harmonies and variations as if they are arranged in relationship on a canvas.

The resonance of silk and wood, the quiet strength, the way the form of the qin relates to the body, and to Heaven and Earth…there is something unique in how all of these things come together that I am still discovering. But I know that when painting leads me to a new understanding of the world, I can bring this into my qin playing directly, and when the qin teaches me something, it is something my paintings want to know as well.

Posted in Essays |