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| Chen Hongshou, After Wang Meng, ca. 1650. |
Drinking Wine
Tao Ch'ien
I live here in a village house without
all that racket horses and carts stir up,
and you wonder how that could ever be.
Wherever the mind dwells apart is itself
a distant place. Picking chrysanthemums
at my east fence, I see South Mountain
far off: air lovely at dusk, birds in flight
returning home. All this means something,
something absolute: whenever I start
to explain it, I forget words altogether.
--translation by David Hinton
The painting and the poem touch on two very different versions of the Chinese past. Chen Hongshou's painting itself is after Wang Meng--a painter from from the Yuan (1279-1638) whose work manifest many of the same tensions that Hongshou felt in his own times (the trials of dynastic change, loss of a vital past). Chen Hongshou conveys this through the energy and concentration of his image--he makes us feel the past as he himself must have felt it. (Note the precarious placement of the house on the spit of land near the water, and the massive, gnarled hillside looming above.) Tao Ch'ien's poem, by contrast, presents country life with a vision that celebrates its peace and solitude. And Tao Ch'ien no doubt had these feelings--but we also know that his day to day life was one of much hardship. In other words, the vision came at a price. And yet he achieved it beautifully. It's the contrast--the back and forth--between these worlds of feeling and meaning...
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