In Other Words

Hot day in the district. Escalators and elevator outage at the U Street Metro Station . At the bottom of that inactive escalator, spotting a hugely pregnant woman walking up, MAD offered to carry up her two hugely heavy bags of groceries. She didn't speak English and MAD doesn't speak whatever she speaks, but somehow the offer was communicated and accepted. At the top, she offered her thanks with a bottle of iced tea and her hand. Sometimes worlds can be communicated without words.

I was on my way to the Freer Gallery's Writing, Carving and Rubbing: China's Calligraphic Arts. A peaceful quiet gallery providing a cool refuge from the heat and crowds outdoors contained examples of Chinese calligraphy. Inscriptions on animal bones and tortoise shells made for purposes of divination morphed into lines of communication and became one of the four arts .

The exhibit traces the development of the six major types of script which began with oracle-bones between the 14th and 11th centuries B.C.E. Having read Peter Hessler's Oracle Bones I was delighted to be able to see an example of a turtle shell with the carvings - only to read the description which identified the carvings as a good fake. At least I got to see what it was supposed to look like!

The scripts - which continued sequentially with Seal, Clerical, Cursive, Running and Standard are presented in the form of rubbings, scrolls and carvings. Even though I may have seen them all before separately, seeing them together made me aware of the lovely differences between these types. I learned about the eight different brush-strokes called radicals that make up standard calligraphy, the version that every child learns in school and saw the Four Treasures of the Scholar's Studio.


But get this: because none of the rubbings, paintings or carvings are translated as part of the exhibit, I was forced to look at them purely as visual art and ignore their original content. The lines on the paper took on meanings to me through the feelings I experienced while looking. No words or thoughts got in the way.

Twice in one day.