[lit-ideas] Re: The Myth of Wu-Tao-tzu
- From: Mike Geary <gearyservice@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 8 Jan 2014 15:02:01 -0600
I was unfamiliar with all this. Thanks for posting it Tor.
Mike Geary
On Sun, Jan 5, 2014 at 1:07 PM, Torgeir Fjeld <torgeir_fjeld@xxxxxxxx>wrote:
> Sven "Exterminate All the Brutes" (*) Lindqvist was born in Stockholm in
> 1932. He holds a PhD in History of literature from Stockholm University.
> This is an excerpt from a piece written while a cultural attaché at the
> Swedish embassy in Beijing, China, in 1960-61:
>
> "One day the Tang-artist Wu Tao-tzu appraised a recently completed mural
> of his. He clapped his hands, the gates of the temple opened, and he
> entered into his work. The gates closed behind him.
>
> We often speak about art appreciation (/einfühlung/), but rarely in a
> concrete manner. Only very young children tend to understand what it
> entails. One hasn't "penetrated" a work of art until one has made the banal
> mistake of confusing fiction with reality. ...
>
> In the mountains to the West of Beijing there's a cavern with a gilded
> Buddha sculpture. According to local myth it's a real human being whose
> expressive face has been overlaid with a thin sheath of gold. Those who
> listen can hear his heart beating.
>
> The same dream speaks from this legend as from the story of Wu Tao-tsu: To
> be from within that which can only be apprehended from without. Art is
> merely a gilded material brushed onto reality so as to fixate it. Under the
> surface there's a living human being, introvert and maintained by the
> golden surface.
>
> ...
>
> In prison I asked for permission to paint.
>
> Permission was granted.
>
> I painted a small landscape onto the cell wall.
>
> It encompassed almost everything I had enjoyed in life: Mointains and
> rivers, oceans and clouds, deep forests. A small train ran at the center of
> the painting, driven by a steam locomotive. It approached a tall mountain
> and the locomotive had already entered the tunnel.
>
> But the wardens wouldn't leave me alone.
>
> Finally I thought it was time to end the misery. If they wouldn't even
> allow such innocent artictic games I would have to make use of the more
> serious arts that I had devoted many years of my life to master.
>
> For a moment I stood up, holding my breath.
>
> Then I politely asked my wardens to wait while I entered into the small
> train in the picture to check on something.
>
> They laughed and let me continue.
>
> Then I made my fire and stepped into my image, entered into the small
> wagon and was driven by the train into the tunnel. The steam from the
> locomotive flowed like a cloud out of the tunnel and hid the picture. When
> the smoke cleared the image was gone.
>
> The wardens were left in a state of great confusion."
>
> Lindqvist, Sven, /The Myth of Wu Tao-tzu/, Stockholm, 1967, pp. 5-8.
>
>
> (*) A translation of the Swedish /Utrota varenda jävel/, 1996. The
> following is from wikipedia: Lindquist's later works tend to focus on the
> subjects of European imperialism, colonialism, racism, genocide and war,
> analysing the place of these phenomena in Western thought, social history
> and ideology. These topics are not uncontroversial. In 1992, Lindqvist was
> embroiled in heated public debate, when his book /Exterminate all the
> Brutes/ was attacked for its treatment of the Second World War and the
> Holocaust. Opponents accused Lindqvist of reducing the extermination of the
> Jewish people to a question of economical and social forces, thereby
> disregarding the impact of Nazi ideology and anti-Semitism and what they
> viewed as the unique historical specificity of the Holocaust. Some of the
> harshest attacks were launched by Per Ahlmark, who declared Lindqvist to be
> a "Holocaust revisionist". This prompted a furious response by Lindqvist,
> who considered it a defamatory smear -- at no point had he ever called into
> question the Nazi responsibility for, or the number of dead in, the
> Holocaust. Regarding the original dispute, Lindqvist retorted that his main
> argument was correct: the Nazi quest for Lebensraum had at its core been an
> application of the expansionist and racist principles of imperialism and
> colonialism, but for the first time applied against fellow Europeans rather
> than against the distant and dehumanized peoples of the Third World.
> However, he agreed that the long tradition of anti-Semitism in European and
> Christian thought had given the anti-Jewish campaign of the Nazis a further
> ideological dimension, and amended later editions of the book to better
> reflect this.
>
>
> Mvh / Yours,
>
>
> Torgeir Fjeld
> Gdansk, Poland
>
>
> Blogs: http://phatic.blogspot.com // http://norsketegn.blogspot.com
> Web: http://independent.academia.edu/TorgeirFjeld
>
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