THE EXISTENCE-TISSUE is whole, but it is not complete, never complete. Seamist drifting, ridgelines writhing and swelling, dynasties rising and falling: dragon-form existence rustles, opening through awareness. It keeps moving, always moving. It’s never satisfied. And there’s more. Who could have imagined here in the beginning, all assumptions and ideas about things forgotten, here before all those assumptions ever existed—who could have imagined anything so unlikely and impossible? But it’s true: this existence-tissue wants to recognize itself, wants to celebrate and explain itself. It may seem recklessly anthropomorphic to speak of existence having intentions like this. But the concept of anthropomorphism presumes human consciousness is fundamentally different from everything else. The Cosmos is driven by its urges, and our human urges partake of those deeper movements, are particular instances of them, continuations of them. And what else could the restlessness of existence, its life, its constant motion of fact feeding on fact—what else could it be called but hunger or want?
Although this sounds suspect in the Western tradition, it is the cultural assumption in ancient China. As we will see over the course of this book, this assumption suffuses Stone-Waves’ painting, and it appears explicitly as 意 (thought/intent) in the second line of the painting’s poem:
意 might be translated provisionally as “thoughts” or “intentions,” but here it is unclear where to locate these thoughts because the sentences lack subjects, which is normal in classical Chinese poetry. On the one hand, the lines seem to be describing Inkstone-Wander’s mental state as he scratches his head in wonder over the vast and empty heavens, feeling in an indescribable way the four limitless distances stretching out from the heights where he is standing. But the second line’s grammar suggests thoughts could just as easily refer to the icy heights, or perhaps to the four vistas surrounding those cold mountaintop heights.
In fact, it is both of these possibilities simultaneously, for 意 is a philosophical term that refers to the “intentionality/intelligence/desire” that shapes the ongoing cosmological process of change and transformation. This is not intelligence in the sense of a divine presence. Instead, it is the inherent ordering capacity infusing the existence-tissue, and so it exists not in any divine or teleological way, but in an entirely empirical way, much as modern science describes with its fundamental principles and laws; though the rhetoric of science renders that “intelligence” lifeless, when it might just as easily and consistently be conceived as elementally alive. 意 is a capacity shared by human thought and emotion as well as wild landscape and indeed the entire Cosmos, and so it reveals the Chinese assumption that the human and nonhuman form a single tissue that “thinks” and “wants.”
Indeed, the term meaning “culture,” especially “literary culture,” is 文 (wen), which originally referred to a design appearing on a surface (veins in rock, ripples on water), and 意 was the underlying force creating those patterns. 文 applies in its largest sense to the patterns of the Cosmos, created by 意. Those patterns include such things as the patterns of stars, seasons, life and death, the diverse array of the ten thousand things, and finally, as another of those “natural” patterns, civilization: philosophy, writing, calligraphy, painting, etc.
Existence, when there might just as well be none: the sheer presence of materiality, vast and deep, everything and everywhere. Existence rustles. It wonders. It wants to recognize itself, wants orientation. It must, for it evolved animals like us that feel compelled to do such things. Recognition, orientation: how could it begin? A cairn, perhaps. Stones gathered, the largest few settled on flat earth, and the rest built up from there: slowly, one stone at a time, keeping things whole. A cairn is mute and elemental as empty awareness. It orients. It recognizes, and means in a sense everything around it, for where does it end? Its extent includes all of that elsewhere. It recognizes, but says nothing. Nothing about the landscape it orients around itself: distances of rivers and mountains. It orients and recognizes, and yet remains empty in a strange way, for it is about everything other than itself. It seems perfect, seems complete and still and whole celebrating the existence-tissue here in the beginning.
It’s the simplest place in the world, this beginning, for the complications of memory and identity, thought and story and myth are perfectly absent. And it makes sense that the earliest art forms would be close to this beginning place, the existence-tissue just learning how to recognize itself, how to celebrate itself. A cairn, perhaps. Or petroglyphs scattered through the planet’s landscape, images chiseled across the burnt-ochre patina of boulders and cliffwalls: wanders and wave-forms, faces with eyes that light up at dusk on winter solstice, bear prints and fish and bighorn sheep, spirals and snakes, people and stars. Fabricated in the midst of earth’s vast sun-drenched landscape out of the landscape’s simplest elements, stone chiseling form into stone, they feel like art executed here at the very beginning. They feel like existence rustling, decorating itself with lightning and egret and sun, with wavelength festoon, wander-deep confetti, eye-lit celebration:
