Japanese House in Philly broken into and vandalized!!!

$2 million in damages, including to the Senju.

No punishment can suffice for a crime against art and beauty.

Surprisingly cold.

I've been quiet for a long time, but I still do my Japanese lessons every day; I've been in the diamond league on Duolingo for 250 days straight now. A sentence from yesterday has stuck with me, in that I find it kind of poetic:

谷川の水驚くほど全て買った
tanigawa no mizu ha
odoroku hodo tsumetakatta

The syllabication is off, of course, but—

the water of the mountain stream—
surprisingly cold

I find that stark and delicious. Like a plum saved for breakfast. (How would one write it? Maybe add some, to 57577 it. #hmm)

This Is Just To Say
wm carlos williams, 1938

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

A thing that's silly and works is a thing that works.

Over the years I've made fun (in my head) of Heisig for making up little phrases or sentences from kanji radicals as mnemonics for the overall meaning, but maybe I just didn't like his. Telling little stories about kanji really does help. Eg, 退屈 たいくつ taikutsu, bored:

艮 good
⻌ street
出 leaving / exiting / emerging from
尸 door

Bored: It's good in the street, so I'm out the door.

(Even better: 屈 also phonetically is shoes 靴, so I'm so out of here that I'm literally 退ing my shoes....)

Is it science, or is it art?

博. Thinking about 博物, 博覧会, 博識, 博士論文, somehow 博す and 博打—erudition and also gambling. (I guess a doctoral dissertaion always is a gamble.) 博愛.

Interesting thread on whether certain types of museum qualify as 美術館 or 博物館.

Life's been quiet for a while, and with COVID nobody's going anywhere, but I still study Japanese every day, mainly with Duolingo, jisho.org, the Imiwa? app, Henshall, NHK, etc. I'd like to pick up 扉 again, but the type is too small for my old eyes. Genki isn't quite challenging enough but would provide solid kanji and vocab practice...for when I meet my ホストファミリー. I'd like to pick up some more Japanese songs; maybe it's my years as a musician, but grammar and vocab from songs tend to stick with me. Eg, I always will associate 昴 with Meiko Kaji's "修羅の花", 古池 and 沈む with Buson, a thousand things with "地上の星", "アイドルール", "川の流れのように", "傘がない"...

Duo gives us some pretty heady sentences about economics, dictatorships, postwar reconstruction...so I can say all kinds of things I probably never will have to. Some users complain about apparent nonsense sentences, but I say, bring them on; we should be able to understand sentences that make no sense, as it's a different kind of challenge from reading material that fits into its context. We may never see a dog selling a hat, but we should be able to say we don't see one. NHK remains difficult; kanji always are a challenge, but I think I'm making some progress by giving in to Heisig's somewhat silly method of making up stories from the radicals. Some of them really insist that we do so: eg, I like to read 退屈, boredom, as what the radicals literally pictographically show: "It's good in the street, so I'm out the door." (The radicals in 退 are "good" and "street/way/path", and in 屈 they're "leaving" and "doorway". More or less.) I've read people refer to kanji as little friends, and sometimes they can be—though it certainly can be frustrating that a small change in radical can completely change the meaning, and that kanji derive from history more than from logic.

But progress is progress. A thing I love about Duolingo in particular is that I can not only study lots of languages, but also study languages in other languages, one of my favorite things to do—ie, cut English out of the equation entirely. One of the toughest things to do in language acquisition is stop first thinking of things in your native language and then translating them into your second. I consider it a feather in my student's cap when something occurs to me in some other language and it takes me a moment to figure out what it would be in English.

An issue with Duo is one common in testing, that with repetition the test-taker learns the item, rather than the principle. Some of the exmaples in Duo are so specific that to memorize the idiosyncrasies is the only way through.

And that funny feeling of being unable to read a thing but knowing what it says.

I still haven't done 書初め! Here we are, almost a month into the year. I still have my yearning to write a decent 浅き夢見じ 酔ひもせず; I did write each on newspaper and stick them on my wall, but I hesitate to insult good paper with rusty 字. (I miss studying extremely; if I ever were to get a tattoo, I think it would be of my 書 name.)

その国では体制を批判すると身の危険につながる。
If you criticize the regime in that country, you put yourself in jeopardy.

車を作るロボットを動かすコンピュータを作る工場です。
This is a factory that makes computers that control robots that make cars.

思ったより (more than expected).

My new favorite phrase is 思ったより (omotta yori), "more than one (had) thought/expected". (Just came across it on Duolingo, which I frequent for a bunch of languages, although I started for and still practice Japanese, and which I recommend, not least for its item-specific discussion spaces.) It's a simple thing, but I haven't come across it before, at least in studies, and it's a concise and elegant way of expressing that surprise. Feels lighter than, as in English, having to inflect the what as a comparative; you can just add the phrase to whatever the situation is. 思ったより面白いです。"It's more interesting than I'd expected." 思ったより高かったよ. "Dude, I didn't think it would cost that much."* 思うよりも役に立つだろうね。

*In more exact/"correct" English, 思ったより高い, I didn't think it would cost this much; 思ったより高かった, I hadn't thought it would cost that much.

雷鳴.

Thunder today. Funny, that the second kanji of a thunderclap (雷鳴, raimei) is 鳴, which also can be a chime or even a bird's cry (to chirp/sing/ring / make a small sound, 鳴る). The parts are literally a mouth (口) and a bird (鳥). Kaminari (雷) is a pretty unprepossessing kanji and might suggest a retro-fit from Chinese writing to a preexisting Japanese word—presumably related to kami (神), gods/divinity, as the concept often is—a cry of the gods—if the older form weren't 靁, same rain (雨) but with three rice fields (田) vs one. (Does this 雨 count as 雨かんむり?)

Interesting: Seems 雷 also carries a kun'yomi of ikazuchi—derivation? From Goo.jp: 「厳 (いか) つ霊 (ち) 」の意。「つ」は助詞》かみなり。なるかみ。《季 夏》 Meaning ika (厳) tsu chi (霊), つ being a particle. kaminari. narukami. (seasonal word for summer)

雷に
松籟どっと
乱れ落つ
—茅舎

ikadzuki ni / shourai dotto / midareotsu
in thunder, a sudden wind disturbs the pine trees; [needles] fall
—KAWABATA Bousha
(ish)

Speaking of that 乱れ落つ verb situation:

春の宵
身より紅紐
乱れ落つ
—三好潤子

haru no yoi / miyori beni? himo? / midareotsu
—MIYOSHI Midori (Junko)

Hmm. More to learn about this one and 紅紐. Some sources say that evening hours in spring suggest dropping a boring lover. ?

I'll have to look further into how to distinguish lightning from thunder; in Eng there's little if any overlap between the words.

お風呂 in Portuguese?

I have on a TV episode that's in Portuguese, and someone has just referred to a hot tub as the ofurô. Might this be one of the famous vocabulary crossovers between Japanese (お風呂) and Portuguese? Maybe in this case the flow was not from the Jesuits but toward them.

小澤征爾さんの名前の書き方 (or, How Ozawa writes his name).

For company while working, I have on the old (1950–1967) game show What's My Line?, each episode of which features a celebrity, each of whom, on entering the stage, writes their name on a chalkboard. Here's how the illustrious symphony conductor Seiji Ozawa* writes his:

小 澤 征 爾

Interesting to track the motion of his writing. He runs 小 into 澤. He reverses the motion of the first two dots of 三水.^† Writes the running-man radical (行人偏, gyouninben) as you would in gyousho and combines the last two strokes of 正 into a curve. The Xes in 爾 suggest there used to be something more complex within, but the character's etymology suggests that it's been written with Xes since forever.

*As it happens, Mr. Ozawa was not the celebrity on this episodes, which aired in 1963. The collective celebrity guest was Peter, Paul, and Mary.
^†Interesting, too, that さんすい means not just three-dot water but also, phonetically, sprinkled water (散水)., as if you could dip your fingertips into the suzuri and just flick them at the paper.

Bai ji shēng wù has got tensho.

Recently I've had some contact with a company called BeiGene, whose logo is in tensho:

I gather the Chinese is /bai ji sheng wu/ and that the /sheng wu/ or /shen zhou/ is biology (生物, seibutsu—or, without 学/學, shēng wù xué, then just living things)—easy enough to see the 生物 through the tensho! The source says /bai ji/ has no particular meaning, beyond perhaps a phonetic similarity to Beijing, the "northern capital" (北京; cf. in Japan 東京 Tou-kyou, the eastern capital, which in the Edo period replaced 京都, Kyou-to, the capital or capital city).

Some help from the China Trademark Office. The same company seems to have registered these:

The first two (righthand column) would be /bai ji/, then. 百済神州. 百済 seems to refer to an ancient Korean kingdom, "land of the gods" (神州)—Baekje?

面白いですよね。I'll have to work it into conversation with them, somehow.

Woke up thinking

初時雨かな

Better nine years late than never.

Surfaced, this morning, from an email I apparently didn't send to myself in 2011:

鮎の背に一抹の朱のありしごとし

Touché, 原石鼎.

鬼は外！ 福は内！ (Setsubun!)

Doing my daily Japanese reading a few minutes ago, I came across an example of  「鬼は外！」 (Demons, out!) Some Helpful Soul points out that this is said on Setsubun (節分), season-division (into Spring), which, as it happens, is today. Time to banish demons and bring in luck! I need to hit the 食料品店 (グロ・スト) , anyway, so maybe I can pick up some soybeans to wing out the door. For a demon mask, luckily, I can just use my face.  >:-D

The custom of mamemaki first appeared in the Muromachi period. It is usually performed by the toshiotoko (年男) of the household (the male who was born on the corresponding animal year on the Chinese zodiac), or else the male head of the household. Roasted soybeans (called "fortune beans" [福豆, fuku mame]) are thrown either out the door or at a member of the family wearing an Oni (demon or ogre) mask, while the people say "Demons out! Luck in!" (鬼は外! 福は内!, Oni wa soto! Fuku wa uchi!) and slam the door. This is still common practice in households but many people will attend a shrine or temple's spring festival where this is done. The beans are thought to symbolically purify the home by driving away the evil spirits that bring misfortune and bad health with them. Then, as part of bringing luck in, it is customary to eat roasted soybeans, one for each year of one's life, and in some areas, one for each year of one's life plus one more for bringing good luck for the year to come. (Wikipedia)

I could use some demon-banishing and some luck, so today is the today for me, フォ・ショ.

「お手数をお掛けして。。。」

(数 + 掛—Is there a sense here of adding to one's burdens/troubles? Hanging more troubles or tasks upon one? Jisho gives as a meaning of 手数 number of moves.)

Writing English as 句.

Since we started studying writing haiku and tanka, lo these many years ago, my in-English semi-cursive handwriting has changed a bit; now I tend to connect letters downward, as if writing a tanzaku, while writing along a baseline to the right. (Maybe I've been thinking of it because I've been studying Arabic along with my Japanese reading, and Arabic connects letters quite differently, right to left, with meaningful parts below the baseline, and also has a rich calligraphic tradition.)

This afternoon I was on a boring phone call and started doodling the word transfer as if it were tanka (right). Many of the shapes are similar, e.g.,

T, 大, 木, 下, 七, 十, tsuchi-hen
R, や, 民, 尸, maybe sousho u-kanmuri 宀
A, sousho 林
N, ん, れ
S, 乙, 弓, し, numerous hentaigana
F/E, 乍,れ, 馬, maybe hentaigana の from 能
&c.

Silly, but kinda fun, and probably decent practice for connecting in elegant and/or interesting ways.

書き初め！

It's that time of year again—kakizome, first writing! The tradition, I gather, is to write happy thoughts for the new year with ink ground from the first draw from the well. A faucet will have to do—or maybe an unopened bottle of water. Hmm. (I think the thing is to write on Jan 2, so I could make a water run, to do it right.) Then burn the writings, on the 15th or so; better apply for a bonfire permit. I've read that the festival in which 書初め are burned is 左義長, Sagichou, the major shrine being Tsurugaoka-Hachimanguu, in Kamakura.

I wonder what might be the history of 左義長—any connection with the ancient government post of Minister of the Left? Or with the (now defunct) 1000-year-old ginkgo tree to the left of the temple stairs? The ja.wikipedia page is helpful, but it's tough reading for me....

Dancing the 単語.

chatting at the store

somehow turns to business cards

「名刺」 count: 1

嘗て。

かつて。That's a new one. I've been encountering lots and lots of vocab that's new to me, but you'd think, in studying 短歌 (tanka) and 昔話 (folk tales), I'd have some across かつて somewhere. Once, used to be. (The classic start to a folk tale is 昔々, mukashi mukashi, equivalent to once upon a time—different sense of once? I do see examples of it as interchangeable with 昔. かつては、ここに教会があった。There used to be a church here.) Apparently, with a negative verb it can refer to something that hasn't happened yet, never has, I guess as もう can. かつて僕のだった、これ。これはかつて僕のじゃない？ I have seen (negative) かつてない; Weblio.jp says for katsute nai, 「今までにない、過去に前例がない、といった意味の言い回し」—not up to now, not so far, no such precedent.

From 嘗て. Henshall doesn't list the kanji; the MS IME does substitute 嘗 for かつ in "かつて". Variant kanji is 甞. katsute　嘗て, nameru, kokoromiru... なめる and licking? To be followed up on, sometime when it's not (already) almost 7am...

会社で働くのは、frei macht か。

Hmm. Turns out アルバイト (arubaito, part-time work, from German Arbeit) isn't the only Japanese loan-word from German. Must follow up (when not still working on work at 3am).

Category:Japanese_terms_borrowed_from_German

Who left the light in (the branch)?

Someone on a message board has just pointed out, in an example sentence, a difference in meaning between the intransitive る and transitive す verb forms. Recalls a tanzaku (短冊) haiku I've had around the house for years:

一枝に	hito eda ni	in one branch
光のこして	hikari nokoshite	light remains
里の春	sato no haru	spring in the village (back home)

The straightforward reading is that (sun)light just remains, but shifting to transitive—what?—implies a subject, someone who is leaving the light there? Certainly, a new way of looking at the poem.

Proverb:

虎は死して皮を留め
人は死して名を残す

tora ha shishite, kawa o todome;
hito ha shishite, na o nokosu

a tiger dies and leaves its skin;
a person dies and leaves their name (o nokosu)

The person (人) leaves (残す) the object (名を).

を vs が: "結果だけが残る！！！"
—only the results/consequences remain (ga nokoru)!

That light, in that one branch—has someone left it there?

才, 材, オ.

才, 材. オ. 歳.

才能, 才気, 才女, 才子, 才人, 才覚, 才力. 財 (which Henshall says a bit dubiously is composed of both shells/money 貝 and, ideographically and phonetically, a dam 才).

Talent meets age. Maybe in this case of age it's just a tl;dw ("too long; didn't write") form of 歳, with the cross-stroke recalling 戈 (and maybe 矛). Or is there a connection between age/experience and increasing aptitude/capability?
Of course, similarity in structure, appearance, feel, or sound doesn't necessarily mean any type of thing.

(The image is of spears/pikes 矛, from the Shimane Museum of Ancient Izumo 島根県・立古代・出雲・歴史・博物館. 才, 弋, and 矛 all seem to involve weaponry, be it spears, halberds, or bows.)

才弾ける?  (a snapping string? 琴を弾く? 引く? 弾ける? 弾傷?)

Will have to suss out all this.

(Learning a lot from Duolingo and spending a lot of time asking questions on the message boards there. Doesn't hold a candle to studying with 先生, but better to stay engaged than not to!)

死亡 、希望。

Nothing but drafts in ages! I keep reading about various things but being pulled away by something else before hitting publish. One of these years.

Have been having a great time with Duolingo; a thing I enjoy is learning/practicing a language in another language, to help me escape English-language patterns of thinking. (I did for years largely live in French, so those patterns also are ingrained.) Duolingo mainly teaches from English but offers bunches of other language–first content, so there's much fun to be had, and it's perfect for doing some exercises in down time or in anxious time, when a person needs something to fidget with. Or in bed, via iPad.

Anyway, I jump in this morning to leave myself a note to look into 望. I have on News 24, trying to pick up whatever I can, and I've noticed shibou (死亡, decease, demise) and kibou (希望, wish, hope). 

亡 recalls 亡くなる/無くなる (to die / to be lost, to "become nothing", both of which are funnily appropriate because く looks like the > sign used in computer coding that means piping-to or resulting-in.) 望 is のぞ・む、のぞ・ましい、のず・み, wish or desire, 望み通り, just as one would wish. Recalls Hamlet, ruminating on death by suicide as "a consummation devoutly to be wished". 

I also am seeing in 望 rarity, the full moon, or the middle of the (eighth lunar) month—Shakespeare again, the Ides (of March, in Caesar's case)—bougetsu, surname Mochi-zuki (月—why mochi?). 望外 bougai, unexpected (外, outside of). 望遠鏡 bouenkyou, a telescope (the 望-distant-mirror).

No time to investigate now, so I'll have to take a rain-check on the full moon, but...note to self! 

七転八起! (or, never say die!)

I'm thinking of writing 七転八起 (shichiten hakki)—”Fall down seven times; get up eight.” This often is heard/seen in English, but it's a long time since I've put brush to paper, so why not? (No, it doesn't exactly make sense, but, really, what is sense, anyway?)

A thing I like a lot about learning kanji is the intersections of their meanings. In this case, we have 起, which I first learned as okiru/okosu, in the sense of awakening / getting out of bed or "knocking someone up"—i.e., awakening someone. Here, it's literally to rise after falling.

I've done a lot of falling down for a long time now and am in the process of getting up, so it seems appropriate. Shichi and hachi both are relatively simple—and hachi, of course, is of particular significance to me—so they have to be really right.

Examples below—thoughts? #八Rising

(Note: Work in progress; images are coded to link through to the source, but I'll have to fix. I'll look through them all after a nap; better just to post what I have, as I have dozens of drafts never finished!)

1. Standard kaisho, 2x2 format, right to left.	2. Somewhere between kaisho and gyousho, single column, top to bottom. The sweeping righthand stroke of 八 cuts off the 已 of 起; I've had the same issue with 八 when writing it 2x2. Love the hooks (そりはね, sorihane)!
3.	4.
5.	6.
7.	8.
9.	10.

Iro-wha?!

Practicing examples of 「浅き夢見じ営もせず」 from The Book (書道字典, Shodou Jiten) and かな精習 (Kana Seishuu). Just on pages of a telephone book, but I have a thought that I'll hang them along the loft wall upstairs and then maybe swap out the characters whenever I'm able to write them better. The trouble is that I'm attracted to so many styles and would like the series to be coherent, at least a little....

I'm thinking of breaking them up as

浅き (asaki)
夢 (yume)
見じ (miji, mishi)
営も (ei mo, wehi mo, yoi mo)
せず (sezu, sesu)

I've had a project of this kind in mind for years and have practiced variations with fude-pen, and ultimately I'd like to add the other parts of the Iroha throughout the house, but—especially with a text so important—I don't trust my aesthetic judgment. 頑張りましょうね。

I haven't blogged in a while—or at least hit "post" on anything I've been thinking of—but I still exist. In some form. :-D

♥
木蔭

Punctuation!!!

A few minutes ago I was typing 「おめでとうございます」, and the Windows Japanese IME asked me which of these I meant:

おめでとうございます！
おめでとうございます！！
or
おめでとうございます！！！

I don't know whether it's assessing my enthusiasm or my developmental age. Maybe the next generation of emoji will ask you to input smile intensity, on a scale or by degree.

Getting lost in the park.

Just had a fun moment while studying in the park with some Japanese materials—Tobira, kanji quiz apps, NHK, Akutagawa's short story "鼻". (The JLPT registration period, Aug–Sep, always inspires.)

Just as my quiz app served me "迷"—"to lose one's way"—a little girl toddled up to me in the grass and waved hello. I said, "Hey, there. 道に迷っちゃったんですか?" There wasn't a 道 to have lost, but I think she got the idea.

The kanji 迷 (MEI, mayo・u) is a favorite of mine, for its mnemonic. It's the movement/road radical (SHIN'NYOU, 之繞), then "rice" (米), which per Henshall may be phonetic or derive from "unfinished" (未), suggesting indecisiveness. As 米 also stands for the US, though, to me this is an American in the older streets of Japan: utterly lost. Perplexed. Like rice in the road. He MEI never figure it out. (笑)

To quote the JLPT, 「いい天気ですから、散歩しましょう。」　
でも、道に迷わないように気を付けようね。

Snakes in the gate! Or insects?

I'm trying to figure out the kanji on the bottom of a mug I inherited from some person terminated by my employer several years ago—a pretty mug, wave-patterned red with a gold dragon on each side, facing one another opposite the handle, with an inset tea infuser and a lid/stand and saucer. (I'm sorry for the person who left it, but I'm happy to have it. It's pleasant to drink coffee from dragons.)

The logo on the bottom is an encircled dotted double mountain, with the letters MTPI, and below that two kanji. The second of the kanji is 通 つう tsuu; that's easy. The first should be easy—it's just 門 with 虫 inside, 14畫—but I can't find any trace of it, in either Japanese or Chinese kanji resources. You'd think it would show up as a variant, at least, or a simplification of something older.

Fun: The older (pre-simplified) form of 虫 apparently is 蟲—just the same kanji, but three times—insect, insect, insect!!! Jisho.org defines it as an insect but also as "temper"; there must be more of a story behind that. Henshall says little but that the basic kanji represents a partially coiled snake and that anciently snakes and insects were not differentiated; I find the latter part hard to believe. If one or the other were in your bed, you'd know the difference.

The Book includes the kanji 門+虫—examples of it as written by eight calligraphers—but doesn't give a reading for it. (I'm sure it's indexed by sound, but that's not helpful.) My suspicion, given that 虫 can suggest a serpent or worm, is that the kanji mean something like "dragon pattern". Jisho gives variants for 竜, but nothing seems likely. Mysterious....

A minor but joyful occurrence.

So, I'm moving some objects, and a label on a thing I overturn says MADE IN KOREA.
Nothing unusual about that, but
looking at the word Korea, I read it as 韓国.

(My reading the English word Korea as かんこく is exciting and worth wondering about, for me. Also, What exactly that appellation means and to whom....)

A blazing autumn for us all.

Thinking about forms of prostration, in the last post, gave me the fun image of fully "prostrating" (in the Catholic sense) oneself in a 4.5-mat chashitsu. It would take up most of the room, and one's papers would fall from one's obi into the inset stove.... I feel a poem coming on!

四畳半
炉に懐紙落ち
暑い秋

yojouhan
ro ni kaishi ochi
atsui aki

face-down on the mats
papers slip into the fire—
a very warm autumn!

...or something like that. I was trying to do something more tankaësque, with 炎秋になり, or at least a good 哉, and to play with a too-hot fire vs the cold of an autumn/winter tearoom, but maybe later. There must be set phrases in classical poetry to describe warm/mild winters. Maybe a specific plant or bird. I'll have to check some kigo dictionaries.

And I'm not sure what I did with 落 was legal. It feels right, though—continuous—and fits the meter. I think I'd prefer 秋暑い. Hmm.

真礼 and 土下座—bowing or prostrating oneself?

In lessons in chanoyu 茶の湯, Tea ceremony, we've done three kinds of bow (rei 礼), aligning with the shin-gyou-sou hierarchy of formality:

• the shin (真, "true"?) bow, the most formal, for entering and exiting the space, etc
• the gyou (行) "moving" bow, about halfway down, as for passing tea, or 道具 Tea implements for perusal, to the next guest
• the sou (草) "grass" bow, just touching the mat and nodding as an acknowledgment (eg, while passing food), especially when you need things to keep moving

I've only heard these terms, so I can't be sure; the bow on entering and leaving class itself may in fact be a 師礼 (shirei), a bow to the teacher, though how that would differ from shin, I'm not sure.

I gather the shin-gyou-sou paradigm applies to other contexts in Japanese culture; certainly it's there in calligraphy (書道)—kaisho 楷書 as, though maybe not most formal, standard; 行書 as the more fluid "cursive script"; 草書 as writing so stylized and/or introspective as often to be illegible.

Recently I've learned of the phrase dogeza 土下座, which is literally down-ground-position but can be translated as "prostrating oneself"; in practice it seems similar to the shin 真 bow. How are these different? Are they?

In Tea class, the shin bow is done from seiza (kneeling), hands fully down on the mat at chest level, fingers and thumb together, elbows out, nose almost to the mat. It's measured and respectful in Tea, though I guess not always in other contexts:

To me, the English phrase to prostrate oneself means something else entirely: It's a body position derived from Catholicism, expressing total subjugation, repentance, humility. Body face-down on the floor, feet together, arms either at the sides or out at a right angle, to form a cross:

But a search turns up far more instances of 土下座 as prostration, so I must just be thinking of it from my own background.

愚 is what makes it tape instead of paper.

So, I wanted to write iki (息, breath/breathing) for my desk at work, as a reminder. (I can be kinda intense; I forget to breathe.) I was paging through The Book for examples—kokoro radical, ten strokes—and happened onto this bit of wonderfulness.

The writer is Zangzhen, apparently considered one of the two greatest calligraphers of the Tang dynasty (7th to 10th centuries) and particularly good at cursive, fluid writing. ("The crazy Zhang and the drunk Su"—just my kind of crowd.)

I love looking through these examples by the old masters; I wouldn't say you can feel the person who was writing, but you can feel the energy with which the writing was done. Some writings are Correct and authoritative; some are somber or subdued; many are playful or energetic; some are made to look like something else. There's an expressiveness to kanji that English, love it though I do, doesn't afford.

The kanji in question isn't iki; it's one I found along the way. Not surprisingly, it's 愚 (gu), foolishness—in this expression, a foolishness which literally surpasseth the margins. I enjoy its lightness, indifference, dancingness. I loved writing yama in gyousho for the same reason: It always seemed to be running. (行、走)

I'd better write 愚, too, for around the house. Or maybe have it tattooed onto my face.