One persistent thought about works of art is that they offer us something significant that cannot be put into words. One very general way of putting this point, a way that ranges across the arts from the abstract arts of absolute music or non-figurative painting to the most concrete arts of portrait painting or epic poetry, is that art is ineffable. That which is ineffable is that which cannot in principle be put into words, and yet that which is ineffable is seemingly also what is most important in our experience of the arts. If what mattered in the experience of the arts were effable, if it could be put into words, then it would seem to follow that the arts and artworks are unnecessary; a description of a piece of music or a poem would convey whatever we would need or want to know and experience. Nor is ineffability limited to the arts: major lines of Christian theology, for example, treat God as ineffable in the sense that we cannot say, at least not fully, what His nature and characteristics are. The best we can do is approach God through consideration of what He is not, that is, not finite, not limited not subject to causality, etc. The thought of ineffability is centrally carried in the West by the use that Saint Augustine made of Plotinus in characterizing God as a successor to the Neoplatonic One that the soul arrives at only with sustained, strenuous efforts on the rarest occasions. As Augustine put it in a sermon, however we might try to understand God through analogies and comparisons, we nonetheless can and must maintain the sense of “the ineffableness, the unutterable quality of the divine greatness”. Indeed, major aspects of human life, such as the physical abilities, and aspects of perception, such as qualities of light or gradations of textures, seem to ‘ineffable’ in the sense that we cannot exhaustively describe what we are acquainted with.
Another way in which the thought of ineffability arises distinctively in the arts is when an artwork seems especially successful—poignant; moving, meaningful, etc.—while also seeming markedly simpler than what usually counts as an instance of its genre. So an artistic painting that consists of a few strokes is simpler than a ‘typical’ representational painting of, say, a landscape, which will consist of hundreds of brushstrokes, a focus or several foci, secondary features, details, a foreground, middleground, and background, ordered spatial relations among objects, etc. etc. One can readily think of analogous examples in poetry and music. Here the thought is that a typical work will offer a great deal of material for recognition, analysis, and reflection, while the simple work just ‘is what it is’, and so offers no footholds for exploration, just bare recognition and perceptual confrontation.
Among the world’s greatest artistic paintings, one stands out as supremely ineffable in the sense of offering only a simple, bare recognition of seemingly trivial objects: the 13th century Ch’an Buddhist painting of Muqi known as 6 Persimmons. In the following I’ll offer an account of this incomparable work that aims to show in what senses the work is ineffable. My claim will be that the work’s meaning is both ineffable and that the work is about ineffability. The account will be in three parts: first, I’ll attempt to analyze the work formally, that is, to describe its composition and handling of materials; second, I’ll sketch the cultural and philosophical background of the work as an artistic expression of aspects of Ch’an Buddhism, as well as of its roots in Mahayanist philosophy; third, I’ll introduce recent philosophical work on ineffability, in particular significant contributions by Graham Priest, A. W. Moore, and Silvia Jonas, with the aim of showing how Muqi’s manner of composing the picture and handling the ink express core concepts of Buddhism and generate the picture’s heightened effect of ineffability.
Formal Analysis of 6 Persimmons:
6 Persimmons is traditionally attributed to Muqi, a Chinese Ch’an (Buddhist) painter of the mid-13th century during the later part of the Southern Song dynasty. Little of Muqi’s work survives, and what survives is in Japan, as Muqi’s work and Ch’an painting generally, with its seeming simplicity of subject, lack of refinement, and rejection of major aspects of traditional Classical Chinese painting, found little favor in China, though was greatly appreciated in Japan, where Muqi is considered one of the supremely great East Asian artists.
The sides of the painting are all a little over a foot long, with the vertical sides approximately an inch and a half longer than the horizontals. The painting depicts six persimmons arranged in a horizontal near-line approximately a third of the way up the surface. The background is wholly left untreated, although there are small incidental and seemingly accidental markings, most prominently some short diagonal drips on the far right. In its current state the painting is mounted on a long cloth scroll whose upper and lower sections consist of identical floral patterns, and whose middle section is a bare brownish-beige fabric. Immediately bordering the painting on its horizontal edges are swaths of a brown floral patterned cloth. The upper swath is approximately twice the thickness of the lower, and this, together with the placement of the painting uncentered and somewhat towards the lower edge of the beige background, gives the sense that there’s a kind of nesting of a dynamic balancing of depiction with blank spaces: the fruit is below the center line of the painting, and the painting is lowered from center, so that emptiness as it were gains a kind of compensatory quantitative strength over against objectness. The large-scale ordering principle accordingly seems to be a balancing, weighting, and/or counter-posing of object and emptiness. Considered as a group, the persimmons are positioned off-center towards the right, with an impression of their self-containment and a kind of relaxed or neutral relationship with the left edge of the support; while on the right the persimmons seem to impinge upon the area governed by the canvas’s edge.
I’ll refer to the six persimmons by numbers counting from left. At a glance all but #3 seem to be arrayed on a line. #3 is plainly a short distance in front of the line, and there is a gap between #1 and #2 on the left, and #4-6 on the right, though the gap is too small to accommodate #3. #2-#5 are all rendered with interior washes, all different, that provide some sense of surface color and texture. Although only monochrome black ink is used, the thin wash of #2 renders it nearly naturalistic, with some sense of the fruit’s volumetric swells. Setting aside the two ends, the ghostly #1 and #6, one notices upon close examination that there is no occlusion among #2-#5. The avoidance of occlusion is particularly striking at two points: oddly straight on the vertical, the left edge of #5 seems to have retreated in order to avoid touching #4; and, in comparison with the mostly slightly oblique stems, the stem of #3 seems to have rotated counter-clockwise, again as if to avoid occluding the bottom right of #2.
By contrast, there does seem to be some sort of occlusion at the ends between #1 and #2 and between #5 and #6. But the ‘ghosts’ lack of surface color largely dissipates what would other be the firm spatial relation established by occlusion; one cannot straight off tell whether a blank solid is in front of or behind a colored solid when their areas seem to overlap. On the left the sense that the ‘ghost’ is slightly behind #2 is cued by the relatively backward placement of its bottom edge, stem, and especially its sepals. Yet on the right, where the cues and so the placement of the ghostly #6 are similar to the left’s, Muqi has #6’s sepals in front of the colored body of #5! This is the single instance in the painting of occlusion that unambiguously cues the spatial relation between persimmons.
What then is the spatial ordering near-to-far among the persimmons? #3 is unambiguously closest. Our initial impression that the other five are in a line is unsettled first of all by the ghost’s play of (non-) occlusion. #2 looks to be slightly forward of the remaining four, although that impression is haunted by transferring the force of the right ghost’s spatial dis-location to the left end. The relation between #3 and #4 is a further puzzle, due to the #4’s saturated ink surface, which seems to flatten it into a near-2-dimensional shape. The saturation in #4’s flattened, quasi-rectangular outline effects a visual spread that is intensified by #5’s seemingly retreating left edge (for an account of this sort of dynamic see Arnheim pp. 438-40).
Each of the four non-ghosts is saturated with ink to a different degree. It was commonly asserted by Chinese painters and connoisseurs that “if you have ink, you have all five colors” (Silbergeld p. 27), and the most naturalistically rendered, #2, in particular seems to induce a hallucinatory sense of seeing orange in the black ink. The dramatic individualizing variety of the depictions of the four central persimmons participates in the perennial interest in Chinese painting for diversity within sameness (p. 46) with the spectrum of differences between the relatively naturalistic #2 and the near-flat plane of #4, but the addition of two ghosts puts pressure on the conception of sameness: what do the two ends have to do with the four middle fruits? What makes a persimmon a persimmon? And how is sameness secured through perception?
A crucial final (and as far as I can tell hitherto unremarked) feature concerns the implied viewer’s point of view. One’s first impression is that the persimmons are observed from a single, unmoving point of view perhaps two or three feet from the support, with the eye slightly above the fruit. However, as with #6, Muqi has rendered #3’s sepals so as to unsettle the seemingly fixed spatial orientation. For more of #3’s sepals are shown, so as to induce the sense that the viewer’s eye is marked higher in viewing that one than in viewing the other five. This could only mean that the implied viewer is quite close to the canvas, perhaps six inches to a foot, so as to see more of the top of #3 than of the others. Noticing this, the implied viewer rushes forward. Consequently, the space between #3 and the rough line of the other persimmons increases, and again the lack of occlusion serves to unsettle the spatial relations.
So in a preliminary way we can say that 6 Persimmons is very much of a piece with Ch’an painting and of Classical Chinese painting as a whole, with the qualification that Ch’an painting presents itself as rejecting the elaborations and sense of refinement in the tradition. Multiple viewpoints and some sense of spatial consistency are typical features of Chinese landscape painting, much attested in Northern and Southern Song works (Silbergeld p. 37). As previously noted, 6 Persimmons’s diversity in sameness is likewise traditional, as is its virtuoso ink handling and its presentation of strokes reminiscent of writing with the stems. Perhaps enough has been said to explain the sense of the work’s great achievement and of its celebrated status, at least in Japan. But if we leave it at that, we have said nothing as to why the painting seems to embody to a supreme degree a sense of artistic ineffability, for the features noted and briefly analyzed are shared with countless other Chinese paintings. Is it possible to give a further account of its ineffability? In order to make sense of that, in my next blog post I turn to the question of how the issue of ineffability arises in Ch’an Buddhism and its arts generally.
References:
Rudolf Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception (1974)
Augustine, Sermon 117 (418)
Silvia Jonas, Ineffability and its Metaphysics (2016)
A. W. Moore, Points of View (2000)
Plotinus, Enneads (3rd Century)
Graham Priest, Beyond the Limits of Thought (2003)
Jerome Silbergeld, Chinese Painting Style (1982)