Once upon a time

Once upon a time

the ancient Chinese

observed nature

with much patience

 

slowly

a line was born

to denote one aspect of nature

 

such as a simple horizontal 

 

to represent the steady earth where he stood

 

then when he raised his head

the enormous sense of space overwhelmed him

 

ah

he , therefore, put a line above the steady horizontal beneath him

 

smaller in scale

perhaps right in the middle portion

on top, paralleling the steady line under his feet

 

to describe the vastnessness

of the sky

 

he stretched his arms from left to right

 

then with a  kind of vertical which denotes his vetebrae,

and two diagonals which denote his open legs

 

he says

look

what is on top of my head

look

what is below

 

on top is the amazing kind of space

right above my head

hidden yet made known through a small horizontal line

below is the amazing kind of space

underneath my wide opened feet

 

 

how incredible is the sky above me

how incredible is the earth on which I stand

I could not tell you

how much I understand

the vastnessness

between the sky and the earth

 

but I am showing you with my full strength

with all the possible means

using the gesture of my body

 

Such was the story behind the first person

who used visual codes , together with his understanding 

to tell a story

of his limited self

in an unlimted kind of space

 

A limit

without limit

Limitless

expressed with limited self

 

Such was a straight forward story

of the earliest concept

of the ideogram

Sky

in Chinese

 

every single Chinese has learned how to

write it

but most are taught only the techniques of making the lines beautiful

visual codes became

standardised

even aesthetic wise

 

Somehow 

to unlearn that known standard

means to

recover

a poetic dimension

the one that embraced

the exciting discovery

of the single character

 

the Sky

 

( a hypothesis notbook II is a work in progress which began in 2013, registering various known notions yet by unlearning their accepted states of definitions, a new vision is born, perhaps more from an inner necessity than from a scholarly point of view- after the journey I chose to begin in 1982-on Chinese calligraphy, color and poetry )