Streams and Mountains without End, handscroll on silk, 1100-1150, late Song-Jin dynasty Cleveland Art Museum. Inscription translation: “The creator has no intentions. Making mountains and streams from pure air.” Added, 1205.
Elizabeth Woody in Seven Hands, Seven Hearts describes her teacher Margaret guiding Woody past her anxieties weaving root bags. Woody is sure she is doing it wrong and disrespecting the traditions of her elders, disrespecting the tule reeds and cedar strands that have been gathered for these inexpert and uneven folds. She is grateful and feels her grandmothers through her hands but also, she’s doing it wrong. Margaret says, “Don’t worry—weave!” The strips pulled from marshes and tree bark stain her palms with a tang of the earth itself, and, she writes, she weaves in herself new pathways to thought.
In 1949 when the Communists drove the Kuomintang Party from power and out of China, the destabilized economy led to a fire sale of art and antiquities; private and temple collections became suddenly available. This was how Richard Hochstadter was able to acquire the twelfth century masterpiece watercolor Streams and Mountains without End, the scroll that now stretches across a wall of the Cleveland Art Museum. Hochstadter himself was in China when his homeland looted its own homes and seized precious art from Jews like Hochstadter, hanging bloodred banners from their museums. During the Cultural Revolution a couple decades later, Shanghai shielded art from Party purges of decadence. The CCP had their own banners to hang.
A former ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, is now the head of The Kennedy Center for the Arts. In his theater box hangs an enormous portrait of himself with the President. Shows are no longer woke, no more drag, the President bragged. The man in charge of programming staff was overheard praising a musical recently staged at the Center: so good “they could be on a cruise ship.” While ticket sales have sagged, the new head of the communications is correct to attribute the drop in revenues to “liberal intolerance.” Meanwhile, Grenell insists on being called The Ambassador. This is the current embassy of American culture.
I hiked this summer to Vesper Peak off the Mountain Loop Highway. The day was moist and fogged, and the mountains towered over me through a thick mist, every sharp crag, rigid and bleak but softened into folds of a weighty cotton. It was a gray monochrome, and I was similarly enfolded against a dry-brush Chinese watercolor, Vesper Peak, watercolored, my own existence against the towering ridge breaks folded in a mystery artists in China beheld in quiet awe a millennium before.
