Writing and the “moved” subject; Or, how black comes from blue but is more than the blue...

Patrick West (Deakin University ), Dr Cher Coad

In traditional Chinese culture writing is regarded as a technical practice perfected through reproduction. Chinese calligraphy is learnt through exhaustively tracing the style of the master calligrapher. This is not simple copying. As the Chinese proverb holds, “Learning shall never stop. Black comes from blue, but is more than the blue.” We learn from and surpass our writing teacher. The “more than blue of black” is created through the interplay of Qing 情 (“feelings”) and Yun 韵 (“composed body movements”). This order of the characters suggests that Qingcreates and supports Yun. However, we hold that articulations or “tracings” of the (composed) body re-create singular feelings. This two-way interplay is vital—we are “moved”. How one is composed affects the compositions of oneself (the expression of one’s feelings). The composed body movements of the standing-up calligrapher suggest an intensity of bodily activity in the very act of writing, which is cognate with Alberto Manguel’s study of the bodily active reader. In this way, the example of calligraphy points beyond recent scholarship by Nigel Krauth on writing and the body. Influenced by Taoism, Chinese (calligraphic) writing engages bodies and theworld in which bodies exist through a physical practice and philosophy of tracing (just as an apprentice calligrapher traces the master’s calligraphy). This paper will enquire into strategies (taken from Franz Kafka and elsewhere) for tracing bodies and the world with one’s (“feeling and moving”) body—for being “bruised” by the world/other bodies, made “black and blue”. Citing Julia Kristeva’s work on the affective elements of the colour blue, we ultimately locate this “black that comes from blue, but is more than the blue” in writing itself, as materialized through notions of “signifying bodies” and “en-fleshed writing”.

Dr Patrick West is a Senior Lecturer in Professional and Creative Writing at Deakin University, Melbourne. His short-story collection, The World Swimmers, was published by The International Centre for Landscape and Language, Edith Cowan University, Perth, in 2011. The Australian’s reviewer wrote that The World Swimmers contains “incredible insight into the human condition throughout.” In 2012 Patrick wrote and co-produced the 27-minute fictional-documentary film Sisters of the Sun (directed by Simon Wilmot).

Dr Cher Coad was awarded her PhD from Griffith University in 2012 for her thesis The Bridge Between and Swell: Writing Difference in Feature-Film Scriptwriting for National Production and International Co-Production. Her short story, “Shot”, was published in 2010 in the Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies. “Shot” is available at http://www.jpcs.in/upload/74854342Shot%20yemen.pdf Cher is a graduate of the Central Drama Academy, Beijing, and has been an actor, model, director and ringmaster. She is currently an executive property consultant with Kay & Burton.