During my four-decade love affair with the voice of poet Han-shan, or Cold Mountain, I have seen many paintings of him. He was unkown in his lifetime—possibly even a legend. But his image became very popular in China. And of all the paintings I have seen, I love this portrait at the MIA the best.
Not only did the painter imagine a completely individual human face, eyes smiling under the eccentric wild hair for which the Han-shan story is famous, but portrayed him with brush in hand, at work making poems. The portrait is a rare, detailed close-up—simple robe, belt of leaves, scroll and inkstone at his feet. The misty mountains, gnarled pine, and smooth rock on which he sits frame his reverie as he seeks to bring a poem to life.
Emily Dickinson once wrote of this state, “To make a prairie / it takes a clover and a bee. / One clover and a bee / and reverie. / Reverie alone will do, / if bees are few.” The unknown painter of Han-shan understood reverie, as does any artist searching the interior landscape to turn the fugitive breeze of inspiration into ink.
The real Han-shan has disappeared into the mist along with his plain, colloquial poems, still uncelebrated and generally not taught in schools. We know only that he was named for the place where he retired and took up his brush. Perhaps he is only a story himself, imagined by someone who loved the idea of an eccentric hermit hewing his own way with commonplace words.
That story has allowed many painters—and this writer—to respond to his voice in our own ways. I did my best in three books of ink on paper. I visit the scroll often now, to share the reverie and sharpen my brush.
IN THE STUDIO OF THE POET
Visiting a cabinetmaker, you would expect to hear
the swoosh of bark off a peeler, the whine of saws,
steady breathing of the plane,
the sharp rap of chisels into dovetails,
wooden mallet taps to make the dovetails tight.
And choruses moaning from coarse to medium to fine,
followed by silent rubbing with oils by hand, missing only
the gathering of wood somewhere deep in the forest.
James P. Lenfestey’s latest book, Seeking the Cave: A Pilgrimage to Cold Mountain (Milkweed Editions, 2014), tells the story, in prose and poems, of his veneration of Han-shan (Cold Mountain) and his travels to China to pay homage. An earlier collection of poems, A Cartload of Scrolls: 100 Poems in the Manner of T’ang Dynasty Poet Han-shan (Holy Cow! Press, 2007), uses this portrait as the book’s cover image.