Time and space in Chinese poetry.
Doing research for a SCC fic, I came across this fascinating book. How, I cannot say, because that would be telling.
Excerpt from Frederick Turner, "Space and time in Chinese verse," J. T. Fraser, N. Lawrence and F. C. Haber (eds), Time, Science and Society in China and the West (1986).
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As to classification of the arts as being of space or time, again, the issue is more complex. The right brain seems, indeed, to process pictorial information, as such, more efficiently than the left: but oddly enough it is also the right brain that, in persons not musically expert, handles melody and musical harmony. Both activities require a gestalt capacity for pattern recognition. The right brain has only a rudimentary sense of time, however; it subjectively exists in a sort of nunc stans or eternal present in which entities are related by juxtaposition rather than sequence. On the other hand, the left brain, which has a keen sense of past, present, and future, and of the irreversible passage of time, deals with linguistic and logical information, which requires the capacity to organize material into a meaningful sequence. But the unique qualities of the musical, pictorial, and poetic arts seem specifically designed to overcome their confinement to one side of the brain or the other. The representational bias of the visual arts all over the world and throughout history--pure abstraction is in panhuman terms a grotesque anomaly--brings to the spatial craft of pattern creation the temporal capacity to tell a story and make an argument. In music, too, when it attains the character of an art rather than a craft or game, the tendency is to supplement the pleasing pattern of sound by mapping it onto a program, a sequence of musical movements, or, of course, the words of a song lyric, chant, hymn, or aria. We have already seen that poetry, the art of language, brings to the aid of the merely temporal linguistic understanding, which is rather limited in terms of information capacity, the spatial pattern--recognition talents of the right brain that are evoked by poetic meter.
Thus the ideographic element of Chinese poetry is not a simple matter of adding a spatial right-brain component to a temporal art, but rather one of providing an additional right-brain spatial element to an art that is already both left-brain, temporal, and linguistic, and right-brain, spatial, and patterned.
In a sense, then, Chinese poetry is only once an "art of time," but twice an "art of space." If we examine the content of Chinese classical poetry, we find a fascinating corroboration of the formal tendencies we have described. Indeed, considering the content, it would be more accurate to say that instead of adding another spatial element to the standard poetic space-time combination, Chinese poetry spatializes the very concept of time itself.
[...]
The wind and the stars--the most transient and the most eternal--continually meet in Chinese poetry. It is as if the contemplation of the ideograms, which contain their meaning all at once and have no past and future, reminds poet and reader that the sequential temporal logic of language is only an arbitrary order we impose upon the world, the reckoning up of the ten thousand things that are in reality the single enduring mountain. Information--even when it is full of the grief of war or parting or bereavement--passes from the urgent temporal mode of the left brain into the nunc stans, the eternal present, of the right, by means of its patterning into meter; and it is held there and fixed by its further transformation into a visual form, a shape that makes a picture in the mind.
Excerpt from Frederick Turner, "Space and time in Chinese verse," J. T. Fraser, N. Lawrence and F. C. Haber (eds), Time, Science and Society in China and the West (1986).
~
As to classification of the arts as being of space or time, again, the issue is more complex. The right brain seems, indeed, to process pictorial information, as such, more efficiently than the left: but oddly enough it is also the right brain that, in persons not musically expert, handles melody and musical harmony. Both activities require a gestalt capacity for pattern recognition. The right brain has only a rudimentary sense of time, however; it subjectively exists in a sort of nunc stans or eternal present in which entities are related by juxtaposition rather than sequence. On the other hand, the left brain, which has a keen sense of past, present, and future, and of the irreversible passage of time, deals with linguistic and logical information, which requires the capacity to organize material into a meaningful sequence. But the unique qualities of the musical, pictorial, and poetic arts seem specifically designed to overcome their confinement to one side of the brain or the other. The representational bias of the visual arts all over the world and throughout history--pure abstraction is in panhuman terms a grotesque anomaly--brings to the spatial craft of pattern creation the temporal capacity to tell a story and make an argument. In music, too, when it attains the character of an art rather than a craft or game, the tendency is to supplement the pleasing pattern of sound by mapping it onto a program, a sequence of musical movements, or, of course, the words of a song lyric, chant, hymn, or aria. We have already seen that poetry, the art of language, brings to the aid of the merely temporal linguistic understanding, which is rather limited in terms of information capacity, the spatial pattern--recognition talents of the right brain that are evoked by poetic meter.
Thus the ideographic element of Chinese poetry is not a simple matter of adding a spatial right-brain component to a temporal art, but rather one of providing an additional right-brain spatial element to an art that is already both left-brain, temporal, and linguistic, and right-brain, spatial, and patterned.
In a sense, then, Chinese poetry is only once an "art of time," but twice an "art of space." If we examine the content of Chinese classical poetry, we find a fascinating corroboration of the formal tendencies we have described. Indeed, considering the content, it would be more accurate to say that instead of adding another spatial element to the standard poetic space-time combination, Chinese poetry spatializes the very concept of time itself.
[...]
The wind and the stars--the most transient and the most eternal--continually meet in Chinese poetry. It is as if the contemplation of the ideograms, which contain their meaning all at once and have no past and future, reminds poet and reader that the sequential temporal logic of language is only an arbitrary order we impose upon the world, the reckoning up of the ten thousand things that are in reality the single enduring mountain. Information--even when it is full of the grief of war or parting or bereavement--passes from the urgent temporal mode of the left brain into the nunc stans, the eternal present, of the right, by means of its patterning into meter; and it is held there and fixed by its further transformation into a visual form, a shape that makes a picture in the mind.