The Four Winds

The paleography class yesterday was really interesting. For some reason I was really aesthetically fascinated by the material we were studying. I kept wanting to copy the text instead of analyze it. It was so beautiful. I guess that means it's time I should make another butterfly. Instead, though, I came home and copied out the text with my watercolor brush. (Somehow I've misplaced my calligraphy brush. That's okay; the original is carved in bone, not painted.) This inscription is a chart of the four winds and four directions, just their names. The left part has been broken off, though the content can be supplied from other inscriptions. The especially hairy character third from the bottom is the character for wind, a borrowing from the character we now translate as phoenix... but which looks an awful lot like a peacock when you look carefully at its development.

I'm not going to post the original picture because it makes my clumsy painting look pretty bad, but it is a marvelous picture. Pocket of Bolts said that oracle bone script looks savage and disconcerting--as if they're trying to depict something but it has become detached in an uncanny way from the things they are trying to depict. Actually, that is just about right. It is far more pictographic and less differentiated than modern Chinese script, but it is already much stylized and simplified. They are, and aren't, pictures of things.