The Purpose of Arts and Music (5)

I am now trying to keep my momentum in writing going because the last time after publishing 'The Purpose of Arts and Music (2)' in late June last year, I spent much time learning more about the various artists and went through all my journals for writing materials. Collating materials from my many journals was a rather painful experience, I stored my journal entries in a word processor and gave each entries and important paragraphs tags for easy retrieval with the word processor's search function. For example, tag words like 'traditional', 'jazz', 'rock', 'pop' and 'dance' will lead me directly to paragraphs that contain materials relevant to the subjects.
However, doing things this way is very stressful and time consuming, I may be able to locate the relevant paragraphs quickly with the help of the search function, but very often, reading the sentences which contained these tag words alone can't bring out any meaning, they are meaningful only in the larger context and so I often need to read the pages before and after these tag words in order for them to make sense. Even after I had collated and understood all the relevant points, it was still difficult to make them fit smoothly. That is why it took me 5 to 6 months later before posting 'The Purpose of Arts and Music (3)' in December 2023.

You can compare it to the experience of listening to a news commentary online; let’s say you paused listening after 10 minutes to go run some errands and returned to listen again after a few hours. You will find that your train of thought becomes disjointed, the remainder of the news clip make no sense, you would have lost the built-up enthusiasm and have to start the news clip all over again in order to understand the direction of the storyline.

When I heard 刘恋's song '生生不息', it gave me an inspirational spark and I put aside all my journals and started letting ideas flow from my heart instead of trying to piece things together like a chatbot. Then ideas and materials just started flowing naturally and they are always relevant and fit together smoothly in a coherent structure. It is amazing how our hearts have the ability to see things in their entirety, know what are relevant and how things are connected without needing to go through the manual process of research and analysis. This perhaps is the shadow of what Buddhists called the '般若智慧'.

That is why we often hear professional performance artists need to immerse themselves totally in the subject of their performance in order to reach the state of unison and one such artist in '乘风破浪3' is 唐诗逸, who is a multiple award winning top dancer from the 'Beijing Dance Academy'. 唐诗逸 mainly specialized in traditional Chinese dance and through her interviews, she revealed that she conditioned herself through studying traditional cultures and ethics, understanding customs and etiquette, appreciating classical literatures, music and fashion.

I was very impressed by her performance in '霓裳羽衣舞', '洛阳久事', '一舞飞天, 一梦敦煌’, and was particularly inspired by '一舞飞天，一梦敦煌'. How can I not be, this whole series of essays on arts and music was based on the subject of the Mogao Grottoes (敦煌莫高窟) which I first wrote about in 2/6/2017. The wall paintings in the grottoes feature many angels (天人) dancing and making music while the Buddha was giving a sermon. This depiction was not the imagination of the painter, it was an actual scene of heaven as recorded in various Buddhist sutras. As a result, I developed an interest in the benefits music and art have on spiritual cultivation.

Beauty

The beauty of 唐's dances lie in the overall artistic conception, the graceful and precise movement, the elegant costumes, refined accessories and the realistic facial expressions. In my opinion, the traditional Chinese concept of beauty is the manifestation of the values of 温良恭俭让, in fact, maybe all forms of beauty comes from values similar to 温良恭俭让. 

I came upon this idea when I watched the car review on the MG Cyberster on the YouTube channel, '极速拍档'. One contentious subject of the review was the design of the rear signal lights of the car which took the form of arrows, one pointing to the right and one to the left. Most people including myself find this design rather odd but couldn't explain why. Then I thought, what is wrong with using the arrow designs? Aren't arrows the clearest indicators of direction and as signal lights, the designs are actually serving their purposes well. 

But this fact just doesn't justify the appropriateness of using arrows as signal lights on sports car, directness and bluntness are more utilitarian then beauty and grace. That is why Penny 戴佩妮 said that if one analyze music too clearly and directly then one will not be able to enjoy the beauty of music, it is as if analysis will block all other brain circuits that enable us to experience joy and get in the flow.

If directness and affirmation do not produce beauty, then subtleties and blurriness must be the elements that can do the trick. The subtle metaphors of poems can blur the barriers between people and nature, make us fall in love and enable energy (正能量) to circulate the same way etiquettes like 温良恭俭让 can dissolve the barriers among people to reduce friction and create the joy of harmony. This circulation of energy is the joy and sensation we felt when we appreciate good music and arts. So when we say that the arrow-shaped signal lights of MG Cyberster look odd, it is because things are out of proportion and thus not harmonious, and that blocks our energy flow. 

Handicrafts

The operative core of these yielding characteristics in Confucianism and Taoism are what the Chinese called '收放自如' and it can inspire wisdom, beauty and refinement in skills across many trades and industries. '收放' is similar to the Taoist concept of 'Yin Yang' (阴阳) or the cycle of detachment and attachment which generate energy flow and thus, 温良恭俭让 is able to enhance our strength and stamina. 

Besides performing arts, Chinese are also very well known for its non-performing arts like painting, calligraphy, and handicrafts like 木雕, 玉雕, 花丝镶嵌, 緙丝, 吉服袍, 海派旗袍, 古典服装 and many others. The essence of good craftsmanship is very much determined by one's temperament, attention to details and the coordination of the hands. 

Ancient craftsmen and apprentices must form a deep bond with their masters and observe values which were not too different from Confucianism  in order to inculcate the right characters that are conducive to learning skills. Characteristic such as respect for master '尊师重道' can condition one to be humble so that one can accept criticism from others and improve one's skills. '包容 ' can appease others so that one will be attentive to their all round needs, and in turn, one will become more attuned to seeing the whole picture. This is especially important in the culinary art where the all round appeal of 色 (presentation), 香 (fragrance), 味 (taste) is of utmost importance. '真诚恭敬' will ensure they respect their customers and their own products because if they adopt a negative and cynical outlook, they will trivialize everything and will lead them to develop lackadaisical attitudes.

What is less obvious is how these moral values can influence people's control over their strength and the coordination of their bodies. The key lies in '让' or '收', which means to detach. Think of someone carving an intricate piece of wooden artwork, he will need to work with many curves, lines, angles, shades and depth. As he work his carving tool from a straight line to a curve, his mind will need to switch from the thought of 'straight' to 'curve'. Someone who is inflexible (执着) will subconsciously find it more difficult to make that mental switch willingly and are more likely to feel vexed and impatient. On the other hand, someone accustomed to '让' will switch the command in his subconscious mind willingly and produce curve lines that are smooth like calligraphy due to less mental resistance. This process also applies to carving different levels of depth and hue, one who has '让/收放自如' in his nature is more likely to have better control over the various levels of strength needed in carving smooth progression in depth and all the fussy refined details.

Perhaps the above explains why places with Confucius backgrounds are good at making stuff. The doctrine of '五伦' guided people to behave in accordance to the roles they are assigned or born into in order to create a harmonious society. This practice later became the bedrock of building effective teamwork that is important in running manufacturing businesses and supply chains.

Dancing

There are no actual professional craftsmen in the '浪姐3' group except maybe for Cindy 王心凌, who revealed that she is very good with kitchen knives and eye lash brushes. One needs to have a delicate light touch in handling tools like good craftsmen in order to brush eye lashes neat and well defined. I now understand why the '王心凌男孩' are so enamored of her song, '爱你', her deftly dance steps in the song is like a poetry in motion and that made us fell in love. If she had training in football, I am sure she can dribble as well as my football hero, Roberto Baggio.

While there are no real craftsmen in the show, there sure are several participants with strong back ground in dancing like 唐诗逸, 朱洁静 and 吴谨言. The one common success factor among professional dancers is what they described as, '把最简单的做到最极致' or honing the simplest motion and expression to perfection.

In my opinion, this can be best understood when we compare the smooth kinetic movement of the human body with the jerky movement of robots in the 90's. Robots were jerky because they can't slow down gradually, they can only go from the speed of say, 1 meter/second to a sudden complete stop. On the other hand, professional dancers can execute more speeds to slow down gradually such as going from 1 meter/sec to 0.75 meter/sec to 0.5 meter/sec to 0.25 meter/sec and zero, and this is what makes their movement smooth and graceful. It is the same with general ambulation where machines' motion can be ungainly and lack a wider spectrum of controls like how autonomous driving cars can sometimes make a sharp turn into other lanes instead of easing smoothly into them.

People in the robotics and software industry explained that the reason behind the jerky motion was due to the lack of smoothness in the machines' logic. It was hard to write software which can execute so many different speeds and to have processors powerful enough to handle so many commands. 
I suspect it is for this reason why modern dance tends to look robotic like popping and krumping, and music tends to be rhythmic instead of smooth flowing and graceful like the traditional ones. The minds and logic of modern people are not as smooth as those in the past, this need for rhythmic sound and action is to offset or bridge the gaps of fragmentation in our minds brought on by industrialization and urbanization as previously written. The rhythmic energies from the beat of music are the extra energies needed to push them through these fragmentations or 'bugs' in their logic.

This will be the last essay in the 'Arts and Music' series, after watching so many episodes of '乘风破浪' I am beginning to find it hard to detach myself from the images, I am even finding it hard to remember what Jacky Chan looks like. The holidays in the coming Chinese Lunar New Year will be a good opportunity for me to reset and clear my mind's cache, so I shall end this series with the best wishes to everyone in the new year, 新年快乐, 龙马精神, 龙年行大运.