Poetry Thursday - re-imagining

Looking for something else in my blog archives I found this and found it relevant to many of my current concerns. It was tempting to follow up the links - but I resisted  (still trying to get a grip on daily life...).
 

05 March 2015

Poetry Thursday - a trail of crumbs

First crumb - a link on the Quiltart list to the work of Michael James, which had fallen off my radar. On his site I was struck by the unusual colours in this, and the way the light seems to come through the work -

The Concept of Qi, 2008, cotton and dyes, 50.5"h x 52"w

It being Thursday, I needed to find a poem for the blog, and this would be a great illustration for such a poem ... so I started looking for a poem about "qi" ... which led to the second crumb - the work of Qi Baishi (1863-1957), purveyor of "poems in a brush stroke", for example (what, after much looking, to choose??) -

Gourds (via)

Third crumb - what is "qi", actually? The ancient Chinese described it as "life force" which permeated everything and linked their surroundings together. Moving into the scientific realm, qi becomes an elemental force: "Fairly early on, some Chinese thinkers began to believe that there were different fractions of qi and that the coarsest and heaviest fractions of qi formed solids, lighter fractions formed liquids, and the most ethereal fractions were the "lifebreath" that animates living beings." But the scientific view is that "Qi is a purely hypothetical concept."

Fourth crumb - the traditional Chinese character for "qi" -

That took me to the Chinese dictionary which still sits centre-front in my field of vision, right next to various thesauruses. (Sidetrack: get camera, take picture, download, tweak, upload ...) -

What looks to us like a short, simple word is manifest in my dictionary in 37 different characters, gathered into four different pronunciations (tones), with a variety of meanings including: a period of time; deceive; seven; wife; strange; ride (eg a bicycle); awaken; get up; abandon; utensil; and, right near the end of the list, "our" qi - whose meanings include air; gas; breath; smell; airs, manner; spirit, morale ... and as a verb: make angry; get angry; bully, insult. Isn't language a wonderful thing?

How many crumbs have we pecked at on this trail? I turn back to go find today's poem - and see that the crumbs that should lead me back have, like Hansel and Gretel's, disappeared.

(Back to the here&now...) Just to add a little something new, based on the mention of Hansel and Gretel ...

Clive Hicks-Jenkins has done wonderful illustrations for a retelling of that folk tale "A nightmare in eight scenes" by Simon Armitage, which has also been a "multi-media spectacle". In Clive's instagram account he shows the evolution of his work, and some of the beloved objects that inspire it, for instance the wind-up toys that he has collected -

Here are some more pages from the book to give you a flavour of it - click on the image to enlarge if you want to read the words -

Hmm, never did find that poem about "qi"....