Dear Brave Souls… This is a story about a time when politicians went silent about their fear or and hatred of immigrants but were plotting in private about what to do about the ‘asian scum’ that had come to America. Soon, they suddenly unleashed a barrage of punitive and inhumane measures against a huge group of innocents. It had been pre-planned but judiciously kept from the public in order to avoid outcry and resistance.
Just a head’s up then… I call this story: The Strength of The Brush
You will shortly see why…
When I first wrote with a brush years ago, it looked so easy. Swish, swish, swash swash. Just dip and write with shoulder instead of fingers and wrist.
My teacher, a tiny woman named Meiow had Parkinson’s, and her head and arms trembled. Yet, when she lifted the brush, it was like medicine tai chi san… she did not tremble at all… until she completed her work and laid her brush back on the slate again. Then the tremor inside her began again.
And yet, she was she said like a plant that was just swaying in the wind, that it was all right. And I loved her, loved her as though she was both little mother and little child, both.
Meiow first taught me the Chinese character for woman : ?. It is delineated as a pictograph… meaning a series of lines that makes a tiny abstract picture of something representational, like a tree or a stream or a leaf or a child… or a woman.
Meiow said long ago the hieroglyph for woman depicted her as bowing. Then in a later period, the pictograph became a kneeling woman, until in the most modern form it appears the glyph for ‘woman’ looks more like a woman taking a giant step forward. In her lifetime which had been long long long, as she put it… How old are you Meiow? Long long long, that’s how old I am.
When I first began writing with the brush, I did say aloud to Meiow that as I watched her masterful arm, it looked so graceful… and ‘maybe’ easy?
She said it was yes, easy. If one were inexperienced. That as one became more experienced, it became harder.
She smiled and patted me.
I sheepishly put on my favorite dolt hat, the tall one with the bent tip, and went back to writing with my shoulder, the brush held only by the head of my shoulder, my front and back deltoids…
but the rest of my arm, except for two – three fingers ’embracing the brush’ as Meiow said… the rest of my arm from upper arm to hand was held totally loose, without any muscle, like an over-cooked rice noodle.
My little Meiow began having difficulty walking, then speaking, and one day when she lifted her brush, the tremor did not stop. Her son came for her then and she was absorbed back into her family the way an ancient city is covered over by the living green canopy of the forest.
When we heard she had passed peacefully …we gathered together, all of her students were so sad and we made many many brush writings that were as much mixed with tears… and the paper which was quality fiber, blobbed up in little hills where the tears fell. And I could hear Meiow saying everything that happened in a writing was the writing. And I could see that tears were writing. And that sudden hills and mountains rising up in the paper were writing, and that my shoulder knew what it meant ‘to embrace brush’ because of Meiow’s gentle teachings, her gentle smile.
And that most teachings are easy when we know nothing, and feel free to flang away with the pigment and brush … in preparation for the very serious study to come… but/and harder as one becomes more conscious of the nuances, the focus required which becomes near beatific, but most of all, in a life, as in the paper on the table… everything that happens, is the writing… including as Meiow told us about her father’s time on Angel Island imprisoned in the western United States as an immigrant under the severe anti_Chinese laws in the US in the 1910s through to WWII 1940…
Her father said many of the prisoners who were held there for months and some for years while being ‘interrogated and investigated’ for whether they really had right to be in the USA… most all of the men ‘knew brush.’ And ‘brush’ was daily prayer, supplication, meditation, medicine and the calm emptiness that is sacred…
And her father said that many of the men became so despairing from being imprisoned without help or representation, so lonely for their families, so frightened they would be imprisoned forever, that they spoke not of suicide, not of risking being shot by trying to escape, but…
they spoke about have despair so great, the thought of throwing away their brushes. In such desolation they thought to never write with their brushes again. I still think of what that might have meant, the times in my own life when I stopped writing for the agonistas were so great… and yet…
The Chinese men imprisoned unjustly, did not throw away their brushes. Instead they brushed and carved their poetry and pictographs all over the wooden walls of the Angel Island prison. They filled the walls and the fathers once released, either deported or allowed to stay in the USA, taught their sons, taught their daughters ‘the brush.’ That the brush looks easy but it is hard, for it is used to row singlehandedly across the most brutal seas.
And this I understand, and I know many of you understand this also… that for art’s sake things might be somewhat easy, but rowing for life during a death-swell takes everything you’ve got. Some might think one should have iron and steel and blades and gunpowder.
But in many stories of life and death of Meiow’s father and the men at Angel Island it was the gentle little brush who waited to sing day after day, waiting only to be lifted by the shoulders of men who had crossed an entire ocean to escape travail, only to be put in more travail.
The little brush, almost as light as air, acted as beauty where there was none, acted as voice where voices had been silenced, and most of all moved through the air, as the prisoners were not allowed to move themselves. And in this, through the brush, all were made in one important way, free… for long enough, until they were truly free again.
This comes with love and with peavce,
dr.e
from The Contemplari manuscript ©1999 by cp estés, all rights reserved.
CODA
Today, 112 years later, Angel Island is a well preserved museum that tells the stories of those Chinese and other immigrants, including Sikhs, previously out of nowhere, held and incarcerated there. The entire era belongs in the Hall of Shame.
While the souls imprisoned… and the little brush and the carving blade made from fingernails and pecking with nail and stone… ought be in The Hall of Fame.
As you see from the image from Angel Island, those referred to as ‘men’ were often really very young, half staved, lonely and unprotected boys.
The image here, is of hieroglyph pecked into the wooden walls of the prison. There are many brushworks writings also. Most all are poems in elegant Chinese forms.