China and the West

Pound, Ezra. ABC of reading [ID D29058].
The First definite assertion of the applicability of scientific method to literary criticism is found in Ernest Fenollosa's Essay on the Chinese written character.
The complete despicability of official philosophic thought, and, if the reader will really think carefully of what I am trying to tell him, the most stringing insult and at the same time convincing proof of the general nullity and incompetence of organized intellectual life in America, England, their universities in general, and their learned publications at large, could be indicated by a narrative of the difficulties I encountered in getting Fenollosa's essay printed at all… Fenollosa's essay was perhapts too far ahead of his time to be easily comprehended. He did not proclaim his method as a method. He was trying to explain the Chinese ideograph as a means of transmission and registration of thought. He got to the root of the matter, to the root of the difference between what is valid in Chinese thinking and invalid or misleading in a great deal of European thinking and language.
The simplest statement I can make of his meaning is as follows :
In Europe, if you ask a man to define anything, his definition always moves away from the simple things that he knows perfectly well, it recedes into an unknown region, that is a region of remoter and prog4essively remoter abstraction.
Thus if you ask him what red is, he says it is a 'colour'.
If you ask him what a colour is, he tells you it is a vibration or a refraction of light, or division of the sprectrum.
And if you ask him what vibration is, he tells you it is a mode of energy, or something of that sort, until you arrive at a modality of being, or non-being, or at any rate you get in beyond your depth, and beyond his depth…
By contrast to the method of abstraction, or of defining things in more and still more general terms, Fenollosa emphasizes the method of science, 'which is the method of poetry', as distinct from that of 'philosophic discussion', and is the way the Chinese go about it in their ideograph or abbreviated picture writing…
The Egyptians finally used abbreviated pictures to represent sounds, but the Chinese still use abbreviated pictures AS pictures, that is to say, Chinese Ideogram does not try to be the picture of a sound, or to be a written sign recalling a sound, but it is still the picture of a thing ; of a thing in a given position or relation, or of a combination of things. It means the thing or the action or situation, or quality germane to the several things that it pictures.
Gaudier Brzeska, who was accustomed to looking at the real shape of things, could read a certain amount of Chinese writing without ANY STUDY. He said, 'Of course, you can see it's a horse' (or a wing or whatever).
In tables showing primitive chinese characters in one column and the present 'conventionalized' signs in another, anyone can see how the ideogram for man or tree or sunrise developed, or 'was simplified from', or was reduced to the essentials of the first picture of man, tree or sunrise.
Thus : 人 man / 木tree / 日 sun / 東sun tangled in the tree's branches, as at sunrise, meaning now the East.
But when the chinaman wanted to make a picture of something more complicated, or of a general idea, how did he go about it ?
He is to define red. How can he do it in a picture that isn't painted in red paint ?
He puts (or his ancestor put) together the abbreviated pictures of ROSE, CHERRY, IRON RUST, FLAMINGO.
That, you see, is very much the kind of thing a biologist does (in a very much more complicated way) when he gets together a few hundred or thousand slides, and picks out what is necessary for his general statement. Something that fits the case, that applies in all of the cases.
The chinese 'word' or ideogram for red is based on something everyone KNOWS.
(If ideogram had developed in England, the writers would possibly have substituted the front side of a robin, or something less exotic than a flamingo).
Fenollosa was telling how and why a language written in this way simply HAD TO STAY POETIC ; simply couldn't help being and staying poetic in a way that a column of english type might very well not stay poetic.
He died before getting round to publishing and proclaiming a 'method'…
I once got a man to start translating the Seafarer into Chinese. It came out almost directly into Chinese verse, with two solid ideograms in each half-line. Apart from the Seafarer I know no other european poems of the period that you can hang up with the 'Exile’s letter' of Li Po, displaying the West on a par with the Orient…
For those who read only English, I have done what I can.
I have translated the TA HIO so that they can learn where to start THINKING.