The Whole Cannot be Understood Without Reference to its Holes 《無缺亦無圓》

In a village in what is now known as Toisan, there was a young scholar who was always reading and writing one thing or another. He read poetry and political thought from the Confucian canon, and he wrote essays and stories. On most evenings, he preferred to be in the world of his studio with a book or brush in his hand.

Late one night, he was composing a lengthy essay when the lines of watery ink lifted off the sheets of paper around him. While the scholar looked on, all of the ink cumulated at a corner of his studio ceiling, forming a dark and surprisingly sizeable cloud that was soon ready to burst. As the ink began raining down, it recomposed itself midair, stroke by stroke. First, the strokes formed an expressive outline and then came a suffusion of colours and realistic details until, within minutes, there stood a young man in the flesh. Having just rained down into the room, the youth’s ink-black hair was shiny with droplets, his skin was moist and dewy, and his wet clothes clung to his body. He introduced himself as Wu (無名, namely ‘Nameless’).

For a moment, the scholar looked at the blank sheets of paper from where his writings had now disappeared. He had written some serviceable prose to theorise about the rhyming patterns in a volume of classic Confucian poetry, but Wu’s beauty was better formed and more persuasive. The scholar put down his brush and walked over to Wu, who smiled and raised his head to meet the scholar’s kiss. Wu stripped off his sodden garments and the scholar followed suit.

With his hastened breaths and flushed face, Wu indeed seemed a real, flesh-and-blood lover. But when the scholar reached for the naked Wu, he found Wu’s body extraordinarily permeable, forming moist openings wherever the scholar sought to apply pressure. These openings would stretch to accommodate any protrusion, enclosing it snugly, and when the scholar withdrew, the apertures would close over.

Since childhood, the scholar had enjoyed gazing at both clouds and inkblots alike, projecting familiar images onto their formations. Wu had rained down from a cloud of watery ink, and yet his fluid nebulousness was like nothing the scholar knew. But Wu’s permeability soon prompted the scholar to project many desires, familiar and unfamiliar to himself, onto Wu’s form. And because he had holes anywhere that the scholar so desired, Wu proved to be a supremely receptive partner.

The next morning, the scholar woke alone. Where Wu’s body had been, dried blots were on the sheets. These blots and the spaces around them now indicated Wu’s absence. Although he ached for Wu, the scholar had not been expecting Wu to linger. After all, clouds pass and cannot be pinned down. He also doubted that he would receive such a visit again, from Wu or anyone, let alone with the frequency he now desired. He dared not hope that it was going to start raining men.

So the scholar began finding other openings for his desires: the orifices of merchants, eunuchs, fellow scholars, maid-servants, fox spirits and ghosts who took many forms, and guards in full leather armour who carried chains and cudgels; a hole that had been worn into a log by pelting rain; a long-necked vase and other favourably shaped ceramic and glass vessels; a lattice panel; a bitten peach; his own clasping hand. His studio was itself a concavity 凹形 that formed a shape in concert with its enclosing walls and the various objects inside the space, and the scholar came to spend even more time in the world of his studio, composing a new essay.

Thinking of the spaces that are both created and left behind, he asserted in emphatic brushstrokes that the whole cannot be understood without reference to its holes. On the days when he especially missed Wu and ached for hole-ness, he proposed more radically that the nature of the body can only be understood as a hole. He termed his perspective 圓缺, which years later, should have been translated to ‘hole-ism’ but was not. This is how this scholar came to be linked with another concept instead – one that stressed the importance of a thing or system as a whole 整體, over and above its nature as a sum of constituent parts.

In reality, the scholar’s writings sprung from his tendencies to submerge parts of himself within a hole, where the parts and the hole could be in intimate interconnection, in turn creating depths within himself. He would spend the rest of his life exploring the contours of these depths too, knowing that holes give shape to what a whole can be.