A PLACE TO CELEBRATE

AN ALCHEMICAL MARRIAGE

From 2013 The Year of the Serpent came many things but one strand of that delightful coincidence of epiphanies that have made up my life over the last four years was an intersection of optimism and happiness – two important requirements for the journey forward. At a deeper level than the surface of an idea the realisation that the fullest experience of Being was through Love. No less than when I was young and the physical demonstration sated it but more urgently now as that experience is a memory gloriously vivid but …only a memory. It would seem for the aging that the fading of Love as an imperative in your life drains the will to be of Life.
The pomegranate is a fruit that for it’s eccentric form and flavour has been an element in the legends of many cultures from the neolithic.Firstly throughout the mediteranean and since the the fifth century moving from the first garden, throughout the world along the trade routes.
It talks to the promise of life, bursting and spreading it’s seed on the ground, and through the agency of small birds, is dismembered and dispersed from where it hangs. It’s chambered interior disgorging it’s contents in the service of Life.

For the Chinese to whom it was introduced via the Silk Road during the Tang Dynasty, it symbolises fecundity by way of a play on the characters in its name. For the Granadans it was the pride and beauty of their city causing them to integrate it into the detail of their buildings, their walls and paths and their heraldry, from Moorish times to the present. For the British it is the Grenadier Guards who hefted deadly exploding devices in war, returning to guarding royalty in peace time.

There are two of its bushy trees  near my Melbourne home that I have enjoyed watching for years as  the sparse beautiful flowers wilt after fertilization birthing from their base, first green hard balls, growing, changing colour to a fiery orange before splitting and exploding their edible magenta seeds.

Melbourne’s large middle eastern population has meant that the pomegranate as an orchard fruit, is in plentiful supply in supermarkets. For all it’s bold beauty though it doesn’t provide it’s delicious sweet acidic juice in great quantities – however this is in plentiful supply, in asceptic packaging, at the same supermarkets. Fragrantly delicious pomegranate pavlovas were my special treat in Melbourne last C’mas,  prepared by my daughter.

The Pomegranate as a glyph for optimism embodies passion and hope .

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomegranate

http://www.collectorsguide.com/fa/fa115.shtml

Double happiness 雙喜 shuāngxǐ  is seen recurring as a Chinese glyph that constitutes the Double Happiness character. A ligature of the double xi (JOY) character  Whilst xixi in appearance it is still pronounced as shuāngxǐ. It is  found as a decorative motif in both modern and antique decorative arts for nuptials and in the embellishment of wedding gifts often together with the the bat as a creature of great fortune.

A Tang Dynasty narrative of the character’s  origin is best quoted from the public domain here as whilst details differ, the same story almost word for word is repeated across the internet.

~ There is a short story behind the origin of the Chinese symbol for double happiness. During the period of Tang Dynasty in ancient China, a young boy was on his way to appear for an examination to become a minister. The boy fell ill while he was traveling through a mountainous region. A herbal practitioner and his daughter took care of the boy, after which he recovered quickly. When the boy had to leave, he found it difficult to say adieu to the girl as he fell in love with her. The girl thus wrote down the right hand part of an antithetical couplet for the boy; which was as follows.

“Green trees against the sky in the spring rain while the sky set off the spring trees in the obscuration.”

“对着天空绿色的树木在春天的雨，而天空衬托春天树木的遮蔽”

The young boy took it and left for the capital to attend the examination. During the examination, he was asked by the emperor to complete the right hand part of a couplet which said,

“Red flowers dot the land in the breeze’s chase while the land colored up in red after the kiss”.

“红色的花朵点缀在土地在微风的追逐，而土地着色为红色的吻之后”

The boy instantly realized that the sentence written by the herbal practitioner’s daughter was a perfect match for the one given by the emperor. Thus, he gave the right answer and stood first in the examination. Impressed by the performance of the boy, the emperor adjudged him as the new minister. After becoming the minister, the young boy married the herbal practitioner’s daughter. On the occasion of their wedding, the HAPPY character was doubled and put on a red paper. The symbol was used to mark the happiness of the event. The double happiness symbol thus attained a respectable position in Chinese art of calligraphy and is used in weddings.

The double happiness symbol is an ornamental design used in decorations and could be translated as ‘Double Happy’ or ‘Double Joy’. This motif is pronounced as shuāngxǐ in Chinese. This double happiness symbol is actually a ligature, i.e. a ‘glyph’ formed of two separate units called ‘graphemes’. Grapheme is a fundamental unit of any written language while a glyph could be the variant of graphemes, a compound character (ligature) or a diacritic (a character with marks present above or below it). ~

There is another version that is so specific in it’s detail to presume it as a claim to authorship by Wang Anshi a Chancellor Northern Song Dynasty and one of the 8 Great Prose Masters of the Tang and Song Dynasties .

The girl’s couplet that changed his life…

“Walking horse lantern, horse lantern walking, lantern extinguished horse stopped trotting”

“走马灯，马灯走，灯灭马小跑停”

…and Emperor Shenzong’s, that surprisingly complemented it in his final test for the job.

“Flying tiger flag, flag tiger flying, flag rolling tiger hide itself .”

“飞虎旗，旗虎飞，旗卷虎藏身”

I find myself drawn more to the first version for it’s allusion to the visual, to tranquility of nature and the colour of human passion over the politics of power implied in the second pair of couplets whilst readily accepting that the green and red play is a later invention to illustrate the ever wonderful metaphor of these two combative hues. They after all complementary as are surely the partners in a successful, fruitful marriage.

Whatever the provenance the Double Happiness glyph in red is ever present at Chinese weddings.

I wonder (very briefly) who wrote the green and red couplets but am doubly happy to accept they were written after the fact by a person who truly believed in the symbol’s efficacy as a talisman of good fortune.

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A Chop to be cut in soft stone before this author leaves Kuching.

Thank You Mother.

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Author’s Note: Google translate has been used and checked back for the Chinese versions of the couplets. Below is the Chinese text of an article expounding Wang Anshi as the author. It is translated in the web based article at :

https://sites.google.com/site/chinesecouplets/couplet-storyhtml/double-happinesshtml

Other web articles referenced are :

http://www.buzzle.com/articles/double-happiness-chinese-symbol.html

http://jnutandquamwedding.blogspot.com/2011/04/double-happiness.html