The secret of the superhuman grace of oriental paintings is in years of practice. One stroke has to be enough, but its exactitude is borrowed from the thousands thrown away. Apprentices can never be allowed to trace their fish, but sit before the paper day by day and dash off brush-strokes until goldfish is their signature. If there should be a glass dish with a pair of languid goldfish in it on the mat beside them, it would only be as a reminder there are fleshly fish as well. They work until the light is far too weak to paint by, and wear blindfolds even sometimes, as they paint. They needn't sight the pictures, which will be discarded with the others anyway. The fish swim on into the flat wall of their cosmos, blind to comprehension in the light as in the darkness. But this apprehension reaches them : there is no virtue in the mere attempt, but only, once, in the achievement, swim into another universe. This diver took his lights into the depths of the Antarctic ocean. There he found a rosy garden of vermilion and carmine ' hues time-tuned specifically to not be seen by those blue beams that penetrate the ardent midnight. Thus they bloom in deserts of gods absolute-enough to work outside the possible. The craftsman now has difficulty seeing anything. He doesn't know it has grown dark, but sits there painting goldfish. You can hear the brush swish, just, and the plop as one fish flicks drops up that capture the residual sparks of sunset, thinking it can leap to freedom from its dish.
