In early autumn, when I went back to my hometown, my grandfather built a pergola in the courtyard. The shed was hexagonal and covered with thatch. On such an autumn day, my grandfather drank jasmine tea in a large enamel jar, and the autumn wind blew, and the tea was accompanied by the fragrance of wood and thatch. It was really pleasant.
A season has a season’s body fragrance, with flowers in spring and lotus in summer, vegetables and fruits in autumn and plums in winter. This is the difference between the seasons, and the commonality is that every season has a woody incense companion.
Looking at the history of Chinese architecture, many ancient buildings are wooden structures. In the early years, many people went to southern Anhui or Jiangxi to collect some old buildings. Bricks and tiles are not valuable, but the wooden structures of houses are valuable. Those turned yellow beams, oxidized brown purlins, dark rafters, and carved sparrows with paste are all treasures. With these, the soul of ancient buildings is there. Ancient bricks and tiles are easy to match, but it is difficult to match the old wood held in the mouth of bricks and tiles. Even if it is old, it will completely lose its original flavor. .
In many ancient buildings, in order to prevent insects, the outside of the wood is painted with tung oil or painted. This refers to large-scale building materials. If you are only building a small building, simply use plain wood. Plain wood, that is, without any anti-corrosion materials, is not colored, and the log emits its due fragrance under the infiltration of years. The fragrance is faint, not strong, and you can’t smell it from a long distance. When you sniff it closely, the faint woody smell is very similar to the smell of wood shavings scraped by carpenters from the plane in the old days in the countryside. Bark, shavings, the smell of wood is all over the yard.
My uncle was a carpenter, and his specialty was making stools. Square or round stools are held together by the mortise and tenon structure, and the excess wood thorns are polished off with sandpaper, and the texture of the wood is fully visible, which is very beautiful. When I was in junior high school, every time I went to my aunt’s house, I would sit on the stool he made for a while, and then hold a fresh stool and smell it with my nose. It was a fragrance. Fragrant and durable.
Wood is such a strange thing. It doesn’t need to be cooked or burned, and its own fragrance makes people want to stop. The faint woody fragrance is not strong, but it is very pleasing. This may be the power of nature and the charm of vegetation.
Plain wood has been popular for a long time. In “Historical Records”, there is a record of plain wood being used for sacrifices and holding five grains. There is also such a sentence in “Hou Han Shu”: “Every spring and autumn for shooting, there are always rituals, with plain wood gourd leaves as Zu beans, mulberry arc Artemisia arrows, to shoot ‘dodder head’.” It can be seen that people use plain wood utensils It is the greatest respect for the ancestors and the heavens to hold the sacrifices. Just imagine, what can a person cover up for the people or gods he respects, and he simply treats them plainly.
In Kyoto, there are also many plain wood buildings or beautiful utensils, which are called “plain wood construction”. The avenue of the universe, the harmony between heaven and man, is vividly reflected in plain wood. In the cultural and creative shops on the street, I saw folding fans made by craftsmen, carved on plain wood, or hollowed out, or carved with light knife marks to carve dry landscapes, like a roll of scorched ink, the color is not strong, but it is fascinating.
I received a hand scroll from a calligrapher, which wrote Cao Cao’s “Dairy Wine”. The lower case is handsome and elegant, and the box outside is also elegant. The small square box made of paulownia plain wood has a scroll embedded in the middle, which is very quaint. Plain wood gives people the meaning of sincerity and indifference, not so deliberate, but also has a humble and low-key feeling, very much like an ancient gentleman. Indifferent but humble, interacting with it is like drinking a cup of old white tea.
Su Mu’s love is a deep love.
