The Calligrapher — Chǔ Suíliáng 褚遂良

Tang chancellor and regular-script master of elegant, balanced strokes.

Tang calligrapher (596–658), master of regular script — Tang master of graceful, tensile regular script favored by the imperial court. Tang dynasty

Cultural Story

忒 is excess, and its opposite — a clean count. 詩經 says 昊天不忒, the high heavens do not err, and the word also means too much, the notch past the mark. One character for the perfect measure and the overshoot, the right and the ruin of the same line.

Common words & phrases

• 忒煞 too much · excessive
• 差忒 error · deviation

Read the story behind the character

忒 is the Beijing drawl for too — 忒好了, a bit much — and 差忒 the error a careful text avoids. The heavens are a dialect now; the excess is everyday. We still mark the overshoot, mostly by speaking it with a vowel the dictionary barely admits, which suits a word that always meant both.

Why this character belongs on skin

There is a character for the moment when feeling overruns its banks—heart radical joined to a word of excess: too much, beyond what is proper, the drop of the pulse that goes past bearing. In the old operas it turns up in the mouth of lovers and the grieving—this longing is too much—syllables thrown at fate by people who meant it. The Taoists would warn against it: excess is the crack where the Dao runs out, the arrow drawn past its breaking point. But then, no one who has ever loved has honored that warning for long. There is a reason the heart radical sits inside the word for too much: feeling is the thing we are built to overdo. To wear this character is to own your extremity without apology—the love that went past sensible, the joy past containable, the sorrow past script. The moderate are never remembered. Ink the excess where you can see it, and let it give you quiet permission: feel it all, and then some.