Revisiting TCB

I have finished my degree program, and am revisiting TCB as if it were written by someone else. I'm pleased, pleased how few apalling surprises I find... I feel I was very blessed, very lucky in this literary adventure. How strange TCB is becoming to me! Some of it of course is seeing the strangeness of the Zhouyi in a different light: Some of it, in other words, isn't due to me or my writing. The Z is a snakey, writhing, underdetermined text. In other words: infuriating, but a lot of fun.

Another form of comparison, correlation: divination, reading: I look at the same questions and problems as others do on Clarity, and get... oh, not the same, but very compatible answers. Except sometimes, when the Zhouyi seems to come up with something blunter, more slashing.

I hope to have more time to put into this, now... we'll see.

Case of the Disappearing E-Mails

Things have been quiet, "too quiet", around the Brazos Media World Headquarters. As it turns out it was too quiet: some, but not all, of our correspondence had been merrily falling off the face of the earth for most of 2006. If your inquiry falls into this category, please ping me again. It should be sorted out, and your purchase or inquiry should be responded to with great alacrity, I think.

Comments and all that

I'm just learning things about blogging that I should have learned a year ago. Anyway. Moderated comments are turned on; please leave a comment, especially if you have been reading and/or playing with The Chameleon Book.

In unrelated news, I'm thinking about adding an I Ching applet to the chameleonbook web site. Any neat ideas to make an applet that doesn't suck?

In more unrelated news, I'm still in graduate school,and it's still wonderful, but time consuming and distracting... my professors are wonderful. Brilliant, great-hearted, and of course mad as hatters... I seem to be going that direction myself... at least the latter bit...

Stories about ancient peoples

Do people write novels set in unfamiliar bronze age city states? I'd like that. I'd like a novel about the cities of Zhou-era China, for example. What a strange time and place. The very ecology was different, lusher, greener, with large mammals to hunt.

Or Mesoamerica.

The I Ching as narrative still captivates my mind. I suppose that is why I wrote TCB; in order to have something to do with these evocative, charming, elusive fragments and stories.

Stories.

I'm imagining The Chameleon Book's narrative as a big, lush comic book. A graphic novel. Would that work, I wonder? I wonder.

What do people do with stories, with narratives. How do they play with them. How do they apply stories to their lives? Like biblical stories, the short, pungent stories of irony and justice and vision.

Ways of reading. How do people relate modern narratives, like novels, to their own lives? They remind us of people we know. Or: "aren't things just like that". Or, they represent Inner Truth. I'm thinking of Philip K. Dick's Man in the High Castle. The nazi officer reflecting on the novelist's tricks when he's reading the novel-within-the-novel: The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. Of course the point was that Grasshopper was true, and the officer was too occluded (because he was a nazi!) to ever possibly grasp the truth...

Are they tricks? Or are they Inner Truth? Yes, and yes, of course.

If you are a graphic novelist who likes the I Ching... get in touch with Brazos Media, ok?

Would I make any grand claims for the Inner Truth of TCB. I think so. I think so. How about, as versus other flavors of I Ching translation? That is less clear. Even terrible translations of the I Ching can be the vehicle for many long thoughts. Borges wrote about how strong poetry survived inelegant transaltions (God knows his does), how it sounds like it was all written by the same poet. Was the Yijing written by Borges? By Homer? I think perhaps it was...

Man. I could use this blog to write a whole essay about Man in the High Castle, if I wanted to.

Hi, JK, BG, AT, CC...thanks for the kind words. You're all very dear to me.

The Freeman Etudes

Speaking of vanity. I bobbled a vanity search a little bit, and did "I Ching" and "Freeman" in Google without my last name. I came up with a number of references to John Cage.

It turns out that Cage wrote a series of horrendously difficult violin etudes (commisioned originally by a violinist named Freeman). It was written, I think, as a response to a request for a piece that was notated precisely.

Cage's response was to write a piece in which every possible parameter of style, dynamic, type of attack etc. is notated explicitly. Its difficulty lies in requiring multiple changes style and attack in rapid succession.

Cage sees it as a commentary on the "practicality of the impossible," the notion that the extraordinary difficulty of the problems our society faces is not a reason for despair, but rather a reason for extraordinary effort.

It was written, by the way, using I Ching hexagrams to select the controlling parameters.

It seems the oracle is using the search-engine oracle, or the Oracle of Cage, to give me a clue...

In other news, I've gotten a considerable amount feedback since the last -- despairing? No, let's say jittery-sounding -- post. Oddly, a good deal of it seems to be unrelated to people reading this blog... kind of uncanny...

Thanks for your confidence; I'll stick to my guns...

A Truly Awful Book?

How's me?

I'm scattered and tending many fires these days; maybe finally too many.

How's the career of TCB?

Not many new sales, but many kind words from people on Clarity's site.

Despite many, many kind words from people whom I know would be frank with me if it was a stinker, I'm still not totally confident in the book.

I'm cycling back around to the fear that I've written a Truly Awful Book, and that my taste and perceptions are so miswired that I simply don't have the powers of discrimination to tell that that's the case.

A reasonable position for me to take is that for me to write TCB off as a stinker would be a slap in the face to the several remarkable people who have checked off on it, and would be a kind of inverted vanity.

Time to hunker down I guess.

Has anyone tried to make a purchase and failed to get a response? If so, let me know.

Brazos Media still has several dozen copies.

Love, hugs and thanks to all of TCB's friends and readers.

Sanctioned Violence

Got an email from Harmen Mesker in the Netherlands calling my attention to a book called Sanctioned Violence in Early China by Mark Edward Lewis. It looks very promising, as does another book by Lewis, Writing and Authority in Early China.

I haven't gotten them yet, but I find that I have better access to a great library, so I'm going to try to read both of them. Stay tuned.

Apparently a few people are following this! If you're one of Hilary's friends, then I've been taking classes and writing papers at a furious clip, and will be lurking on Clarity some more soon. The people at Clarity have been wonderfully good to me. Peace, y'all.

What does TCB reveal about the I Ching?

So what emerges from this process of stripping away everything but the original Zhouyi, and correlating it to the Zhou Conquest narrative?

Well, it's an exciting book!

It's a book about the overthrow of a rotten central government by a virtuous provincial people!

It's a book with killing! Beheadings! Visionary quests!

Kings and ministers cutting deals that shape the future of dozens of kingdoms!

It is a book with a villain who gets unseated from his throne, and a people who are rescued from the misery that he has brought down on their heads!

It is a book with characters! Amazing characters, that we get to see through the dark glass of a text from the dawn of literacy, a bronze age society like ancient Greece or Egypt.

It is a ripping yarn!

It has a plot!

(With the wrinkle that it is all scrambled up. Is there a grand pattern to the way the chronology is rearranged? I don't know! I hope TCB is a step toward someone finding out.)

All this, and it's also a working oracle.

My new friends who are working diviners have said that it works, and it reads. And the narrative material about the Zhou Conquest enables a new way of reading. (Or clarifies a very old one.)

What emerges is a book about war; but it is not a bellicose book. The importance of treaty, alliance and correct treatment of defeated peoples are immense in the I Ching. And war as a figure can be applied to the individual life and career in clear ways. Also, it is not a timid book, which I have sometimes (perhaps wrongly) felt of traditional I Chings.

I would like to read more Asian writers about warfare, pre-modern warfare.

I've read a fair amount of Samurai literature. And of course I've read Sun Tzu's Art of War. Some of the sensibility strikes me as very comparable.

It would be interesting to correlate some of the notions that emerge in my naive readings with other writers on pre-modern warfare in Asia.

I wait with bated breath for a reader who is a strong student of bronze-age warfare in Asia. I will find their thoughts deeply interesting.

What is The Chameleon Book's angle?

Every I Ching related publishing project has an angle. TCB I suppose is no exception, except that there are several angles, and they're not easily summarized.

I think what emerges is sensational, but it's not because I have one particular theory I'm putting forward, but because of the interaction of several things results in a very different view of the I Ching, or I should clarify: the primitive I Ching, the Zhouyi.

When I began looking hard at the original text and comparing the usages of the same word in several different places many things became clearer. At some point the notes I started taking sort of developed critical mass, and detonated into a book project.

There is the translation, which is I think, pretty uncontroversial. Basically everything that I do that is controversial or against the grain, either grammatically reparsing a line, or making a homophone substitution is footnoted and explained.

I tried to lard in as much historical material that was useful, uncontroversial and relevant, because I felt that if my guesses were worthless, then the translation and all the correlations with historical material would continue to be interesting and of lasting worth.

There seemed to me a lot of correlations that were rather simple that could be made that nobody ever did. Such as saying what kind of herbs the herbal references were, and why they might be relevant. Things like what a plow looks like, and why that was relevant to the Great Yü.

A lot of simple and sometimes lovely fragments of fact and data.

Out there in dissertations, papers and history books. Nobody ever organized into an annotated Zhouyi. Why? Well, because there wasn't an obvious way to market it.

Roughly speaking: what you would have might be too geeky and technical for the mass market (in the eyes of a conventional publisher), and yet too spooky and weird and too much a piece of creative writing to go through the channels as an academic paper.

The only way a book like this would get written and published is if an outsider with a completely bizarre combination of skills as a reader, puzzle solver, literary detective, critic, creative writer and typesetter fell in love with the damn book.

That would be me.

Freeman Crouch, literary detective, at your service.

So what emerges in this reading? What's distinctive about TCB?

I'll try to address that next time.