TCB Basics

It's the first day of daylight savings time. Early. I'm looking these posts over and am sort of dissatisfied. I still don't think I've hit quite the right tone.

But, as we say Texas when we get off topic, we could chase that rabbit alllll day.

I'm feeling bleary and like my body is at low tide, but not so much so as I have in previous years. My wife and I have been getting up about 40 minutes early. We heard the BBC on the radio at that indecent hour.

I adore daylight savings time. We saw the first hummingbird of the year last evening.

Divination basics. Modern divination. In fact, there's a lot that I don't know anything about. Astrology and tarot.

I grew up in a setting that at once had a lot of hoodoo going around, and also a lot of people with their faces resolutely set against it. As a suburban kid, this was part of kid culture. It was also emanating from the poor neighborhoods down near the shrimp boat docks. Attitudes about magical conduct were immoderate.

It occurs to me that the time and place I grew up was immoderate in other ways. The Texas "chemical coast" of the 1960s was very racially divided... A lot of the remarks about magic and spells could be applied, for example, to the blues as well . The blues were everywhere; you didn't talk about 'em a whole lot.

There were a lot of things you didn't talk about back then. We didn't have any basis for thinking of it as a repressive, or oppressive time and place. (Later, as teenagers, we just thought it was us, wanting desperately to break out of "Plastic City, Where Nothing Is Real." Just our own developmental difficulties, individuation. In retrospect, maybe there really were a few things that were weird and awful about that era and place.)

I see I've riffed for 30 minutes and not really talked about modern divination.

As I was saying, it's amazing how much I don't know about this.

I don't know, I just got a book and started casting coins and seeing visions when I was a teenager. Maybe 1975.

I was a lonely screwball kid with a gaudy vocabulary trying to get his thoughts and values organized.

My first I Ching. It was a terrible I Ching, but a pretty good book. And I presume it produced fair sales for Bantam. I see that it is still in print. Sam Reifler, I Ching: A new Interpretation for Modern Times. An enviable title! It's always good to be Modern!

(As if we could be otherwise.)

I see Random House still has it in print. Reifler was, I imagine, a dope smoking philosophy major from a nicer university, and a very decent little bloke. It is a humane book, and seems to know its audience well. (Enviably well.)

It doesn't hold up so well from the standpoint of the passage of the years.

It is like reading some of Kurt Vonnegut's novels; it's starting to seem like a commentary on that era, the American Scene of the late 1960s. And the cover: what's up with that? The new cover is not good. The original cover was so wonderful! A photograph of a tai-chi symbol made of lucite with colored lights being played on it. Serious oooh factor.

But it was a grand book. Slick as a Steely Dan song, and redolent of the smell of subverting the dominant paradigm. Or at least smoking dope and getting laid.

In some ways too, it's the things that you take in with your baby milk that affect how you see and do things. Riefler I guess was a huge influence on the shape of TCB some 30 years later.

And it was a courage teacher, I think. Though I can't say it led me to walk that road less traveled (I was never able to find the road more traveled), it gave me courage at a few junctures. Even a truly bad I Ching can give hair-raising readings.

It almost seems to amuse the oracle to do that, to speak cogently through a terrible translation, like the stories of Sidney Bechet pulling pieces of the most horrible, beat up clarinet out of his pockets and then putting them together with chewing gum and playing like an angel.

Still haven't addressed the topic set by the title...

Next time.