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.

What kind of thing is the I Ching?

There's two theories, and which you tend toward may be a measure of the kind of person you are and the kind of reader you are.

One theory is that the I Ching is simply an ancient book, or a series of books, that have served communities and markets and users of various stripes, in completely different ways, whose recieved text more or less stabilized some 2800 years ago, and which has accumulated a vast critical apparatus that has with time become fossilized as part of its bones.

The other theory is that the I Ching is an infinite book, a perpetually moving target, a sort of divinity of which anything may, sooner or later, be reasonably said.

A kind of Rorschach test for both the reader and the would-be translator.

This latter has elements of truth, of course.

But to feel that the text is capable of taking on any form whatsoever completely destroys one's enthusiasm for digging deeply into the text.

I mean, why bother trying to crack a nut if the nut is a collection of vague underdetermined associative chains, and not a nut to be cracked at all?

Yet among other things, the I Ching is exactly this.

It can be played with in a superficial way, and that can be rewarding for a lifetime. The surface brilliance makes me imagine a collage of ancient pieces of broken wood and glass. Or perhaps a musical instrument covered with such a collage of ancient fragments.

And I hope too that you understand that I mean no condemnation by the word superficial.

Surfaces are important!

It is a musical instrument that has been played, often played against for many centuries by readers, sometimes by readers of genius.

Sometimes in fabulous misreadings: arrogant performances of genius, or simply vast mistakes, or perhaps -- creatively salvaging an ancient text that a political change in climate has rendered toxic and unbreathable?

The book as a sort of wasteland, dead ashes of many empires that had run their course.

But (and I steal Wittgenstein's strong image, here) -- with spirits hovering over the ashes.

I believe these remarks recover some of my first feelings from reading Wilhelm-Bayes, the main English language I Ching, and then Wang Bi/Richard Lynn's version.

Here is where I think the I Ching-as-Rorschach-test idea is wrong:

There is a strong distinction to be made in interpreting the I Ching.

The user may apply it to anything. That's what it is for: it is for the infinitely free play of interpretation.

The would-be maker of an I Ching translation is vastly more constrained.

There are realities: textual, historical, cultural, mythic, folkloric -- there to be dealt with.

And communities of strong readers.

Any number of interpretive games might be played, but they have to be played explicitly and with a degree of rigor.

For example, Wilhelm's approach might be called anthropological. He preserved the traditional viewpoint of a group of superb informants in the 1910s-20s, from the point of view of a westerner completely immersed in, and deeply in love with, Chinese culture.

But the archaeology that underpins the Modern School didn't exist. Does that make Wilhelm's book bad? Does the new interpretation diminish his book's importance? Hell, no. Obviously not.

Wilhelm's book sells something on the order of ten copies a week on Amazon.

I hope that one of the side effects of my little book is to bring more readers to Wilhelm as well.

My book is a very different kind of critter, however.

More of that another time.

On Love Affairs With Books

Read a story from the New Yorker (Feb 25, 2005) "The Beards" by Jonathan Lethem. One of my cronies sent me the article because it reminded him of me.

It was basically a mini-memoir in the form of essays about books and records and movies he was in love with when he was a teenager. Fripp and Eno's "No Pussyfooting". Citizen Kane. Philip K. Dick's Ubik. Bob Dylan records. (Lethem was four years younger than me. For him, to do Bob Dylan was to be a man out of time, an eccentric.)

It feels weirdly voyeuristic watching him remembering reading these books. Like watching someone sleep with your ex-girlfriend.

Your relationship with your books is a profound and monogamous one, but only on your part.

In fact your partner crawls in the laps of perhaps thousands of other people.

This is a fact that continues to feel shocking, and a little nasty. Why that?

The extraordinary intimacy with which we interact with our books. The way we wad up and break the backs of little paperbacks. It is a rough form of love. (The stories of Samuel Johnson's way of manhandling books. For Dr Johnson, to read a book was to ravish it.)

The way that words and phrases and pet analogies become wedded into our own way of talking, welded into our nature.

If by nature we're not happy with our manner of talking, we hate the very cadence and tonal character of our own speech (and who does not?) , they become prostheses of a sort, they become parts of us just as my glasses are part of my face.

For myself, there's something about little fattish paperbacks.

Science Fiction. I remember the difference was when I was a kid: you could own paperbacks. They became part of you in a way a library book could not. And more often than not, I didn't know anybody else reading the same stuff I was...

We are lulled into forgetting these slick, perfect friends of ours who know us so well were manufactured dreams, dreamed up and pressed into paper and plastic by large and powerful corporations, with their legal ownerships, legal environment, nourished and protected by phalanxes of lawyers and marketing drones.

An industry.

Anyway, I'm thinking about The Chameleon Book, and relating it to the little paperbacks I would breathlessly buy as a teenager. It is a book about them, to a certain extent.

But it occurs to me that in a certain way, TCB is more like them (more like how I felt about them) than they actually were.

It dawns on me that TCB really, literally is a book being read by a tiny coterie of gifted, knowledgeable, quirky people all over the world.

Surely this is one good way to measure a book: look at the people who are reading it.

(A Borgesian question. Could a book in itself be rather unremarkable, or even very bad in some ways, and yet in some way be very be very great, because it successfully helped form a great community?)

The Passage of the Pope and an Eclipse

An eclipse on the day of John Paul's funeral makes a Yijing reader thoughtful.

Eclipses aren't terribly unusual. There are (I learn from the radio) five to seven a year.

In the Yijing there is an eclipse as a figure for the passage of great power, the passing of the Mandate of Heaven.

Further, it is associated with the funeral of a very great king, the saintly and literary King Wen.

He was, to a greater or lesser degree, a historical person; and the founder of a great dynasty.

Today's eclipse is a "hybrid" which means it is not a total eclipse everywhere on the path of totality. Here is a map of the path of totality:

http://sunearth.gsfc.nasa.gov/eclipse/SEplot/SEplot2001/SE2005Apr08H.GIF


The trajectory of the path of totality does make one thoughtful.

Romance and the I Ching

Love and sex.

No doubt the I Ching can talk to these, but there's a certain ponderousness about it, a certain absence of lightning.

It is, in the most perjorative sense of the word, literary.

(One of life's normal ironies. You are more comfortable talking about the uncertainties and joys of flirting and dating when you are older, married and safely away from them. )

I remember reading about an I Ching maven completely boring a charming woman at a party to death while he laboriously cast a reading and sorted out what it meant. She sort of drifted off.

The lesson I take from this is that modern divination either needs to be in a tranquil setting, or it needs to be really, really quick.

By tranquil read: not in the throes of a romantic whatever...

I have this student who looks like a rock star. He acts like a pretty normal and goofy kid around his teachers, but when there are sexually relevant girls, the rock star vibe comes out. He starts posing for crine out loud.

This dude doesn't need to tell girls their fortunes. He's got Svengali eyes with magic sparks coming from them, and that works for him.

Vibes.

No, I'm thinking more astrology and Tarot cards. My offhand sense is that they are sexier than the I Ching. That the superficial vibe of I Ching has to do with the will to power rather than a sex vibe. (I'm just riffing about superficial appearances here.)

Speed and fluency.

TCB and the coin oracle might be the ticket. I don't know. It's certainly quicker, and the entries aren't so mazy.

I'm starting to get feedback about TCB, and some people are saying it actually is a pretty good I Ching for use. Nothing could gratify me more, but (and I know this sounds like a vast lie) -- that wasn't really the goal.

The goal was to come up with an interpretation that was sort of plodding and painstakingly correct, to display the Zhou Conquest narrative material, and then to see if a useable oracle would pop up as a side effect. (Or an "emergent propery," if you like.)

(For most of the writing process, I figured I was unearthing an oracle that only an empire builder from 1000 BC could love.)

Courtship and marriage appear as figures all through the I Ching.

Love and Marriage as figures for war.

But.

If I pose a question about love, then war becomes a figure for courtship.

An assault on the castle, and so forth. Are we pleased with that? Nothing could be more ordinary. Soldiers and cavaliers have made such figures since time out of mind.

A bit of swashbuckling, then, gentlemen? Perhaps so.

Time will tell if TCB is, shall we say, comfortable, with matters love and sex. (Nothing could have been more banal if I had labored to make it so; nothing could be a more pleasing lagniappe.)

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.

A Style of Scrupulous Meanness

James Joyce said of Dubliners that he had written it, for the most part, in a style of scrupulous meanness.

Now by this he did not mean that he was hateful toward his characters, or that the narrative was angry, or anything of that sort.

He meant that the writing style was one of fastidious plainness, in which he tried, for the most part, to excise the purple patches and fine writing.

I think that Joyce often damages those with writerly pretenses who read him (and who reads Joyce who does not?), but I think one of the good things a writer my inherit from reading Joyce is a certain limberness with regard to clarity or obscurity, simplicity or complexity, of style. By which I merely mean that sometimes Joyce is very simple. Sometimes he is vastly baroque. And every possible plateau in between. It's all a matter of context and the effect he is persuing.

I believe people are very prone to endowing prose of a certain level of density and complexity with aspects of moral probity.

I too am very inclined to do this; I think it very natural.

TCB is in a style of scrupulous meanness. By which I indeed mean a style of fastidious plainness.

But the byzantine style of many I Ching translations I resolutely do not condemn as byzantine excesses.

I just can't read them very easily, in some cases.

I find that my attention wanes for literary writing that I can't read rather easily. I think I am rather ordinary in this regard.

I'm starting to have a few strong readers read TCB. The ones who aren't already into the I Ching find it perplexing. The ones who are do not.

So, are these strong readers finding TCB perplexing, or the I Ching?

I'm not sure. I think maybe indeed the latter. For this reason.

I had a draft that was much clearer, much more linear, and unfortunately, full of stuff that was wrong. Oversimplifications, in several cases.

When I corrected my mistakes, I came up with the current TCB. And it seemed much more convoluted, much more snaky.

And much more correct.

To the extent TCB is a narrative, it is a narrative whose chronology has been run through a Cuisinart.

And a plain style can't do much about that...

Am I a promoter of alien abductions?

I was reading an article about an alien abduction hustler by the noted science journalist, James Gleick. He wrote a book about Chaos Theory that I loved years ago.

He talks about UFO believers and takes a distinction from the world of wrestling. Wrestling fans consist of the "Smarts" and the "Marks".

Somehow I ran across the article and I had to apply it to myself, and my efforts to establish a readership for my book. Am I like the Doctor? Am I a Smart passing myself off as a Mark? Or, am I a Mark pretending to be a Smart?

More disastrously, am I doing something that is a slap in the face of capital R- Reason? Or worse, trying to take advantage of the Marks, the True Believers, and thus exploiting people whose beliefs I don't altogether share?

Troubling questions!

What are I Ching fans really like? Are they chumps?

No...They seem to be extremely bright. And they are succeptible to visions. (Why, I wonder?)

I'm thinking about Jung's intro to Wilhelm's I Ching. It is quite an august piece of writing. It puts forward a scientific principle by which this strange little practice can be justified: "Synchronicity."

This preface radically puts divination in another realm from religious practice; recall that sainted Wilhelm, the translator, was a Christian missionary, and his book is saturated with a humane Christian sensibity. My nose tells me he was a very good man, as good as he was erudite. He concieved modern divination as a form of introspection.

Apparently it worked; I haven't heard of people having book-burnings of I Chings. Furthermore, the significant thing for me was that it allowed me to mess with the I Ching not despite my faith, but despite my heathenishness. I was quite a hard-bitten atheist at 20, it let me read the I Ching, convinced I was doing something vaguely scientific.

As often happens, I'm reminded of a Borges story, the one about the Arabic poet who wrote the book that would become the Rubaiyat. He is a Algebraist, a student of the Koran, and an atheist. His lack of faith did not preclude being a competent theologian, as part of being a cultured man.

Within the tent of any belief or organization there is going to be a spectrum of flavors and kinds of faith.

And even being a card-carrying athiest doesn't prevent someone from being a glassy eyed True Believer in something. As a recovering Ayn Rand worshipper, I know this to be true.

One of my friends is a devout Christian, and loves reading about UFOs. But he's at all not a True Believer about UFOs. (I think.) It's like reading fiction.

The more I poke around at it, the idea of the human race being divided into Smarts and Marks seems more complicated, and less obviously true, than it first seems.

"Believing" and "believing in" are ideas that should come in more flavors.

I do know this: being an absolute skeptic es no bueno! It prevents thinking and causes you to lock things out before you engage them. Some flavors of skepticism strike me as a kind of mental crudity.

And being gullible has its obvious problems...

Am I dealing with terribly dangerous things? Or merely slightly silly ones?

Whatever. For the most part, I'm having a lot of fun. And the work justifies me, in some obscure way.

I'm also savoring the friendships I'm starting to make because of the book.

My final thought is that people who fool around with fortunetelling have surprisingly alert bullshit detectors. Though they might not shred me for cutting corners on research (though several would), they assuredly would if I wasn't playing from the heart.

Which, to the imperfect extent to which I even have a heart, I am doing...

Divination and the Literary Critic

"Criticism"...

I would like to see literary criticism as a meat and potatoes, meet-the-damn-deadline, common-sense activity that does things useful for more or less normal people that read books. Sounds like a fantasy of being an old fashoioned newspaper man doing movie reviews.

Reading important books-- or just wierd, difficult, exalted books-- instead of watching films that are mostly by-the-numbers potboilers.

Where does reviewing shade off into criticism? or Critism? Well, the publishing context is everything. That's a whole nother blog entry, I think...

So I see that you wrote a divination manual based on the I Ching.

Well... no, I wrote a nit-picky, carefully correct translation of the I Ching, and then wrote a commentary that reflected what I thought it meant.

So does that make you an expert on Chinese literature, or magic or divination, or something.

Well, more of an expert that I would have thought, I guess. But...

I see myself as a kind of journalist who has a tolerance for details, and, I fervently hope, most of the time, good taste.

I don't think you're cashing the check you wrote with the title.

No, I don't think I have. Relating "reading" in the sense of divination to "reading" in the sense of "reading"... sounds like a big topic.

Looking at divination and reading books from the outside, they both look like rather stupid activies.

Compulsions. And ones whose value is not immediately obvious.

They're similar in other ways as well.

They're also both extensions in a certain direction of things pretty much everyone has to do in order to survive. Extreme extensions. (Mathematics is this way also.)

They're both very old activities that are part of civilizations... very tied to the context of the civilization they are in.

I feel about what I do rather like professional philosophers seem to do about recruiting for their work. Nobody should do this unless they have to. I don't want to pitch my product, in a way.

Except to those who already are under the influence of visions of one kind or another... religious, or of stories, or the grandeur of history, or even great fiction or epic poems... or, or, or.

Except that some of these things make me feel so rich, and the people around me sometimes seem so poor, and the life they have seems so thin in texture.

Roughly: reading is the art of making meaning.

And divination is a form of reading. I don't really know if this is a rather pathetic thing, in the face of the grandeur of 2500 years of the Religions of the Book, or not. Or, if it is to be thought of as oppositional to the Religions of the Book at all.

I'm reminded of the Borges story about the Sect of The Phoenix, whose ritual is rather silly and ephemeral...

and yet... and yet.