Lucas Klein

Lakes and Mountains:

Richard Berengarten’s Changing via the transnational and translational I Ching

“Octavio Paz, Allen Ginsberg, Jorge Luis Borges, and Charles Olson, among many others, wrote poems inspired by its poetic language,” writes Eliot Weinberger. “Fritjof Capra in The Tao of Physics used it to explain quantum mechanics and Terence McKenna found that its geometrical patterns mirrored the ‘chemical waves’ produced by hallucinogens. Others considered its binary system of lines a prototype for the computer.” Weinberger is referring, of course, to the I Ching, China’s Bronze Age “Classic of Changes.” He continues:

Philip K. Dick and Raymond Queneau based novels on it; Jackson Mac Low and John Cage invented elaborate procedures using it to generate poems and musical compositions. It is not difficult to recuperate how thrilling the arrival of the I Ching was both to the avant-gardists, who were emphasizing process over product in art, and to the anti-authoritarian counterculturalists. It brought, not from the soulless West, but from the Mysterious East, what [Richard] Wilhelm called ‘the seasoned wisdom of thousands of years.’ It was an ancient book without an author, a cyclical configuration with no beginning or end, a religious text with neither exotic gods nor priests to whom one must submit, a do-it-yourself divination that required no professional diviner. It was a self-help book for those who wouldn’t be caught reading self-help books, and moreover one that provided an alluring glimpse of one’s personal future. It was, said Bob Dylan, “the only thing that is amazingly true.” (Weinberger 2016: 145-146)

To Paz, Ginsberg, Borges, Olson, Dick, Queneau, Mac Low, and Cage can now be added Richard Berengarten. His Changing is the newest work to write into and out of the methodology of the I Ching; it may also be the most ambitious. And yet the ambition of Changing is counterbalanced with the understated everydayness of many of Berengarten’s poems, like the interplay of yin and yang 陰陽 in a hexagrams’ broken and unbroken lines. Weinberger’s essay provides a helpful lens and filter through which to view Changing.

The book totals 563 pages, comprising 450 individual poems, each of eighteen lines. As Berengarten explains his process in the “Postscript,”

I have modelled Changing closely on the I Ching by replicating and adapting its architectonic patterns at various levels of compositional structure. At the micro-level […] each poem has six stanzas and each stanza consists of three lines. In this way, the forms of both hexagram and trigram are implicitly re-presented (re-called, re-embodied, reduplicated, replicated, etc.) in each poem’s mise-en-page. The visual and formal patterning of six tercets (eighteen lines also suggests three hexagrams stacked over one another.

At the macro-level, the book consists of sixty-four clusters of poems, each re-presenting a hexagram. Each cluster begins with an italicised ‘head-poem’, which is related thematically to its corresponding hexagram title and statement in the I Ching; and each of these is followed by six further numbered poems corresponding structurally (and often, though not always, thematically too) to the hexagram’s six change-lines. In this way, each of the I Ching’s hexagrams yields a cluster of seven poems, arranged hierarchically and in a sequence that follows that of the ‘received’ (standard) version. Together with two additional poems for the I Ching’s extra line-readings in the first two hexagrams, the number of poems in the book is (64 x 7) + 2 = 450. (CH 525)

Berengarten also mentions that he “came across the I Ching in 1962,” as “a nineteen-year-old undergraduate studying English at Cambridge”; that the first poem he wrote “out of” the I Ching was on August 30, 1984; and that he was “beginning to entertain the idea of writing a collection based on the I Ching” by the nineties (ibid. 523-525). So not only have these ambitions served him for over fifty years, but, since writing the first poem of the book, he has published, by my count, at least nine other books of poetry, not to mention his prose and the collections he’s edited.

And yet look at the first poem he wrote chronologically, titled “Two lakes, joined”:

Two lakes, joined,

one above the other

along the same river:

Upstream, the Derwent

and, below,

the Ladybower.

When two lakes join

together they

do not dry up.

One draws the other

through constant

self-replenishing.

Upstream, the Derwent

and, below

the Ladybower.

Joyousness:

two lakes, joined,

one above the other.         (58/0: 464)

This piece, Berengarten explains, “was based on a divination,” and “articulated itself quickly and effortlessly through composition into its particular form, with little need for restructuring or rewriting” (524-525). Rather than being ambitious in any egocentric sense, this poem reads as meditative in its repetitions: it comes across as sexual yet not lustful, and therefore loving but not Romantic (there is a Derwent in Wordsworth’s Lake District, but here the Derwent and Ladybower are manmade lakes in the Peak District) (561). Overall, the poem is one of joy: indeed, that is the gloss Berengarten gives in his gloss at the bottom of the page:

joy […] on joy

Overall, in both tone and themes, this poem casts off the kind of ego-bound ambitiousness that might otherwise be implied by the project as a whole.

Not that Changing doesn’t include poems more emblematic of its drive to encompass swathes of reference and experience. The thirty pages of notes at the end of the book attest to this scope and inclusiveness, ranging references from Bronze Age China to Paul Robeson and Joan Baez; from Woody Guthrie (“The night before // he was executed, Joe telegraphed / Big Bill Haywood: ‘Don’t waste / time in mourning. Organize’”) to Edmond Jabès (“Singular, unique you, // final piece in its puzzle, / end-cog, wired connection / completing its circuit, // switching it on, off, on, / you open and close the book / with no back cover”);¹ from Thomas Malory (“And when Sir Bedivere had / thrown the sword in the lake, an / arm and hand rose up straight / from the waters and grasped it) to Theodore Adorno’s comment about “no poetry after Auschwitz” (“I shall find words, my / own, after, despite and because / of this. And speak of it. / … Whatever your intent, your // words invite barbarism / to root in nothing-saying. / Failure is not of or in // language, but small trust / and short vision. Our task lives / in words. Not outwith them”); and from quoting Cesar Vallejo while riffing on Matthew Arnold (“Calor, Paris, Otoño, ¡cuanto estío / (Heat, Paris, autumn, so much summer)— / and then turned pages and read // C’est la vie, mort de la Mort!— / and that was even finer than fine. / Poetry is a criticism of death”) to collating Blaise Pascal and Shakespeare’s Caliban in the lines “The grandeur of / these infinite spaces / gives delight and / hurts not” (56, 141, 157, 293, 333, 445).

And there is of course ambition in the heightened pitch of many of the poems:

Josh’s fossil turned out

a nautiloid, black limestone,

400 million years old.

Air in these lungs

is thick with crumbled

shit dust. Meanings

that moan in dross

and memorabilia demand

magnified attention.        (23/0: 184)

Or here, where the texture of the language is as onomatopoeically and alliteratively loaded as Anglo-Saxon verse or Ezra Pound’s “Canto 1”:

Ballasted angled keels,

hewed smooth-curved hulls to

sit stable in water, caulked

carvel planks, lengthened

bowsprits, hoisted masts further

forward, slung neat jibs         (42/0: 336)

But more common are plainspoken statements with philosophical implications, for example, “A lake on a mountain”:

A mountain presses

up, pushes its presence

to rear, bucking

against gravity. So

when a lake forms on

a mountain, opposed

forces meet and

merge in fine self-

checking balance. (31/0: 248)

Which is to say, the book’s greatest ambition may well be to stay as accessible as the everyday.

This “quotidian” ambition of Changing also gives it an internal tension. If this is an embodiment of the I Ching’s yin and yang, it is at once the result of the poem’s — and, I think, Berengarten’s — greatest influences, which are the poetics of Octavio Paz and Ezra Pound. Pound, of course, was not only, in T.S. Eliot’s words, “the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time” (Eliot 1928) with Cathay, his 1915 translations of medieval Chinese poetry, but also one of the progenitors of the by-now-long tradition of writing Chinese culture in poetry in English.² Pound is, unsurprisingly, referred to many times throughout Changing, from the last line of the epigraph (“it coheres all right”: Pound 1970: 27) to the final poem (“It all coheres, no question, / as do these notes of mine”, 64/6: 518) — including a poem written against Pound’s lines “these were the ‘Wing’d-with-Awe’, / Inviolable,” from a poem Berengarten titles “Hail Victory,” a translation of Sieg Heil. (58/6: 470; Pound, “The Return,” 1928: 85). But while Berengarten disclaims the fascist in Pound, clearly he emulates his erudition.

The Paz in Changing is perhaps the more interesting case. “Of all the poets I have known personally,” Berengarten has written elsewhere, “Octavio Paz has had the strongest and most lasting effect on me” (RB 2017) — and it shows. They met in Cambridge in 1970, when Paz was writing The Monkey Grammarian (whose main character, the simian deity Hanumān, is also incarnated as Sun Wukong 孫悟空 in the Ming-dynasty Journey to the West 西游記). While Pound has his focus on the luminous detail, Paz is the gentler poet, and his influence lends Changing its understated tenderness—even without being cited as often (or, indeed, because he is not cited as often).

Nor should Paz’s relationship to China be overlooked as a contiguous and deeply connected wellspring for Berengarten’s involvement in the I Ching. Weinberger has catalogued some of Paz’s expressions of China:

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, translations of Chinese and Japanese poets. East Slope [Ladera este, 1969], arguably his best book of poetry, takes its title from the Sung Dynasty poet Su Shih, who wrote under the name Su Tung-p’o (East Slope). The pages on Taoism and Chinese eroticism in Conjunctions and Disjunctions [Conjunciones y disyunciones, 1969]. […] In the 1970s and 1980s, short essays on Tu Fu, Wang Wei, Han Yu, and other Chinese poets. […] In 1989, Duo Duo, the young Chinese poet avidly read by students demonstrating in Tiananmen Square, remarks that his favorite poet is Octavio Paz. (Weinberger 1992: 35)

Weinberger adds that Paz “never indulged in Orientalism” (See Said 2003). Alongside Duo Duo’s interest in Paz, there is also the contemporary Chinese-language poet Yang Lian whose long poem Yi is also based on the I Ching and, according to its translator Mabel Lee, bears many similarities to Paz’s poetics in “Sunstone.” (Lee 1997).³ An example of one of Paz’s most ‘Chinese’ poems is “Concord:”

Water above

Grover below

Wind on the roads

Quiet well

Bucket’s black Spring water

Water coming down to the trees

Sky rising to the lips        (Paz 2012: 273)

Weinberger points out that this short poem “takes its first two lines from the I Ching (the 28^th hexagram, Ta Kuo: ‘The lake rises above the trees: The image of “Preponderance of the Great.” Thus the superior man, when he stands alone, is unconcerned, and if he has to renounce the world, he is undaunted.’)” (Weinberger 1992: 35). Paz wrote this poem in 1968, two years before Berengarten met him. “In 2014,” Berengarten writes, he discovered that “Octavio had been exploring the Chinese Book of Changes as early as 1958.” Serendipitously, the two “had been following similar explorative approaches into the I Ching […] but by independent routes.” Berengarten concludes: “To Octavio, then, what is called chance is just one of the modes through which our perception registers the inherent coherence and connectivity of things” (RB 2017).

But if Paz never indulged in Orientalism, has Berengarten done so? And is Changing indicative of what Timothy Yu has said about “white writers praising Chinese culture while ignoring Chinese people”? Weinberger’s line above, about “the seasoned wisdom” from “the Mysterious East,” implies that nearly any vision of the I Ching would have its Orientalist aspects. While Wikipedia introduces Berengarten as “a British poet, translator and editor,” it also states that he prefers to think of himself “as a European poet who writes in English.” Here, several further questions arise. First, is such cosmopolitanism not a pose that overrides locality and real borders, which he can afford by virtue of a passport he doesn’t admit to? Second, since the allusions I have traced above are all of Western literature, in writing from the I Ching is he extracting value from Chinese heritage only for the exclusive use of a separate tradition in the West?

My answer is no. Orientalism is real, but reflexive accusations of Orientalism for nearly any engagement with a cultural other are too easy. For one thing, Berengarten points as frequently to scholarship on China and the I Ching in its earlier contexts as he does to European and American reference points. The sources for his knowledge about the I Ching are not only from the earlier Wilhelm tradition but also from such present-day scholars Edward L. Shaughnessy (who also provides Changing with its preface) and Richard J. Smith, as well as innumerable Chinese friends and acquaintances who have guided him in his journeys. Their not being included above among illustrations of Changing’s breadth represents no more than a selection of references based on the likely readership of this book. In addition, Berengarten’s acknowledgement of his living Chinese sources not only makes the I Ching more contemporary but also avoids the typical Western construction of China, which is to make itself the standard-bearer of modernity while relegating China to antiquity.

Weinberger reminds us that according to the ancient Chinese tradition of the I Ching’s mythic origins, Fu Xi discovered that “the patterns of nature”—namely the markings on birds, rocks, and animals, the movement of clouds, the arrangement of the stars”—could be “reduced to eight trigrams, each composed of three stacked solid or broken lines, reflecting the yin and yang, the duality that drives the universe. […] From these building blocks of the cosmos, Fu Xi devolved all aspects of civilization—kingship, marriage, writing, navigation, agriculture—all of which he taught to his human descendants.” Of course, “The archaeological and historical version of this narrative is far murkier”:

In the Shang dynasty (which began circa 1600 BCE) or possibly even earlier, fortune-telling diviners would apply heat to tortoise shells or the scapulae of oxen and interpret the cracks that were produced […]. Where the hexagrams came from, or how they were interpreted, is completely unknown. (Weinberger 2016: 140-141)

For centuries, much of the story of the I Ching has already been international: the movement westward includes not only the registry of writers this essay with, but also many earlier ones, for “the I Ching was discovered in the late seventeenth century by Jesuit missionaries in China […]. Leibniz enthusiastically found the universality of his binary system in the solid and broken lines.” Later, “Richard Wilhelm’s 1924 German translation of the I Ching and especially the English translation of the German by the Jungian Cary F. Baynes in 1950 […] transformed the text from Sinological arcana to international celebrity.” The German edition gave general terms to “specifically Chinese referents,” as well as “scores of footnotes noting ‘parallels’ to Goethe, Kant, the German Romantics, and the Bible.” In this way, by being presented through the lens of a “Jungian, metaphysical version of chance,” the Wilhelm/Baynes version became a text that wrote the merging and melding of times and cultures (Weinberger 2016: 142, 145).

Changing, of course, is an elaboration of the I Ching, not a translation. Berengarten explains: “My hope is that this book will be read first and foremost as a poem, or gathering of poems, in its own right and for its own sake” (521). Nevertheless, as Weinberger suggests, insofar as “the I Ching is a mirror of one’s own concerns or expectations […] like one of the bronze mirrors from the Shang dynasty, now covered in a dark blue-green patina so that it doesn’t reflect at all,” (Weinberger 2016: 151), we can also draw the same conclusion about the reflections and refractions, the clarities and opacities, of Changing. The book is both encyclopedic and linked to many other works of poetry, as well as to art, ritual, history, philosophy, and mythology. It can also be read either cover to cover, or else be “dipped into at random, the way one reads E. M. Cioran or Elias Canetti.” (Weinberger 2016: 147). I recommend dipping into it, even perhaps consulting it as you might an I Ching translation.

Hexagram 52 (Gen 艮) is one of the eight ‘doubled’ trigrams. It consists of two ‘mountains’ ☶, one above the other, designated as V. For this hexagram, Berengarten deploys the title “Stilling,” and the first poem in this set of seven involves climbing a mountain.

He left his city,

walked out past

wind-battered scanty

fields carved vertiginous

in terraces, sheds wedged

against hillside rills

nestling perilous on

edges and past these

higher still where

scant trees grew,

to a cloud-smothered

mist-wreathed hut

on a gorse-spattered

plateau. Friend, he said

on arrival, I bring you

no gift, either of inheritance

or of adequate skill. None

the less, here I am.        (52/0: 416)

The poem starts to narrate what seems like the prototypical Chinese hermit at the moment of becoming, but Berengarten’s mist-wreathed mountain is in fact a plateau, spattered with gorse—a flower native to western Europe. Perhaps the mountain on mountain takes place not far from the “Two lakes, joined,” above, from which Changing grew? And here, rather than pursuing perfect solitude, Berengarten’s hermit meets a friend. In its way, then, this poem, like every poem in Changing, is a microcosm—both of the book in which it takes its part and of its relationship to the I Ching: two mountains conjoined, as if reflecting each other across the surface of a lake, rippling with differentiation, and yet always returning to each other in stillness.

Yin and yang are not only the broken and solid lines of I Ching hexagrams, or the feminine and masculine, respectively, or the out-of-the-ordinary and the quotidian; they are also, in their earliest definitions, the north side of a body of water or south face a mountain (yang), and the south side of a body of water, or a mountain’s north face (yin). And even when they are still, they are always changing.

References

Berengarten, Richard. 2016. Changing. Bristol: Shearsman Books.

———. 2015 (July 8). “Octavio Paz in Cambridge, 1970: Reflections and Iterations.^” Online at: http://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/2015/07/octavio-paz/

Eliot, T.S. 1928. “Introduction.” In Pound, Ezra. Selected Poems, xvi.

Fenollosa, Ernest and Pound, Ezra. 2008. The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: A Critical Edition. Saussy, Haun, Stalling, Jonathan and Klein, Lucas (eds). New York: Fordham University Press.

Hinton David (trans.). 2015. I Ching: The Book of Change New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Klein. Lucas. 2018. The Organization of Distance: Poetry, Translation, Chineseness. Leiden and Boston: Brill.

Lee, Mabel. 1997 “Discourse on Poetics: Paz’s Sunstone and Yang Lian’s [Yi].” In Lee, Mabel and Hua, Meng (eds.), Cultural Dialogue and Misreading, Broadway, N.S.W: University of Sydney World Literature 1, Wild Peony, 86–99.

Minford, John (trans.). 2014. I Ching: The Essential Translation of the Ancient Chinese Oracle and Book of Wisdom (New York: Viking.

Paz, Octavio. 1981. The Monkey Grammarian. Lane, Helen R. (trans.). New York: Seaver Books.

———. 2012. The Poems of Octavio Paz. Eliot Weinberger (trans. and ed.). 

New York: New Directions.

Pound, Ezra. 1915. Cathay. London: Elkin Mathews.

———. 1928. Selected Poems. London: Faber & Gwyer.

———. 1964. “Canto 1”. In The Cantos of Ezra Pound. London: Faber and Faber, 7.

“Richard Berengarten.” Wikipedia. Online at: https://wiki2.org/en/Richard_Berengarten

Said, Edward W. 2003 [1978]. Orientalism. London: Penguin Books.

Shaughnessy, Edward L. (ed.). 1996. I Ching, The Classic of Change: The First English Translation of the Newly Discovered Second-Century B.C. Mawangdui Text. New York: Ballantine Books.

———. 2013. Unearthing the Changes: Recently Discovered Manuscripts of the Yi Jing (I Ching) and Related Texts. New York: Columbia University Press.

Smith, Richard J. 2012. The I Ching: A Biography Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Weinberger, Eliot. 1992. “Paz in Asia.” In Outside Stories: 1987-1991. New York: New Directions.

———. 2016. “The I Ching.” In The Ghosts of Birds. New York: New Directions.

Yang, Lian. 2000. Yi, Lee, Mabel (trans.). Copenhagen and Los Angeles: Green Integer.

Yu, Timothy. 2016 (April 9)/ “White Poets Want Chinese Culture Without Chinese People.” The New Republic. Online at: https://newrepublic.com/article/132537/white-poets-want-chinese-culture-without-chinese-people.

Published: Saturday 23 April 2022

[RETURN TO CHANGING]

Lucas Klein (柯夏智, Ke Xiazhi)  is a father, writer, translator, and associate professor of Chinese at Arizona State University. He is executive editor of the Hsu-Tang Library of Classical Chinese Literature (Oxford), author of The Organization of Distance (Brill, 2018), co-editor of Chinese Poetry and Translation (Amsterdam, 2019), and translator of Xi Chuan (New Directions, 2012, 2022), Mang Ke (Zephyr, 2018), Li Shangyin (NYRB, 2018), and Duo Duo (Yale, 2021).