Mike Barrett
Positive and Negative Capability:
I Ching and the Poet
Overview and Method
I have foreseen
you reading this be-
fore you were ever
conceived. (CH 53/6: 430)
My first encounter with the I Ching was eighteen years before the time of writing this essay, while preparing for a trip to China as part of an education delegation from Missouri. I threw coins and read hexagrams with the help of a book whose tone was self-help. I found a more authentic version in a text I bought in China, The Illustrated Book of Changes by Yan Li, an illustrated version of the Zhou Changes. The gnomic language in the text —“Plain white clothing. Not bad” (Yan 154)—captured the essence of imagist poetry, that “intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” (Pound online), while also functioning as a meditative prompt, in a similar way to Tarot Cards, Buddhist koans, John Dee’s hieroglyphs, or Kabbalistic figures.
The poet who deploys the I Ching in the process of composition may engage a vatic role, recalling Sidney’s statement: “Among the Romans, a poet was called Vates, which is as much a diviner, foreseer, or prophet” (Sidney 106). Shelley, too, in his “Defence of Poetry” echoes this theme:
Poets […] were called in earlier epochs of the world legislators or prophets: a poet essentially comprises and unites both these characters. For he not only discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the present […] (Shelley 781)
The Blakean Bard, “who Present, Past, and Future sees” (Blake 37) enacts this same vatic function. Throughout this essay, when I refer to the ‘diviner-poet’, I mean the poet who conducts the I Ching divination procedure and responds with poetry. The diviner-poet, in this respect, is both vates and maker.
The I Ching itself may be regarded as a semiotic system applicable to all that is, could, and should be. The diviner-poet, working with intention and guided by meditation, composes a question. Meditation necessarily precedes formulation of the question—it reduces the ‘self’ or, at least, that part of the ‘self’ that is conditioned by subjective responses to the phenomenal world. Meditation, then, releases these responses, so that, localized in the body’s here-and-now, the diviner-poet may attend more deeply to the present.
A random procedure—whether gathering yarrow stalks, throwing coins, or transforming situations into numbers—operates on this semiotic system and generates either a single hexagram or a sequence of two hexagrams in answer to the diviner-poet’s question. The hexagram is a topological function that projects those pertinent aspects of what is, could, and should be for the diviner-poet to consider and respond to. S/he will also consult judgments, predictions, and prescriptions, accumulated and selected from the past and integrated into the text of the I Ching. The ground for the entire procedure is an assumption that immutable laws govern mutability. Out of this process, the diviner-poet makes a poem.
By examining this procedure, I derive eight emergent properties of the I Ching:
It is semiotic.
It is kinesthetic.
It is esthetic.
It is ethical.
It is civic.
It is mathematical.
It is cosmic.
It is hermeneutic.
In this essay I will discuss Richard Berengarten’s Changing by analyzing it in relation to this procedure and these properties.
1. It is semiotic
[…] these
marks, this residue
constantly dissolving
and recrystallizing, this
efflorescence. (10/3: 83)
In some sources, the I Ching results from inductive reasoning—sages observed the comings and goings of things to derive a system of signs. For example, Berengarten’s “What the Book Says about Itself”:
mountain-shapes in mist,
textures of fur, skin, and hair,
light’s striations on water,
tracks made by animals,
birds, spiders, insects, worms,
in sand, dust, mud, clay—
observing these high
and low with eyes peeled
we learned to copy
and with our fingers mark
patterns of our own in shell,
wood, clay, hide, stone. (20/1: 161)
Harmony with Hopkins’s inscape is heard here—the deep-down tune in things, source of their haecceitas, perpetually expressed to the attentive observer. The account of Fu Hsi developing the eight trigrams is similarly narrated:
[…] looking up, [he] contemplated the images (xiang) in the sky and, looking down, the markings (fa) on the earth. He observed the patterns (wen) on birds and animals and their adaptations to the earth. From nearby, he took hints from his own body…then he began to make the “eight trigrams” of the Book of Changes to pass on the model symbols (xianxiang) to later times. (qtd. in Gu 263)
The origin of the trigrams is also defined deductively, as an axiomatic transmission from heaven. Berengarten’s “Changing into Beautiful” begins: “What the book says of itself / is that first of all came numbers / taking forms of straight lines” (20/3: 163). In this version, the origin is a formal system assumed to be anterior to the existence of natural phenomena. Thus, whether derived from observation or intuited from ‘eternal forms’, the I Ching functions as a semiotic system to encode phenomena and transmit that code into the future.
In his essay “The Zhouyi (Book of Changes) as an Open Classic: A Semiotic Analysis of Its System of Representation,” Ming Dong Gu argues that it is an “open book amenable to appropriations and manipulations by people of any doctrine, religious belief, or moral standard, and its openness comes from it being a semiotic system whose principle of composition warrants unlimited interpretations” (Gu 258). In Berengarten’s Changing, the I Ching is applied to peoples of many historical periods, cultures, and doctrines: Old Testament Jews, modern European modern Jews, Russians, Serbs, Moroccans, Poles, Rwandans, Chinese, English (Medieval and contemporary), Classical and modern Greeks, et al.
The sixty-four hexagrams form the base-signifiers of this semiotic system. The trigrams themselves assume multiple, polysemous roles: for example, the trigram ☱ Dui 兌, signifying ‘lake’ or ‘marsh’, might become a cloud, young girl, body part, or meteorological condition. Gu calls a hexagram’s multiplicative signifying potential its “representational capacity” (ibid. 265). This capacity increases geometrically when trigram is stacked on trigram to form a hexagram. The diviner-poet is thus able to transform metaphoric interpretation into metonymic substitution: the youngest daughter in one hexagram takes the form of a lake in another. In Berengarten’s poems generated by hexagram 31, Xian 咸, which he renders as “Reciprocating,” the upper trigram Dui is a lake, a young lover, a frustrated plan, a hamsah.
The linguistic commentary accrued over time is added to the computable system of hexagrams: “the hexagram images constitute a system of symbols while the hexagram and line statements form another system of linguistic signs” (ibid. 265). Hellmut Wilhelm finds these linguistic signs to be archives of folk wisdom, incorporating both Confucian and Taoist themes, wherein can be found the I Ching’s “real value” and “its comprehensiveness and many sidedness” (Wilhelm, H. 1995a: 51). Gu elaborates:
First it is a network woven with both visual and verbal signs. Second, the symbolism of a sign is polysemously designated. Third, the signs relate to each other in indeterminate relationships on multiple levels. Fourth, the network is amenable to different but equally valid interpretive strategies. Last…the system has a tolerant quality that permits new views to be assimilated into it as new components. (Gu op. cit. 275)
Berengarten’s Changing is a twenty-first century assimilation. Its design enacts further significations. The foot of every page holds what Berengarten calls a “base-line,” a set of words or phrases which functions not “merely as a by-product of the poem’s design but as an integral part of its content […] to echo, reinforce, support, strengthen, contextualize, complement, qualify, offset, develop, ramify, interpret, self-reflect, reflect upon and/or comment upon the main body of the poem” (RB 2018).
The I Ching itself allows multiple significations by clearing “a hermeneutic space constructed with imagistic or verbal signs capable of generating unlimited interpretation” (Gu 259). Berengarten calls this hermeneutic space “A Reading of Now”:
A reading of now
and its tails and hooks
antennae and entrails
roots and routes
tendrils and crannies
webs and branches
[…]
questions and quests
imminent and immanent
pitfalls and strands
and movements of
this to its end here is
posited, is posted. (l5/5: 45)
The poet observes the world through its sign systems, “its roots and routes / […] webs and branches”, in order to “posit” and “post” the reading, which joins 3000 years of previous positions and posts.
Information systems require channels through which messages pass. Although the I Ching may signify endlessly and prompt the poet’s insight, the poet must become a clear channel so that insight may be transmitted:
You have to sit and wait
in a patience within patience
without praise or hope
for meanings to grow
like ferns unscrolling from
cracks between lines. (20/0: 160)
2. It is kinesthetic
‘I’ dissolves. ‘I’ keeps
on dissolving. (25/4: 204)
In order to see, the poet seeks clarity. How does this happen? Sit and wait until the self dissolves— the poet clarified. Images in The Illustrated Book of Changes depict sages, male and female, in Taoist meditative postures. In some, they meditate; in others, they sit in front of yarrow stalks, scrolls, or with hexagrams hovering above their heads. These images reflect the I Ching procedure as meditative practice, stilling the body and quieting the mind.
Taoist or Buddhist meditation guides emphasize the importance of posture during meditation. Proper posture ensures that the body rests on a firm foundation. The kinesthetic and proprioceptive senses, secure in the balance of the body in space and time, become less active, calming the nervous system. But as the body settles, the mind must quieten too. If not, mind stirs body in a negative feedback loop:
Eyes down-inclining,
I entered in here-now,
in their intertwining
What might interfere
or come undermining
but a host of sincere
wanderings of thought
commenting and resisting
on this must, that ought,
clamouring, insisting,
till skin and muscles fought
and clarities kept misting? (33/3: 267)
Even though the narrator has begun meditation with the proper posture, the frontal lobe, with its “musts” and “oughts,” agitates the kinesthetic, “till skin and muscles fought.” The poem’s aba / cac / ded / ede / fgf / gfg rhyme-scheme reinforces the tangling of mind and body in disquietude.
Among the sages in Changing, Shi Jing represents a contemporary meditation model. In “Epping Forest,” we see Jing meditate under an oak. When a boy asks, “Oy, aintcha cold, mister?” Berengarten writes, “Smiles open and spread / through him, then join up /a single smile” (33/6: 270). Mind and body united and clear, Jing smiles with his entire nervous system.
Berengarten employs hexagram 52, 艮 gen, mountain over mountain, which he calls “Stilling,” to narrate the process of the ‘I’ dissolving, of brain circuitries becoming “unconditioned” (Austin 116), under the guidance of Shi Jing.
The commentary in the Illustrated Book of Changes to line 1 of hexagram 52 “Stilling” reads: “Stopped to look at your feet. Right—this is the right moment to make a long-term plan” (Yan 359). When we stand, we connect to the earth with the soles of our feet. The commentary implies: “Your connection to the earth is secure; now consider what’s beyond this path.” In Berengarten’s response, the sitting narrator isn’t yet ready to look down because his head is busily insecure:
I settle slowly, mind
top-heavy turbulent giddied
not yet ready to look down
let alone gaze into deep
nothing (52/1: 417)
Shi Jing’s bowl-bell that calls meditators to attention is the subject (and object) in poems 2, 3, 4, and 6 of “Stilling.” The bowl-bell is emblem of the meditator’s ideal mind: dissolved of the filling ego, the bowl sits ready to receive:
[…] Lacking
hope or desire, bowl-bell
has no views on things,
no opinions, options or
ideas, and sits or seems to
sit in perfect rounded
silence. (52/2: 418)
Its tone when struck —which is reminiscent of Hopkins’s “bow swung” that “finds tongue to fling out broad its name” (Hopkins 1587)—is unique to each bowl. If it is not empty, its tone is distorted. Only an empty bowl can hold everything:
[…] What happens
is nothing. Everything
fills to the brim with
absolute nothing. That’s what
empties (into) everything. (52/5: 421)
As already suggested above, the I Ching procedure can be seen as a meditation session. The diviner-poet meditates until a question emerges; then, much like handling prayer beads, the poet’s hands are occupied in a familiar patterned movement while throwing or picking up yarrow stalks and contemplating the question. When the hexagram is generated, s/he meditates on it, much as a Zen Buddhist meditates on a koan, in order to respond. This meditation session never really ends. Once activated, the kinesthetic sense recalls the poet to a balanced body and clear mind, and s/he is thereby enabled to act propitiously. Berengarten likens this process to replenishment that requires a kinesthetic act—lowering and lifting a bucket from a deep, clean well:
I lower my
question on a rope
of thought.
I draw up
water-wisdom. (48/5: 389)
By practicing the I Ching, the narrator is able to “draw […] wisdom”. This over-brimming is akin to the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”: it only works for one who has “thought long and deeply” (Wordsworth 160).
3. It is esthetic
light changing
on surfaces
is delight, is
glory, the unique
common miracle […] (55/1: 441)
As the previous section explains, the ego dissolves through meditation, then the channels of reception open. Clear perception then reveals the numinous in nature. In the essay “An Unexpected European Voice,” Paul Scott Derrick comments: “[Berengarten’s] poems could be described as the hymn of the praise of things” (Derrick 157). Changing adds to the hymnal.
For Berengarten, things collect and connect, for example a “Cox’s Pippin”:
I bring you the very
sweetest apple in the whole
world, from an orchard
in England. Its pips
rattling in their pods recall
spring rain scattering
on greeny rivers. Red
umber and gold clouds
on its shiny skin bring
back misted dawns
and bronze sunsets (26/0: 208)
This apple is multidimensional. Time and space give its form. The poem is rich in sound quality. For example, “shiny skin bring / back misted dawns / and bronze” and the repetition of nasal/n/ in “shiny,” “skin,” and “dawn.” The /br/ chime rides along the sprung rhythm of “bring / back misted dawns.” This melopoeia is sweet like a Cox’s Pippin.
Things derive blessings from local conditions, as does art. “A Singer from County Clare” is the poem for the first line of hexagram 25 (无 妄Wu Wang, rendered by Berengarten as “Untwisting”), consisting of the trigrams thunder ☳ (震Zhen) under heaven ☰ (乾Qian). The Wilhelm/Baynes version translates these trigram names as, respectively, “The Arousing” and “The Creative.” In Berengarten’s poem, local conditions tune the timbre of the voice:
[…] its brindling by sun
and cloud on sward, its
tough difficult farms
tucked in sallow nooks
among karst mountains
flecked grey and black,
its goose ponds and mud,
its angles of slopes between
dune-marram and ocean […] (25/1: 201)
Creativity grows locally. As in “Cox’s Pippin,” the sound is rich: the network of consonant echoes in “brindling,” “sun,” “cloud,” and “sward.” The assonance of “karst” and “farm” conjoins, before another measure of consonantal sounding begins in the next stanza.
In Berengarten’s esthetic, beauty is light-fed and night-rested, sky-born and earth-swaddled—channelling the grace that moves through everything.
Under hills this
grace flows
through everything.
Chestnut and oak
bud, green
earth’s carpet.
Red tulip petals
scatter. A blue
butterfly hovers. (22/0: 176)
Noah Heringman, scholar of Romantic literature, names this kind of poetry “nature at home” (n.p.). After reading Changing, a reader could easily describe the ‘nature at home’ with Berengarten in Cambridge: its flora and fauna, its weather, the casting of its light.
Throughout Berengarten’s oeuvre, the sign of natural grace is light. That visible form of energy illuminates our sense and fuels us:
Always light above and
light’s inflections most
keenly inject glory
through tunnels in
tissues behind eyes. (10/0: 80)
Derrick aptly writes, “the poet [Berengarten] has become—in Emerson’s famous phrase—a transparent eyeball, trembling with the power of a blinding glory that grants him a second sight” (Derrick 156). In Berengarten’s response to hexagram 35 (晋 jin) , consisting of the trigrams fire ☲ (離 Li) over earth ☷ (坤Kun) which he entitles “Dawning”, the sun is heaven’s gift and arouses the earth to life. Light clings to things the way earth clings to heaven:
How light and things
trust each other. Unshakably.
Light everyday loves
things so much it sticks
to, passes through, lingers
over, surrounds
all. Light adheres, inheres
everywhere, there, here in
here. (35/3: 283)
4. It is ethical
It’s light that
most demands to be
affirmed against
death […] (30/4: 244)
The I Ching is often deployed as a guide to deciding on the action proper to changing circumstances. Therefore, it calls the diviner-poet to an ethical as well as an esthetic response. Alfred Huang notes that the Confucian School uses the I Ching in a daily, practical way (Huang 111); and Richard Wilhelm calls it as a rulebook for the art of living (Wilhelm, R.: 224). This dimension is evident in Berengarten too. His response to the first line of hexagram 10 (履 Lü), sky over lake (which, following Richard Wilhelm, he calls “Treading”), models the kinesthetic component of the ethical:
hands washed and open
breath clear, regular,
feet slightly apart, knees
and shoulders unstressed,
supple eyes prepared
to take in all angles,
ears filtering slightest
sounds – all of which
accumulate to a poised,
coiled, sustained alertness –
so treading on anything is
delicate as a small bird’s
footprints on snow, a sturdy
bee’s on stamens. (10/1: 81)
The position of the body here recalls tai chi posture and the poem dictates that attentiveness is the essence of careful treading. This poem may be compared to The Illustrated Book of Changes, which contains a tiger motif: “Tread lightly because you don’t know what you may step on” (Yan 64). Berengarten’s concluding analogies are precise, and procreative: “a small bird’s / footprints on snow, a sturdy / bee’s on stamens.”
The Confucian commentary indicates that only a righteous moral state will allow the diviner-poet to see accurately: “But if you are not the right man / the meaning will not manifest itself to you” (qtd. in Wilhelm, H. 1995a: 85). Berengarten provides practical tips for achieving this state:
[…] Best
to read, walk
a little, meditate,
exercise – breathe in this
present, for there
is no other – keep
body and mind clear as
‘one’ can, say little,
be cheerful or at
least act it […] (47/4: 380)
In addition, live modestly:
From now on self
will be surrounded
by a very few
loved and familiar
objects and still fewer
impossible desires. (60/4:484)
Like the Kabbalah and hermetic worldviews, the I Ching positions the human being in a microcosmic/macrocosmic relationship to the cosmos (Wilhelm, R. 203). The ethical is achieved by following the balance of heaven, as signed by natural phenomena:
Rules that govern
the gathering of rooks
into creaking colonies,
V formations of geese,
vastness of herring shoals,
bees’ mouth-shapes
to particular flowers,
also govern patterns of
your mortal time […] (17/0: 136)
The final ethical dimension that I will discuss here is found in the Hebrew word tikkun (‘mending, restoration, restitution’), which connects Changing to the Kabbalistic tradition (545). Many of these poems, both those directly addressing Jewish tradition and history and those concerning other peoples, apply tikkun to a world sorely in need of this remedy:
Our job, to clean
air, protect unkempt wild
hidden spaces twined
in forest lights, where
nest-singing birds that
chorus like angels […] (36/6: 294)
Changing itself is an act of tikkun.
5. It is civic
Malcolm didn’t register
how indelibly and ineradicably
were inscribed their interests
in models and infrastructures
of obsolete systems […] (18/4: 148)
In the same way that the I Ching proposes a micro/macro relationship between the individual human being and the cosmos, so also civil society relates to heaven. In an essay applying the principles of the I Ching to economic globalization, Wang and Kelly write:
From the insights provided by Chinese culture, the process is not only geopolitically global but cosmic, through the unity of heaven, earth, and humanity, symbolizing the harmonious relationship between all strata. This means that the human component—be it individual, state (through its government), or the international system—finds harmony with both heaven (Yang: the moral universe, related to justice and ethics) and earth (Yin: the source of nourishment, related to economics, environment, governance. (Wang and Kelly 247)
To be sure, the yin/yang polarity can be applied to any current political or economic circumstance, but the historical grounding of the I Ching complicates any such application. For example, The Illustrated Book of Changes, with its roots in the Zhou dynasty, is replete with images of taking prisoners for human sacrifice. Clearly, metaphorical transformation is required to derive contemporary civic instructions from these Bronze Age practices.
Furthermore, auspicious or inauspicious judgments are often made by determining whether yin and yang are in their appropriate position (Huang 100-108). In China, for more than two millennia, the I Ching has functioned as a rhetorical ‘instrument’ to maintain the social status quo. In The I Ching: A Biography, the historian Richard J. Smith explains: “The I Ching provided a cosmologically grounded justification for the social and political hierarchies of Imperial China from the Han period through the Qing” (Smith 219). Thus we can see how “issues of the day affect an exegete’s reading of a classic, and how an exegete’s reading of a classic helps to shape the direction of public debate” (Hon 15).
One civic thread that runs through Changing is a continuation of Berengarten’s previous project in The Manager. Late-stage capitalism is embodied through vignettes peopled by characters living under its strains. For example, we meet Antonino, a Mafioso hitman (0/6: 326); the widow of Magistrate Parving-Potts (54/1: 433); Julie, negotiating her adolescence (45/3: 363); and an isolated celebrity, Samantha (45/6: 366). Similarly, we encounter interns and managers, an NGO worker named Chiara (18/1: 145), and Julius, a wealthy, dull scion (6/3: 51).
Three main themes emerge from a survey of these characters. First, people become inured to the stench of greed and economic corruption:
Rottenness spread
so normally, so spiced
and glazed with reason
most believed it inevitable
and universal. (12/2: 98)
Second, self-absorption dulls perception:
Brisk, confident, but blind
in assumptions and certainty,
Jo screws up nearly every
time she moves […] (18/3: 147)
Third, the practice of tikkun is a powerful antidote to the Zeitgeist: “Plant saplings, shrubs, bushes” (18/1: 145).
Another civic thread that runs through Changing occurs in Berengarten’s response to hexagram 29 (坎 Kan, water over water), which he calls “Falling (into a pit).” In The Illustrated Book of Changes, this hexagram shows soldiers falling into a deep man-made trap. The positive and negative outcomes of that circumstance are set out in the line-readings. Berengarten’s first poem introduces us to three Moroccan political prisoners, Ali Bourequat and two of his five brothers, Bayazid, and Midhat. They are imprisoned in Tazmamart, “a disused tank barracks / beneath Atlas Mountains,” where they are held in “cells, three meters by two / pitch dark” (29/1: 233).
If they lie down
they’ll never get up
or out of this desert hole
where four winds meet. (29/2: 234)
The prisoners hang on to their lives and each other by sharing memories:
‘So long as we
had nothing at all,’ says Ali
‘our memories clothed us, who
were spiritually naked.’ (29/3: 235)
This poem recalls the work of the contemporary Korean poet Ko Un, whose series Ten Thousand Lives began when Un was a political prisoner. He kept sane in isolation by recalling, in detail, every person he had ever encountered. Un’s poetry and Berengarten’s account of the Moroccan prisoners highlight the life-sustaining nature of social memory.
When the prisoners are finally released eighteen years later, the prisoner Ali, while walking a beach in Scandinavia, affirms:
I’m sharper in awareness
of injustice from knowing
unbounded strength far
beyond hate. We were dead
and we came back. Now
delivered, I savour
unique moment’s breath
night and morning. (29/6: 238)
I have noted how an “exegete” interprets hexagrams as a mode of political discourse. Hexagram 29 has also been interpreted in light of administrative law (Smith 219). How, then, does Berengarten’s exegesis of that same hexagram shed light on Changing’s civic dimensions? First, whereas in the past, Chinese interpretation of the hexagrams has tended to reinforce social order, Berengarten’s main concern is in justice over order. Second, in writing about the Muslim Ali and his two brothers, Berengarten has taken a population currently ‘othered’ by European and American nationalists and portrayed them with humanity and dignity. The reader identifies with their courage and their fate. Third, his exegesis ends optimistically, matching the optimism of his work in general. Last, Berengarten has been called a European poet writing in English. His poems in Changing indicate that he is a world poet writing in English.
6. It is mathematical
First came number
out of both nature and
our own minds…
‘Numbers are instantly
available for every
counting operation,
like spirits that can be
conjured up at will.’ (20/2: 162)
In his book on the Plum Blossom Anthology, Da Liu observes that the Chinese character 算suan means both ‘to predict’ and ‘to calculate’ (Liu xi). The idea of exegesis as ‘calculation’ speaks to a foundational assumption of divining with the I Ching: immutable laws govern mutability. The universe is deterministic and its determinism can be expressed mathematically:
What the book says of itself
is that first of all came numbers
taking forms of straight lines
like fingers, which gradually
folded in upon themselves
being and denoting
pattern in inner and
outer worlds […] (20:3: 163)
Berengarten here reflects on the role of numbers in the I Ching: they inhere in the pattern of things. He embodies that numeric foundation in the form of Changing: every poem is composed of six stanzas re-enacting the structure of the hexagrams themselves.
Berengarten and Liu both reflect a kind of mathematical Platonism wherein mathematics is not merely an accurate calculus for modeling the cosmos but, rather, the cosmos itself is ordered mathematically. In addition, Huang states that numbers represent the motions between heaven and earth (Huang 23). By digging deeper into this assumption, we can further analyze this calculating process.
The random mathematical operation that generates a hexagram reduces all cosmological (macrostate) determinations to those that apply to the diviner-poet. Perhaps the contours of the present are disclosed through the random operation —like iron filings aligning themselves with an unseen electromagnetic field, or the role of observation in quantum mechanics: upon observation, all possible microstates (i.e. a macrostate) collapse into one that is the case. The random operation provides an observable scale to a cosmic measure:
As the universe
keeps all measures
and all in measure,
and each thing main-
tains its own seams,
stains, marks, patterns,
edges, pleats, horizons—
may the same quiet
patient appetite for
order cohere, inhere
in this, in here. (1/3: 7)
For Berengarten, then, the pattern “inhering” in a hexagram, uncovered in the present, signifies a coherent cosmic design, reproduced in the poem itself.
Nearly every introductory text on the I Ching in a Western language alludes to the story of Leibnitz and one of the first Jesuit missionaries to China, the Frenchman Joachim Bouvet, who introduced the German mathematician to the sixty-four hexagrams. This episode is compelling to enthusiasts because it implies the I Ching’s comprehensive accuracy. Two mathematical aspects of the I Ching drive this implication. First, the foundation of the entire system is binary. Liu relates yin and yang to positive and negative charges in atomic particles. Computational systems run on binary code. Matter/antimatter and energy/dark energy are also binary systems. Second, the I Ching requires combinatorics. This is the mathematical branch that governs the behavior of elements when combined in a finite set, such as trigrams and hexagram. Combinatorics is also used in molecular biology. Sergey Fedotov’s essay “Simple Association of the Genetic Code with Hexagrams of the Book of Changes” applies the structure of the hexagrams to the codons that compose DNA.
However, these applications could be interpreted as properties of the I Ching’s adaptable semiotic system rather than revealing ‘true’ cosmic measure. This idea can be demonstrated by considering the two nuclear or inner trigrams (or ‘core gua’) in each hexagram. Huang discusses the importance of these for interpreting the I Ching (Huang 144). Because of the way these trigrams are chosen (the 4th, 3rd, and 2nd line for the lower nuclear trigram; and the 5th, 4th, and 3rd line for the upper), only sixteen possible hexagrams can result from among them. This is by combinatory rule.
Now, if one takes the core of the core by applying the same procedure to these sixteen, one is left with only four hexagrams: the 1st, 2nd, 63rd, and 64th (in the Wilhelm/Baynes version, respectively named “Initiating”, “Responding”, “After Crossing Over”, and “Before Crossing Over”). Then, if one proceeds to extract the core of the core of the core, “Initiating” will continue to initiate and “Responding” to respond. However, “After Crossing Over” will turn into “Before Crossing Over” and vice-versa, and go on doing so, ad infinitum. Therefore, a mathematical necessity becomes a fundamental truth about the cosmos—heaven and earth are eternal, with everything in between perpetually coming or going. The combinatoric becomes the cosmic.
7. It is cosmic
Without the Platonic mathematical assumption, there is another way to think about cosmic coherence, for “Spaces / comets, stars, galaxies, / quasars, supernovae”
[…] stretch around,
among, within
us who, being
on earth, thereby
reside in heaven,
among heavens,
made of the same
heaven-stuff as they. (55/5: 445)
There is no separation between heaven and earth in this real sense; everything was one thing at the Big Bang, and everything has been changing ever since.
Studying physical laws that govern the mechanics of these heavenly bodies as they change is to study formal systems nesting into other formal systems:
[…] coherence
of all separable discrete
entities in a grand design,
the ways they all fit,
how fitting it all is, how
suitable, at all levels, from
the most tractable forms
threaded on the known and
probable to apparently least
significant hidden strings. (14/0: 112)
Jack Spicer had a good line about the fit and finish of the universe. In a letter to Robin Blaser he wrote, “Things fit together. We knew that—it is the principle of magic” (Spicer 164). Changing operates on the same principle.
Last, we may bring the locus of discussion back to where the design of the universe is continually revealed and reckoned—the now. We don’t see mathematical laws themselves; we see their manifestations. In the present, coherence manifests through, and inheres in, change:
[…] every-
where is constantly
on the move through-
out spacetime, just as
reciprocally spacetime
itself is always on
the move through
things. The one
common inhering
condition that never
changes is Change. (2/3: 17)
8. It is hermeneutic
[…] in plumbing you
I soar
feet still grounded
in this here now. (48/4: 388)
Surely the previous seven engagements proceed from the hermeneutic moment, the reading of divinatory clues and commentaries. As mentioned, Berengarten calls this process “A Reading of Now” (5/5: 45). Indeed, A Reading of Now is an accurate designation of the hermeneutic of Changing: “this now, / this knowing, this nowing / for poems” (21/2: 170). The diviner-poet in this respect is seer and maker, reading the is, could, and should be in the present, and inscribing its changing forms in poetry. Like the I Ching itself, poetry is made from responding and initiating.
The yin poet is a microcosm open to macrocosmic possibilities. Shao Yung, eleventh century author of the Plum Blossom Anthology, defines a sage in this manner:
The sage is a person by means of his one single mind to observe myriad other minds, by means of his own single body to observe a myriad other bodies, by means of a single (external) object, a myriad of other objects […] (qtd. by Liu xiii)
The poet’s receptive state recalls Keats’s “negative capability,” which he defines as “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason” (Keats 863). Berengarten is certainly sage enough to practice this receptivity, as evidenced in the enormous scope of subject matter and variety of narrative locales Changing inhabits. Negative capability is necessary for a creative response, but makers make, and making takes initiative: “the superior man keeps himself vital without ceasing […] and to enrich his virtue to sustain all things” (Huang 88). This creative vitality I call “positive capability”; it is yang in making. Changing, the result of a fifty-year relationship with the I Ching, is a testament to the positive capability of Berengarten.
In poetic composition, in general, both these orientations are always involved. But poetic composition is recursive, and finding a scale fine-grained enough to determine the exact order of negative and positive capabilities is impossible:
This is where we start
every time – in purposeless
potential, in a before so far
‘back’ ‘behind’ all other
befores, it can’t really be counted
as being in time of any kind,
let alone pertaining to or
belonging to time. Its isness –
meshed so tight and sheer
into its notness that neither
is extricable from the other –
yields a pointless point
neither passive nor active
neither this or that but both –
point of departure […] ( 2/7: 21)
Berengarten’s ‘base-line’ for the above poem includes the phrases “unhewn block” and “uncarved wood”, represented by the Chinese character 樸 pu. The extended meaning of pu is ‘pure and simple. But pu can only be “unhewn” or “uncarved” if it is already meant for hewing and carving. This point of departure opens the way for poetic composition, in which the poet becomes yin and yang merged in the process of making. It is as if the poet were an entangled quantum particle—both initiating and responding in a single state.
Changing is a work hewn out of the accrual of presence and a sagacious response to our anxious age. In “The Spirit of Art According to the Book of Changes,” Richard Wilhelm writes:
How are we able to rescue the spiritual heritage from the vulgarity pressing in on us from all sides? Art that succeeds to solve this problem of human kind is good art. Such art passes on spirit and flame kindled in the heart and it will continue to kindle, propagate, and guard the sacred fire, so that it may continue to burn. (Wilhelm R. 232)
Changing is the kind of art that Wilhelm calls for. It initiates and responds with vitality and optimism. It sends the reader ‘back’ into the present, ‘re-patterned’ in spirit. In its own words, Changing is a book
[…] fit for, capable of examining,
expressing, understanding, in
and through words, what had
been unsaid, unsayable […]
so that it may
[…] mend and change the real,
regrow and rebuild hope. (23/6: 190)
Acknowledgements
Grateful thanks to the editors for their careful reading, to Seido Ray Ronci for insight into the meditative sequence of the I Ching, and to Tim Langen for assistance with combinatorics.
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Published: Sunday 24 April 2022[RETURN TO CHANGING]
Mike Barrett is from Chicago. He has a B.A. in Economics from the University of Notre Dame, and a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from the University of Illinois-Chicago. As a founding member of the Chicago Poetry Ensemble, he helped establish the Uptown Poetry Slam, in the birthplace of slam poetry. Since then he has written ten books of poetry: Babylons/Other Poems, A is for Acts, Radical Two, The Book of Morpheme, 50 Easy Pieces, Recto Verso (V. 1&2), A Missouri Diptych, Walking with my Doppelgänger, and Nutz and the Boltzmann Brainz [sic]. He is recently retired from a long teaching career at Moberly Area Community College. He lives in Missouri with his wife, fiction writer Trudy Lewis. A comprehensive source for his poetry, prose, and visual art can be found online at mikebarrettarchive.com.