Richard Berengarten
The Making of Changing
Extract from a Work-Journal (2010)
1. Introduction
Changing was published in 2016. Between July 2010 and January 2014, during the last three and a half years of its making, I kept a work-journal. In that time, I was processing material that I’d been amassing since 1984, as well some from even before that – editing, reshaping, repositioning, challenging, querying it. I was also generating new material to fill spaces that my already-clearly-determined overall symmetrical structure now demanded of me: that of the I Ching itself.
What follows here is the first part of that work-journal, dated July to September 2010. Whether this fragment of a larger text sheds light on the processes of making any long poem, or does so only vis-à-vis some of the motifs and structures of Changing, is hard for me to say. My hope is that it may do a bit of both – and, besides that, fit coherently into the set of critical and interpretative essays that Tammy Ho, editor of Cha, has so magnanimously published as a feature.
In retrospect, I now recognise that keeping this journal performed several valuable functions for me. It enabled me to generate more material, to cut out waste, and to find the ‘right place’ for many pieces that I knew ‘fitted’, or at least ‘ought to fit’, but wasn’t quite sure how or where. So this was a time when the twinned processes of accumulation and iteration kept encircling each other, often met, and occasionally mingled, to breed new pieces. More specifically: as I typed these sporadic notes, I found myself gradually working through – and working out – questions, at precisely the moments when they were emerging in composition. And during, around and between writing the notes, realisations and solutions sometimes did occur. All in all, then, conducting these conversations with myself about and around the work, but away from it, actually turned out not only to belong to the work itself but also to be an integral part of it, insofar as this procedure often enabled me to sort issues and get back to making the poem with renewed energy and shifts in perspective and tone. Here I use the word ‘work’ to mean both process (labour) and product (completed artefact).
I also see, retrospectively, that the journal reveals phases of uncertainty, befuddlement, anxiety, doubt, tension and confusion, as well as pleasure, discovery and clarification. Keeping this journal enabled me to express and reflect on many changing moods, ranging, for example, from confidence, to despair, to acceptance; from frustration, to impasse, to flow; and from self-irritation to occasional pleasure in something working out right – and all of these, all over again, in many differing combinations, including zigzags, arcs and spirals.
The journal also shows that intense bursts of active composition were interspersed with time-gaps, some of which were quite lengthy. These gaps sometimes resulted from intrinsic difficulties but more often than not from a variety of other life-needs and pressures. So the work (in both senses of the word) proceeded in fits and starts, and with many interruptions.
In these ways, keeping the journal enabled me both to clarify to myself what I was doing, or thought I was doing, and to mould and shape material. This set of procedures inevitably meant trial-and-error: attempting this or that solution and hoping one of them would work out, but often, after trying it, deciding against it and going back to a previous idea, or simply waiting for another to appear – and occasionally discovering (astonishingly, unexpectedly, and delightedly) an entirely new one. So: trial-and-error, as I understand it, is a heuristic process involving multiple contradictions, cancellations and self-arguments, all of which – one hopes, or prays – will eventually work out.
The part of the work-journal published here was edited very sparsely in early May 2022, in collaboration with Paschalis Nikolaou, to whom I’m immensely grateful. Several references and retrospective clarifications have been added in square brackets. A few passages have been lightly modified for better clarity, and others have been cut out, mainly because in retrospect they seemed over-repetitious or trivial.
2. Extract from the Journal
Each date indicates the start of an entry. Dates with more than one entry indicate a spate of thoughts following one another rapidly on the same day.
21-7-10
Working from old drafts in notebooks and polishing them.
How do I know which poem fits into a particular position (hexagram)?
Sometimes the procedure is as follows:
If a poem has certain patterns of images, embedding / embodying a certain feeling, tone and movement of ideas, then it’s often fairly clear which hexagram it fits into. The procedure can be very simple. For example, take the poem ‘Water in the Stone Jug’, completed today [Changing 10/0: 80 – ed.]. This contains imagery of water and light, and it’s clear that it involves the two gua of water (Kan) and light (Qian). So the poem could only belong to one of the two in the opposed pair, Hexagram 5 or 6. Number 6 is ruled out because it’s about conflict. This poem then clearly belong to the hexagram (archetype?) 5: waiting, nourishment, needing, etc
This discovery of the positioning of the particular in the architectonics (sinfonia) of the whole is accompanied by (carried in it and with it) a kind of pleasure and recognition. To get it right: the fact that yes it does all cohere – answering Pound. [“I cannot make it cohere” and “it coheres all right / even if my notes do not cohere.” See Ezra Pound, CANTO CXVI, in Drafts and Fragments of CANTOS CX-CXVII. London: Faber and Faber, 1970: 26-27 – ed.]
I then may check and recheck through five or six different English translations of the I Ching in order to test, refine, purify, simplify the poem itself and its positioning in the overall pattern. I also check through my own (albeit primitive and ignorant) notes and file-cards.
It could be said that in this process is a kind of poetic equivalent of doing taiqi exercises, in fact, possibly any kind of internal martial art – insofar as one is going over the same material time and time again, in order to refine and clarify both procedure and resultant artefact. And also, of course, to refine oneself in the process. The artefact and the working on oneself are identical.
There’s no possibility of shamming or fooling the reader.
21-7-10
The six poems in each hexagram are to be read in most cases as a mini-sequence.
The ‘master’ poem to each hexagram isn’t necessarily part of the 1-6 sequence but may be a commentary on the rest it – or a counterfoil juxtaposed against it.
21-7-10
Some of the poem has been written as a mode of discovery – as I’ve found out more and more about the I Ching – as a way of my moving from ignorance to at least a little understanding.
23-7-10
Time to stop trying to be clever […] and instead aim to be simple, direct, and speak from the heart.
24-7-10
Have decided not to follow exactly the sequencing of individual lines in each hexagram – for all its myriad complexities – but rather to indicate a themed movement in each sequence of six lines.
Have also started to consider making the ‘master’ or rather ‘key’ to each hexagram (series of six) a personal poem in which the voice of ‘I’ is deployed.
4-8-10
Trust the magic and the spontaneous. You don’t have to control everything. Or need to understand and deliberate and control everything yourself. Allow yourself to move more freely and be more surprised. Adopt qigong free-flowing methods.
7-8-10
Sometimes it’s difficult, if not impossible, to reach a satisfactory understanding of the meaning of a hexagram – however long one studies it and however many variant interpretations and translations one studies. These meanings often turn out to be not only complex but also contradictory, which only adds to the confusion. My own approach in such cases has been to do my best to trust and follow the patterns of imagery.
7-8-10
Constant accretion of interpretations and meanings.
7-8-10
Times when one is simply feeling one’s way. Working with the eye in the back of the head and the single eye in the heart. Shutting down on intellectual ratiocination. Very necessary, trust.
8-8-10
I aim for a clarity, bell-like or gong-like. A poem should have the quality of a crystal glass. When it’s struck gently (by the reader’s mind, and in the reader’s mind), it should ring on one clear, fine note.
9-8-10
This one clear fine note should of course not allow only one mode of hearing / reading / interpretation. It should be the way in. This is to say: mystification is to be avoided.
10-8-10
I’ll need to say in the Postscript that this book isn’t intended in any way as a commentary on the I Ching and still less a kind of version of it. It’s a homage, a way of honouring / paying tribute to a great book. If it involves study and application and conscious submission to its influence, it isn’t a midrash.
10-8-10
Along with this goes a separate but intimately connected point: I’ve always been interested in the architectonics of poem-as-building, as-epic-structure: spacious, generous, welcoming enough to admit a huge variety of content. This is one reason why the structure and numerology of I Ching are enormously appealing. They admit everything, like a sort-of-universal filing cabinet, filing system (Needham).
And the numerology is far more than a hint, too of the complexity of its interconnections. Structurally simple overall. In it everything links with everything else, in an intricacy as beautiful and undulating and inevitable as, say, filigree – or a Bach fugue, or a Miles Davis track, or the fan vaulting in King’s College Chapel. This is precisely what poetry postulates in brimming in every instance of its presence: that everything connects.
The vision has to be Daoist. And in Daoism, the interconnectedness of everything is key.
10-8-10
The clarity and apparent simplicity of surface-meaning, as a way in, may perhaps be beguiling and deceptive, simply because of the density of the material itself in terms of its dreamlike consistency, its sheer unquantifiable and irreducible isness, and its multiplicity of possible interpretations, whether contextual, referential, symbolic, etc. // The isness combines with notness. So both thisness (haeceittas) and otherness (elseness, alteritas) are simultaneously and inextricably bound. Pure Daoism.
10-8-10
The process of writing, in its current phase, has become a simultaneous sifting and filtering of accumulated material – almost a kind of archaeology – yet to discover quite what, one never knows until one has found it. After sifting through all the accretions, the paring away and baring are a slow, painstaking, quiet job. The separating out of what’s murky and dross from what’s pure and genuine is one of the keys to the correct carrying out of this activity.
11-8-10
Needham’s (Marxist) argument is that, whatever its virtues, the I Ching’s “filing system” is (1) in a sense arbitrary, and (2) when viewed historically, so deeply embedded in Chinese patterns of (Confucian) social bureaucracy and hierarchy that (3) it becomes all-encompassing, thereby actually operating as a contributing factor to inhibiting and even preventing the development of scientific doubt, enquiry, experiment and knowledge. All this may well be true, especially if one is sympathetic to the view that history is only understandable if one applies notions of progress and evolution. [Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 2, History of Scientific Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956: 336 – ed.]
But conversely, scientists have seen the I Ching anticipating many very recent discoveries, even DNA (like Johnson F. Yan). [See J. F. Yan, DNA and the I Ching: The Tao of Life. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1991 – ed.]
At least for my purposes, the patterning does serve as a wonderfully complex filing system, with so many and such rich and intricately patterned cross-referencings and interconnections, that it could hardly be bettered at least as a riposte (and perhaps even an answer) to Pound’s plaint: “I cannot make it cohere.” [See the first entry above for 21-7-10, and the next entry – ed.]
In Pound, Confucianism and Fascism merge. The riposte has to come in democratisation and Daoism.
The I Ching does cohere.
12-8-10
From an email sent today to John Matthias:
Two to the Power of Six [an early title, later abandoned by RB – ed.] is coming on – I’ve nearly 300 poems done AND ‘in place’ – and around 50 more in draft. (By ‘in place’ I mean in the correct positions according to my reading of the I Ching). I now see that the whole cohering principle of the work responds to Pound’s lament on his own failure in the Cantos (“I cannot make it cohere”) with the obvious conviction that one’s notes are in any case BOUND (in all senses) to cohere – i.e. the principle underpinning all poetry. Pound’s Confucianism, which he got trammelled up with Fascism (or vice-versa), was a huge error of judgement – and it is answered by an inalienable democratic spirit – which also happens to be irreducibly Daoist. Time to move on from Post-Modernism – a still-born notion if ever there was one, relating only to what had gone before it and not to anything else worth even tinkering with.
12-8-10
Some notes for experts on the I Ching and sinologists?
It may be salient to point out, and it may need to be emphasised, that Two to the Power of Six is definitely not intended to have any kind of divinatory function arising out of the nature of the I Ching or the poem’s relationship with the book of oracles. The book is a poem, a book of poems, no less, no more.
I’ve deliberately not rigorously followed the internal order of line-readings in each hexagram, preferring to allow my own imagination to play on and with the overall image.
The so-called ‘master’ or ‘control’ poem for each hexagram is meant to embody the spirit of the whole. The idea to do this came out of readings of hexagrams 1 Qian (Heaven, The Creative, Yang) and 2 Kun (Earth, the Receptive, Yin), in which even in the earliest Zhou-Yi (Shaughnessy, Kunst, Rutt), there’s an ‘extra’ overall reading for each of these hexagrams when all its lines change. This doesn’t occur in any of the other 62 hexagrams. I’ve simply extended this principle to all the hexagrams so that, in fact, my title isn’t strictly accurate for the whole of the book.
The ‘master’ or ‘key’ or ‘control’ poems are given in a separate section at the end of the book [an idea for placement, later abandoned by RB – ed].
They’re intended not as ‘titles’ but as ‘summations’ of each hexagram. Sometimes they offer commentaries on the other poems in the sequence; and sometimes they may be read as integral and/or continuations.
This book isn’t especially ‘Chinese’ and not only for sinologists or I Ching experts and devotees – even though I hope that such readers will find enjoyment in it.
12-8-10
An emphasis on the minuscule and the domestic, which you won’t find in Pound. This is rooted in my belief that the commonplace is miracle. [See ‘Only the Common Miracle’ in Black Light (collected in For the Living: Selected Longer Poems 1965-2000, Bristol, Shearsman Books, 2011: 161-162) – ed.]. It is all holy (Blake). This is also Daoist (i.e. everything is right here already – that is if you’re lucky enough not to be born into poverty or slavery or oppression or war or drought or flood, etc.).
12-8-10
A poetry of sparse crisp information. An unadorned poetry of direct saying.
12-8-10
The I Ching is many things to many people. At one level, it’s a book of divination for all-comers that gives ‘advice’ for all areas and levels of society, on matters ranging from household and family affairs, to psychological states, and from management of business, commerce and agriculture, to war and political ruling. It comments on both public and personal morality and behaviour. It’s therefore both ‘Confucian’ in its concern for statecraft and public behaviour and ‘Daoist’ in its concentration on the individual Way. It’s both an intimate, personal book and a social book, and one of its great virtues is that it works in the quotidian areas as well as in great matters of state – in and for private as well as public issues.
Furthermore, in its symbology and mathematical complexities, it has a series of inner, esoteric resonances and applications that chime particularly well with Daoism, that is, within Daoist philosophy: in ritual, physical and psychological balance and health, and spiritual development, including inner alchemy, martial arts, qigong, taiqi, etc.
I hope this poem reflects these various layerings – by taking in some aspects of all of them.
13-8-10
In allocating poems to hexagrams, I’ve often been guided by the study I’ve made of the eight component trigrams (bagua) and the ways in which these combine in upper and lower positions to form a hexagram. Sometimes, themes and images that are clearly evident in individual poems find correspondences (chimes, wave-similarities, accords) with those of trigram-combinations.
16-8-10
Some of the sections (poems, small forms) are to do with the process of writing the poem itself. This kind of self-reflexivity is deliberate and derives from many beliefs and compunctions. One is the influence of W. S. Graham: the idea that ‘reality’ itself as a kind of language, i.e. patterned and coherent. Another is alchemical. The process of writing (composing, making) a poem is a kind of ‘internal alchemy’, as the Chinese Daoists put it. There’s no distinction between the making of the work and the remaking of oneself. Oneself (one’s self) is the alembic: locus, cauldron, crucible (etc.) in which the transformations take place. Yeats: “It is myself that I remake”. Though surely Yeats got it wrong – “perfection of the life” and perfection of “the work” are one and the same [see Yeats’s poem, ‘The Choice’ – ed.]. I’m no dualist.
16-8-10
It doesn’t need to be solemn and ponderous. There’s plenty of scope for play, wordplay, irony, comedy, parody, piss-takes.
All these notes to myself – myself speaking to whom? I have in mind that some of these notes may get used in an introduction or postscript.
A good idea perhaps to use only one-word titles for hexagram-groups of poems, if possible?
17-8-10
My section-titles are my own and belong to the poem. They aren’t intended to replace titles of hexagrams in various translations of the text of I Ching. However, they clearly derive from them – and sometimes comment on them.
24-8-10
The book should also have some of the qualities of casual conversation, so that the reader sometimes has the sense of casually overhearing an intimate personal dialogue.
24-8-10
Inclusion of material about horror and atrocity has had to be included. Why?
First, the book is a panorama of life. Negative aspects have to be presented for that reason.
Second, how is it possible not to write about such matters in the age we live in? We bear the burden of the memory of Auschwitz and there’s no way we can release this or ourselves from it. We are responsible to this burden, even if not for it. It needs to be incorporated into our poetry as an ever-present and necessary element. The model for doing so is Celan. The model to argue against is Adorno. [“To write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.” Theodor Adorno, 1967 (1949), ‘An Essay on Cultural Criticism and Society’. Weber, Samuel and Shierry (trans.). In Prisms. Cambridge, MAL MIT Press: 19 – ed.]
Third, the groundbreaking translations of the Zhou-Yi and commentaries on it (Kunst, Shaughnessy, Rutt) make it clear that the Bronze Age society that gave rise to the text was one in which what we would now call atrocity was widespread, accepted and even respected, especially in war. And war was frequent, and possibly even ongoing. Therefore, this kind of representation is also an honest reflection of the I Ching itself – under the multiple Confucian and neo-Confucian layerings, not to mention the moralistic Christian glosses of Richard Wilhelm et al.
1-9-10
Poems that do their job effectively necessarily contain elements of surprise and/or discovery for the reader. These are co-extensive with the elements of surprise and discovery for the poet during the act of writing itself. I’ve always known this. The reader of a fine poem ‘re-experiences’ the thrill the poet experienced in the writing. The recognition of correspondences lies precisely in the making of “…that building reared / By observation of affinities / In objects where no brotherhood exists / To passive minds” that Wordsworth wrote of in Book 2 of The Prelude. These constitute the main pleasure (delight) in composition (though not the only one). One opens up to elements that are unknown, and these either flow through one, as if from outside, and are suddenly experienced internally – or (if they were already resident) they were subliminal and closed, budlike, but now they blossom, fully, open.
The technique of collage as used by George Oppen, which I discovered consciously from Mike Heller’s fine essay (in Uncertain Poetries) and am now applying with increasing awareness of technique, is one that actually brings out these kinds of latent connections between inner and outer (and surface and depth) and encourages further heuristic leaps in the act of composition itself. For example, putting together two sets of notes or jottings from the common fund of a journal isn’t simply an arbitrary act. It is and involves discovering latent connections between two sets that until then have been discrete. This isn’t arbitrary, because themes, obsessions and patterns of images all recur in one’s mind, just as dreams have sequences and elements repeat themselves. So the poem I’ve just written this evening for Hex. 1 (Prometheus) is based entirely on finding two sets of notes (aperçus) from earlier this year, written perhaps days apart. [This poem was rejected by RB for the final text. But the principle applies to others, e.g. ‘Roots, roofs, routes’, Changing 46/1: 139 – ed.] The two bits do cohere because I must have been brooding on or ‘half-thinking’ about an idea, a nexus of images, over a period. Putting these two sets together, and extricating a little more from the connections, results in a unity that’s surprising. This involves leaps that otherwise might not have been made if one hadn’t opened oneself to the possibility of discovering them (the leaps).
1-9-10 and 2-9-10
The words collage, collation and collection all have similar etymologies as in Fr. coller, It. collare, ‘to stick, paste, glue, glue together’. The Zhouyi and I Ching are both collages, collations, collections in this precise sense: the putting, placing together, the composing, the with-and-together-placement of many bits of lore, advice, wisdom. The PIE *leg, *lect form means ‘join, yoke’, link – as in law, etc. See OED [PIE: Proto-Indo-European, ed.].
On waking, 2-9-10
This is not a book that claims any kind of spiritual authority or pumps itself (its self) up as possessing and divulging great secrets which purport to offer the key of life, passport to immortality, wisdom, perfection etc., etc. It’s a poem, a composition, a collation, a collage.
It is not a manual either.
2-9-10
This ‘I’ – that keeps bumping into things.
2-9-10
One of the limitations of the I Ching is that there’s no sea in it. It seems to have been composed by landlocked people. There’s plenty of water, lakes, and there are crossings of rivers. But no sea.
3-9-10
Back again to Needham’s semi-ironic notion of the I Ching as a kind of universal filing system into which everything can be neatly slotted. The idea that, across much of Chinese history, this system was developed into a sort of sacrosanct, pre-ordained model whose gnomic but absolute authenticity and veracity couldn’t be questioned – gives rise to N’s notion that the I Ching militated as a strong and all-pervasive force against development of the mental modes of doubt, questioning, curiosity and what we might these call ‘deconstruction’ that are pre-requisite for scientific enquiry – at precisely the historical times when science was forging ahead in Europe…
It’s a strong argument. But I wonder if it’s true. Needham also shows the huge progressive achievements of Chinese science within a worldview encompassed by the I Ching.
But sidestepping the argument, I’m still interested in the notion of the I Ching as universal filing system – and as one that’s helpful rather than dismissive. I suppose this is really what has most interested me. For the structure I’m aiming to build, the I Ching serves as scaffolding, foundation and roofing. Any writer of a poem that aspires to anything like an epic scope needs an overall Weltanschauung both as constructional frame (scaffolding), conceptual rooting (foundation) and spiritual aspiration (roofing). And for the poem I’m making, the I Ching is more than this too: it’s the entire architectonics, the single necessary overall unifying ‘symphonic principle’, into which everything ‘slots’ (fits, coheres, is patterned, is patternable).
It also follows from the above that the I Ching enables the poem to be panoramic and all-inclusive both in content and also in style (i.e. linguistic/poetic approaches).
In terms of language-use, the poem includes: direct ‘prosaic’ literal statement; at least one rhymed piece; both long-line and short-line pieces; language deployed symbolically, harnessed allegorically and quirkily exploding surrealistically (Vallejo); achieved lyricism; struggling and terse self-hesitating attempts to say what has never quite yet been said (at least for me, by me); the cusped and gnomic utterance; the haiku-like image; the philosophical abstraction (including abstract nouns – in direct challenge to Imagism and Ezra); and even (though rarely) post-Celan murkiness and syntax-fragmentation.
And in terms of content – it includes domestic life, family life, children, the home; politics, war, atrocity, sensuality and eros, nature, abstract philosophy, etc.
(NB – first jottings, all of these: I need to work on the above more: refine and develop some of the points, their hidden angles and interstices, and the shadows behind them).
3-9-10
The idea of an epigraph for each poem from a hexagram image or commentary – perhaps in different translations – is appealing. A jeu d’esprit – but one that could be taken seriously by certain readers? A kind of Borgesian joke, a Quixotic red herring – but one that would nevertheless lead back into the maze? Even to its heart?
4-9-10
Have been trying out the idea of line-readings from the I Ching as ‘epigraphs’. The idea isn’t a bad one in principle and may enable me eventually to tally each poem with at least some aspect(s) of each separate hexagram-line, without seeming either manically finicky or over-mechanistic about the procedure.
But the position of the phrase is wrong as an epigraph above the poem. This makes it over-dominant. It should rather be printed in unobtrusive grey in the bottom left hand corner of a verso page and the bottom right hand corner of a recto.
4-9-10
Have now reached the point at which the process of composition can simply involve play rather than strenuous effort or exertion. In copying and working on a piece about an angel just now for example it flowed effortlessly [Changing 16/4: 132 – ed.], and after finding the poem had more or less completed itself, I spontaneously stood up from the desk and went swiftly and happily through my taiqi routine.
4-9-10
I realise consciously what I’ve always known intuitively, that is – that, of course, a poem – the concept, presence, being of a poem – the quality of poemhood – a poem’s necessary mode of being written and being read – is for me the only possible way for the I Ching itself to be approached, understood: polysemically, polyphonically, in generous and willing admission of all its uncertainties, obscurities and ambiguities, varying meanings, associations, and modes of interpretation, while allowing them all to co-exist in simultaneous correspondence and even contradiction. Polyphony. So away with all facile literalness.
4-9-10
I know nothing at all about the I Ching. Nothing,
4-9-10
Excitement! The grey-print under-notes consisting of phrases from the hexagram line-images are working! Just tried it out on all poems so far written for Hexagram 14. This procedure also suggests: (a) that my gradually emerging sense of the rightness of particular poems for particular hexagrams, and also their ordering, has been intuitively correct; and (b) I’ll be able to use this extra patterning procedure from now on to double-check accuracy and appropriateness – an extra dimension or layering of meanings, an extra checking resource, an added dimension. [This note, together with several previous ones, charts the gradual subliminal development and conscious arrival of RB’s idea of the ‘base-line’ – ed.]
4-9-10
Need to emphasise and keep re-emphasising that this book has no didactic and still less proselytising impetus – in terms of political, social, religious (mystical) systems – except to advocate love and justice, and the opening of minds, eyes, hearts, spirits. It is a poem.
It does have and it does advocate a morality, and it does have anger in it – against what I perceive as unjust and evil. It is grounded in an ethical view of things.
5-9-10
Trivialities have their place in the poem. As do surrealities. In the poem there is no centre and no periphery, no location more important than any other – in the same way that the Dao is attainable equally by madman, fool, or wise person. In that sense, at least, no one thing is more ‘relevant’ or ‘significant’ than anything else. How wonderful, and what a relief, to get away from all the idiotically superstructured hierarchies!
8-9-10
Since every hexagram is capable of changing into any other hexagram, every poem in the book is capable of linking directly and intimately with every other poem. All equally ‘important’, equally ‘crucial’. The ‘importance’ of the trivial and the mundane is in my mind a Daoist principle. This makes me happy: it’s always been part of my view that ‘the commonplace (common place) is miracle’.
All this allows us to dispense with the heavily expensive, deeply reactionary (and I think ultimately pernicious) ways in which Plato has been advocated and adapted by some poets […] to insinuate that some ‘levels’ of activity, thinking and being are ‘higher’, ‘more worthy’ and ‘more real’ than others.
13-9-10
As in dream every-any-thing can change into every-any-thing else, so also in this poem. Hence poems born(e) straight out of dream (can) fit perfectly into it.
3. A Mosaic
The journal shows continual oscillations in perspectives, ranging from close-up focus on this or that small part, to an overall (long-distance) view, and back again. This oscillation enabled me to see that sometimes my queries turned out to be issues of repositioning. One day, it dawned on me that a metaphor that might most aptly fit my entire compositional procedure (as a kind of fieldwork) was the art of mosaic-making. This involves the finding, selecting, shaping, preparing, trimming and fixing of pieces of small, hard, multicoloured stones and glass into a spatial field. Words, of course, aren’t hard, solid or fully fixable, in any sense, though they are both small and ‘multicoloured’. But for all its limitations, this analogical motif got bedded into the text itself:
A thing like this
Making a thing like this means
following twin perspectives, as in
building a mosaic. While along
one you follow each parcelled
fragment, its unique resonances
to light and touch, the other
you let wander over the whole
design, its soarings and cascades,
fractal novelties and intricate
repetitions, which turn
and tune space to music. And
when details and the whole
correlate and intertwine,
when patterns take care of one
another (and of you), they
let you let go of all old skills
and all old selves. Whatever you
were falls away, irrelevant.
_______________________________________________
following first small things then the large
[Changing 17/3: 139]
Published: Wednesday 21 December 2022[RETURN TO CHANGING]
Richard Berengarten describes his book Changing (2016) as a “homage to the I Ching” and as a “poetic mosaic”. Berengarten has been a reader of the I Ching since 1962 and his poetry and thinking have been strongly influenced by Chinese culture. A forthcoming chapbook is his set of 24 villanelles in honour of Tao Yuanming, entitled the Wine Cup. In recent years, Berengarten has attended several international literary events in China (Xichang, Chengdu and Xiamen) and has also travelled to Hong Kong and Henan. The eight critical and interpretative essays included in this CHA feature on Changing will appear with other essays in a volume entitled The Book of CHANGING (edited by Paschalis Nikolaou and Richard J. Smith, Shearsman Books, 2022-2023).
Born in London, 1943, Richard has published over 30 books, and his writings are translated into over 100 languages. Titles include: Tree, Black Light, The Manager, For The Living, The Blue Butterfly, In a Time of Drought, Under Balkan light, Manual, Notness, Imagems and Balkan Spaces. Distinctions include: the Eric Gregory Award, Duncan Lawrie Prize, Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Award, Manada Prize (Macedonia), Morava Charter Award (Serbia), Xu Zhimo Silver Willow Award (Cambridge), PEN Guest of Honour (Slovenia, 2020), and Poetry and Liquor Award (Luzhou, China, 2021). Berengarten is a Bye-Fellow at Downing College, Cambridge, Academic Associate at Pembroke College, Fellow of the English Association, previous Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund, Adviser to the Pari Center (Italy), and Principal Counsellor to the Medellín International Poetry Festival, Colombia. He has lived in Greece, Italy, the USA and former Yugoslavia.