Pyramid News Scheme

All things Anthropocene. All things, that is, marked by language — this word, Anthropocene, in particular, in this instance — by the inadequacies of language to do more than whatever it might be doing in the moment of its activation in embodied mind (in the human brain).

Poetry goes way back: representation pushed to limits beyond “mere” representation, the attempt through rhythm and rhyme and the makings of other patterns to weave language in the instance of its movement through embodied mind (chanting, song, recitation, voicing) to go beyond denotation, beyond words pointing to things, and even beyond words entangling with perceptual fields extending beyond material things (a rock, say) or phenomena (the color of the eastern sky at dusk; a blue-hued rock; a blue feeling, the abstract thought of blueness) to enact pattern-making and unmaking, to perform dynamic change unfolding in time and to model it, thereby fixing and embedding that model — a narrative, instantiation of a moral value, group identity, ethical guidelines and moral imperatives all bundled up – in “reality” in increasingly “permanent” ways.¹*Part of this project involves an exploration of the Changes – the Zhouyi and the Yijing with its “Ten Wings” and the voluminous interpretive apparatus that has evolved from and around the core eight trigrams.

This began, simply, as a means of generating a walking algorithm for use in Situationist-inspired psychogeographical forays into Shanghai neighborhoods. I had been generating the algorithms otherwise, until, teaming up with Tim Tomlinson for a walk with students, I took his suggestion (after first resisting it, thinking it corny and stale and a bit too Chinoiserie-indulgent, if not an outright “problematic” instance of cultural appropriation) of using the Yijing. Over the past few years, the role of the Yijing in the project has grown, suggesting itself not only as a means of generating a 6 – 12 step walking algorithm, but also as a means of conducting walks and writing corresponding texts in ways that may resonate and correlate with not only the history of Chinese thought and culture as, in significant part, animated by the Changes, but also with “the West” by way of its translations and uses and appropriations of the Changes.

With regard to something like the question of the origins of language, for instance, it’s useful to me now to refer the second chapter of Richard J. Smith’s The I Ching: A Biography, in which he traces the relative codification of the Zhouyi into an official classic during the Han Dynasty and summarizes the “Great Commentary” from the “Ten Wings” on language:

“The process of consulting the Changes involved careful contemplation of the ‘images’ associated with, and reflected in, the lines, trigrams, and hexagrams of the basic text. According to the Great Commentary, sages like Fuxi ‘had the means to perceive the mysteries of the world and, drawing comparisons to the with analogous things, made images out of those things that seemed appropriate.’ Initially, then, there were only hexagram images, trigram images, and line images — pure signs unmediated by language. But later on, hexagram names, judgments, and line statements appeared in written form to help explain these abstract significations. Thus subsequent sages came to use words to identify ‘images of things’ (natural phenomena, such as Heaven and Earth, mountains, rivers, thunder, wind, and fire), ‘images of affairs’ (social and political phenomena, including institutions, war, famine, marriage, and divorce), and ‘images of ideas’ (thoughts, mental pictures, states of mind, emotions, and any other sensory or extrasensory experiences). Later commentators sometimes likened images to ‘flowers in the mirror’ or ‘the moon in the water’ – that is, reflections of things that ‘cannot be described as either fully present or fully absent’ ” (64).

This, all in the context of a larger presentation of the history of the Changes that makes it clear that the text itself can only ever be encountered – whether in a Chinese version or translation into another language, or via the hexagrams as posited “pure signs unmediated by language” (not possible) – as a reflection of itself that “cannot be described as either fully present or absent.” One question moving forward, for me, is how thinking about the Changes in the context of the Anthropocene might work, based in part on the premise that somewhere in the Changes we’re picking up signals of what it was like for humanity to transition out of the the Pleistocene and the Neolithic into the Holocene and the acceleration of technology – writing and image-making very much included – that settles in around the Bronze Age. 

(Continued)