Reconstruction Vol. 13, No. 1
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Wrestling the Goat / Will Buckingham
Keywords: Communication; Literature; Philosophy
<1> Seven years ago now, I decided to embark upon a curious project: to write a novel of sorts, built of sixty-four chapters, each one a short story, each one based on one of the hexagrams or gua 卦 of the Chinese divinatory manual, the Book of Changes, or the Yijing 易經. I was interested in the relationship between creativity and divinatory techniques, in the idea of using divinatory methods as a tool for thinking, an interest that I owed, in part, to Italo Calvino’s maddeningly clever book, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, which tells series of interlinked stories by means of reading off grids of tarot cards; and I thought it might be fun to explore this further.
<2> Back then, I did not really know very much about the Yijing, and I approached it from the outset with a degree of scepticism. Like Calvino, I was no great believer in the innate haruspicatory powers of tarot cards and Chinese divinatory manuals; nevertheless I was convinced that there was something that made these kinds of tools, built around randomising, combinatory systems, significant engines for creative thought.
<3> Knowing very little about the Yijing, I went out to buy myself a few translations of the book, and I found myself taking the first steps on a seven year journey that would lead me first into that thicket of difficulties that is the Chinese language, and secondly to China, where I spent time on trains, on the street, in bars and in hillside temples, chatting with scholars, disreputable diviners, and Daoist priests, in an attempt to explore the Yijing as what I came to think of, after the example of Calvino, as a “literature machine.”
<4> The Yijing is not only arguably one of the great books of the world—it deserves such a title by virtue of its historical impact alone—but it is also one of the strangest of all the strange books that have ever been written.
<5> For those who are unfamiliar with the singular texture of the book, perhaps the best way of giving a sense of the Yijing is by providing a short extract. So here is the text of the thirty-fourth of the sixty-four chapters. The chapter is called Da Zhuang 大壯, which might be translated “great force”. I’ll provide the text in Chinese, followed by a rough (and perhaps unscholarly) translation. I have chosen this particular chapter for a reason; because it is the story of Da Zhuang, and of the strange struggle with this portion of the text, that I want to tell here.
Da Zhuang 大壯 |
大壯 利貞。
初九 壯于趾。征凶有孚。
九二 貞吉。
九三 小人用壯。君子用罔。貞厲。羝羊觸藩。羸其角。
九四 貞吉。悔亡。藩決不羸。壯于大輿之輹。
六五 喪羊于易。无悔。
上六 羝羊觸藩。不能退。不能遂。无攸利。艱則吉。
Great force. Profitable augury.
Nine at the beginning: force in the toes; marching is inauspicious; there is confidence.
Nine at the second: loyalty; auspicious
Nine at the third: the inferior person uses force. The noble uses a trap. Loyalty is disastrous. The ram has butted the hedge. Its horns are weak.
Nine at the fourth: loyalty; auspicious; regrets pass; the hedge is broken; using force on the great carriage-axle.
Six at the fifth: the sheep is lost in ease; there is no regret.
Six at the top: The ram has butted the hedge; he is unable to retreat; he is unable to advance; nowhere is there any profit; arduousness followed by good fortune.
<6> The six-line figure with which the chapter opens is the hexagram. These six line figures, each line of which may be in one of two states, either broken or unbroken, give rise to the sixty-four chapters of the Yijing, two to the power of six being sixty-four. The text that follows on from the hexagram in the example above is not atypical of the Yijing: most of the chapters of the book are this terse and hard to fathom. The nines and sixes in the text represent the unbroken and broken lines as they are read from the bottom (first) to the top.
<7> The text of the Yijing is written in an archaic Chinese that is—to put it mildly—open to a wide range of interpretation such that the Yijing became, in China, the central nexus of a more than two millennia-long riot of interpretation and analogical thinking that touched everything from poetics to music theory, military strategy to statecraft, religion to philosophy, architecture to the fine arts.
<8> What interested me about the Yijing as a storyteller, and what still interests me, was this strange fecundity, this way in which this book—which may or may not mean anything at all in and of itself—was capable of giving rise to countless meanings. A scholar friend of mine from Hong Kong, Xiaosui Xiao, wrote that the Yijing must be capable of giving not only to a multiplicity of stories, but to all possible stories. I am still not sure if this is true, or what it would mean for it to be true; but I resolved to put this fecundity to the test, to use the book as a way of conjuring sixty-four tales and fables.
<9> Very early on in the writing process, I settled upon a method, and upon a form for the novel-of-sorts that I was writing. Each chapter, I decided, would begin with a commentary—ostensibly non-fiction—exploring the historical and philosophical resonances of the gua in question. This would be followed by the story itself. And, because every meaning derived from the Yijing seemed to naturally give rise to further meanings and possibilities, I decided that the book would have endnotes to suggest these other possible stories. It was my hope that, as the novel unfolded, so too would an overarching story of sorts that might throw some light on this strangest of books, the Yijing.
<10> What this meant was that I had to come up with sixty-four stories, one for each hexagram. Sixty-four stories is a lot of stories; and as time went on, as I plunged ever deeper into my study of Chinese and of the historical and imaginative richness of the Yijing, I began to realise the magnitude of the task that I had set for myself. The text of the Yijing proved itself to be elusive, allusive, impossible to grasp, slippery as hell; and whilst for some of the hexagrams, stories came easily, growing out of the fertile soil of the Yijing and its many commentaries almost of their own accord, other hexagrams remained stubborn.
<11> After six years of fairly intensive work, I had written a large part of the book, which is to say around fifty of the sixty four chapters; but by 2011, I felt at an impasse. The trouble was this: I realised that I was still not at all sure what this novel I was writing—which I was now calling A Book of Changes: Sixty-four Chance Pieces—amounted to. After six years of work, with those fourteen stories still unwritten, I was still not sure that I had a book, I was still not sure that this added up to a whole; and because I wanted to give the novel my complete attention, I decided to take myself off on a short writing retreat, to see if I could move beyond this impasse. My requirements were simple: I needed somewhere quiet, somewhere distraction free, without telephone reception or internet access, somewhere I could go for long walks or work fourteen hour days, and nobody would mind. I rented a small wooden hut on the edge of a forest in the south of England, and there—with my several versions of the Yijing in both English and Chinese—I spent seven days of intense writing. I told myself that by the end of week I had one single goal: not to complete the book, but instead to know whether, after all this time, this project was ultimately capable of being completed, or whether it should be abandoned. My stay in that little forest hermitage was a way of forcing the issue.
<12> For the first couple of days, everything went as well as could be hoped. I baked bread. I went for strolls through the cornfields, taller than my head, talking to myself like a lunatic. I got up before six and went to bed after eleven, and spent the hours in-between writing, rewriting, moving stories here and there, playing with the various hexagrams to see what they could do for me, or divining for stories using the traditional method of manipulating yarrow stalks.
<13> In the six years since the beginning of the project, my initial scepticism about the Yijing had waned. I was, and am, still suspicious of any claims that this was a tool that was in any way useful in attaining to certainty about the past, present or future; but I was increasingly impressed by way that the Yijing worked in precisely the opposite direction: not as a tool for certainty, but as a tool for generating the doubt essential to creative thought. As the philosopher and poet Yang Wanli wrote, back in the twelfth century, ”the profound implications of the Book of Changes plunge people of the world into doubts and make them think.” Through my long engagement with the Yijing, I had come to realise increasingly that stories arise not out of certainties, but out of doubts, out of the spaces in-between certainties, out of ambiguity, out of difficulty; that they come not out of clear convictions, but out of the ability to allow the mind’s habitual patterns to be unseated by a chance word or image. And so I continued to work there in my woodland hut, casting the hexagrams, writing furiously, until I got the hexagram thirty-four, Da Zhuang. And at this point, I found myself falling into such a profound well of doubt that I wondered, for a while, if I would ever recover.
<14> By this time, I had written fifty-seven or fifty-eight stories: stories about infernal bureaucrats and strange machines; stories about philosophers and poets and kleptomaniac pensioners; stories about demanding gods no larger than a pea; stories about mythical fish and philosophers attempting, and failing, to seduce beautiful women by means of formal logic. The book felt as if it was taking shape. But when I hit hexagram thirty-four, not for the first time, and in my failure to grapple it into anything like a story, I began to doubt the whole enterprise.
<15> I had been skirting round the hexagram for years. The text seemed, with its vivid concrete images, to clearly offer itself up to storytelling; and yet whenever I attempted to actually tell a story, I found that it was impossibly stubborn, yielding up nothing. A year before my retreat, I had wandered the streets of Beijing for a full two days, thinking about rams and hedges and saying to myself, “there must be a story here,” but finding that no story came. I had read countless translations and texts and commentaries. I had worked through the original Chinese, reading it now this way, now that. I had scoured my bookshelves for any scraps that could form the beginnings of a story. But nothing seemed to come of any of it. As the philosopher Wang Bi’s commentary to the hexagram said, “beset by doubt and paralysed with hesitation, the will is utterly undirected, so if one were to decide matters under such circumstances, nothing fitting would ever come of it.”
<16> When I returned to the hexagram, there in my hut, it felt as if I was doing so for the last time, as if I would have to either finally resolve this problem, or abandon not just the story, but the entire project. So, three days into my retreat, I left my hut in the forest and went for a long walk. As I walked, I murmured to myself, “A ram caught in the hedge . . . a ram caught in the hedge . . . ” No story came. Every story I tried to impose upon the text seemed to miss something essential. I returned to my hut in the evening, ate distractedly, thinking about rams and hedges. I slept and dreamed of rams and hedges. The following day I sat down to write and realised that I still had nothing to say. I spent the rest of that day walking around, in a state of some derangement, muttering again about rams and hedges. Then, that evening, I returned to the hut, cooked some dinner, and the rain started to fall heavily.
<17> Despairing, I lit a candle or two, hunched over my desk, and returned to the text in Chinese. Coming to the fifth line, I saw something that was so obvious that I hadn’t noticed it before: sang yang yu yi, 喪羊于易. I had translated this line as “the sheep is lost in ease”; but the final character, 易 yi, which I had translated as “ease” was the same “yi” as is found in word “Yijing”: idly, somewhat disconsolately, I retranslated the line as, “a sheep, lost in the Yijing.” You, I thought to myself, are the sheep, trapped in this hedge for so long, unable to go forward or back, struggling in bewilderment and darkness. It was then I realised I was exhausted by all this struggle. The rain pounding on the roof, I pulled out my laptop and started to write.
| * |
<18> It was raining when I woke up, and after a few moments I realised that I had been aware of the rain for a long time in my dreams. The rain and something else, another sound, the thing that had woken me. I heard it again. And because all sounds seem strange in the night, it caused me to shudder. I turned over and tried to sleep again.
<19> The sound came again. A low, animal moan. I fumbled for a torch and sat up in bed. I heard it again. I put on my dressing gown over my paisley pyjamas, and put the torch in the pocket. Then I went to the door.
<20> I had been renting a cabin out in the wilds from a friend, so I could have some time to write and to think. The cabin was basic: little more than a hut, in a deserted valley of caves and thorn bushes. No running water, although there was a stream not far away where I could wash in the morning and draw water. No electricity. I built fires in the evenings to keep warm and used a Primus to cook what food I had brought with me. But I had spent the days before getting nowhere, sitting at my rickety desk, writing a few words, crossing them out, writing a few more, crossing them out again. In the afternoon, walking across the hills and ridges, I tried to shake off the feeling of futility that was pursuing me.
<21> I had thought that here, of all places, free from distraction, I would be able to work away from the constant hum of radio and television and mobile phones and traffic and news bulletins. But in truth, I was going nowhere.
<22> The sound, again. I opened the door and shone the torch into the dark. There was a smell of rain. I lit a candle in the hut, for no other reason than it seemed to offer a beacon of friendliness in all that wilderness, then pulled on a waterproof, put on my slippers so that I did not inadvertently tread on snakes or scorpions, and made my way outside.
<23> The sound again, and a scuffling. Then something reflected in the beam of my torch, through the pale cross-hatching of the rain: there, no more than thirty yards away, its horns trapped in a thorn bush, was some kind of a goat. It was straining and bucking with its back legs, but its head seemed stuck fast.
<24> I thought for a moment about leaving it, thought about returning to the cabin, where the friendly candle was flickering, thought about closing the door and firing up the Primus, and making a late night cup of coffee. But I too was stuck. I couldn’t go back, leaving the poor creature out there to struggle until exhaustion or the mountain lions got the better of it. But neither did I dare approach it. I just stood there in the rain, letting the beam of my torch light up its shaggy coat, listening to the pitiful sound of its struggle.
<25> The beast let out another moan. The rain was so bitingly cold that I couldn’t stand there all night, just watching. I stepped forward and put the torch down on the ground. I was only five metres away now, no further. I could see the horns, stuck fast in the thorn bush, the oblong of the creature’s eye lit up yellow.
<26> Very carefully, I approached the goat side-on. Its back legs bucked away from me. I edged a little closer. And then something about the sheer animal shudder of the creature made me realise that this was no place for caution. I could feel my pyjamas and dressing gown becoming sodden with rain. The goat moaned again. I swallowed hard and lunged at the creature, circling its neck with my arms. The goat seemed astonished. It froze where it was, bleating softly. The torch beam started to fade. It flickered a little, and went out. Batteries dead. Or waterlogged.
<27> I do not know how long we were like that, in the darkness. Me in my dressing gown and waterproof coat, my arms around the neck of the goat, my face pressed close to its flank, smelling the wild smell of it, the rain streaming down into the gully, the faint light of the candle in my hut just visible. And I don’t know why, but the goat seemed calm, with some other creature clasping it around the neck. It just stood, gasping for breath. I guessed it was already tired from the struggle.
<28> Gently at first, I started to pull. The goat bleated again, and then a shudder ran through its whole body and it let out the most horrible cry. Its back legs kicked sideways and caught me on the side of my ankle. I held on and pulled harder. The goat lurched forward, and I felt a thorn rake against the back of my hand. I pulled and twisted, struggling in the rain and the darkness, and for a while there was nothing but the stink of animal and the rain and the struggle itself, and the thorns that cut at my flesh and tangled the cord from my dressing gown, and the moan and holler of the beast, and the sharp edges of its hindquarters as it struck me in its panic, and the absence of all purposes and aims and hopes and dreams and ideas and thoughts, all except the struggle, like Jacob and the angel, but in a dressing gown with a knotted cord, and in paisley pyjamas covered by a thin waterproof, and wearing slippers that were already waterlogged and slippery in the mud as I tried to get a purchase on the goat.
<29> Then the goat was free. It twisted out of my arms, aimed another kick at my side, striking me just below the ribs, and it was gone.
<30> I lay looking up at the sky, gasping for breath. I could feel pain in my left cheek, in my hand, in my side where the goat had kicked me. I was beginning to shiver with cold. I got to my feet. I could still walk. I staggered back towards the hut where the friendly candle still flickered. I would find the waterlogged torch in the morning.
<31> By candlelight, I stripped naked to assess the damage. I was badly bruised and cut. After washing the blood from my face and my hand, I could see the cuts were not deep. I put antiseptic on them, just in case. I balled up my dressing gown and pyjamas. I would wash them in the morning, if the rain let up. Then I climbed into my sleeping bag and waited for my body to become warm, for the pain to subside, for the exhaustion to take hold.
<32> The following morning was bright and clear. The rain had ceased some time before dawn; and by the time I was up, standing naked in the door of the hut, there was steam coming off the hills and the ridges and the desert floor. My cheek throbbed and my side ached, but in a way that seemed almost soothing. I cooked up some eggs on the Primus. Then I sat down at the small desk, still naked, took out my pen, and started to write.
<33> I was still writing when the sun started to touch the hills in the west and the shadows across the desert were becoming long.
| * |
<34> When I finished writing, I snapped my laptop closed, and I knew that I had my story. And, having the story, I knew that the book itself was now within my grasp. I sat there listening to the rain on the roof. It struck me then that I was both writer and goat, lost in some kind of strange desert, tussling with the darkness and the thorn-bush and the rain; and I asked myself what it was that had changed, what it was that had broken with this impasse, why it had all been so damned difficult.
<35> I looked back at the text.
<36> Arduousness followed by good fortune.
<37> Sure, but why such arduousness? And why at that point? It seemed to me then that the hexagram provided not just the story—a simple enough story, it turned out—but also spoke of the long itinerary by means of which I had arrived at the story, that it also spoke of the whole process of writing this book, those six or seven long years.
<38> The inferior person uses force.
<39> Yes, perhaps: but sometimes it is necessary to use force to truly understand the weakness of force, to pass through force into the abandonment beyond; and what is one to do if one is irredeemably an inferior person? Does this become an injunction to use force?
<40> He is unable to retreat. He is unable to advance. Nowhere is there any profit.
<41> And yet, perhaps the impasses, the periods where nowhere is there any profit, are necessary, for stories, for new possibilities and new worlds, to arise at all.
<42> Hexagram thirty-four was the turning point. After that, I finished the remaining chapters of the book without any great difficulty. I went to bed and dreamed, but neither of goats nor of hedges; and for the rest of the week the writing went smoothly. I returned home with an almost complete manuscript to begin working on with my editor’s pencil. As a result, I am now concerning myself with more mundane wrestling matches, with the question, for example, of who might ever publish such a wilfully obscure and uncommercial novel-of-sorts. Yet, whatever the fortunes of the novel, I am pleased to say that the book is now complete.
<43> And so it is at this point that I must cast around for a conclusion to these brief reflections, even though my study of the Yijing has taught me that conclusions are only fictions (the penultimate hexagram of the book, Jiji 既濟 or “Already Across” is followed by the final hexagram, Weiji 未濟 or “Not Yet Across”); but when I look back on this curious story about wrestling with a story about wrestling with a goat that is wrestling with thorn-bush, out there in the darkness and the rain, and when I try to trace the various threads of these multiple stories to see if I can say something clear about the relationship between the itinerary that led to the story and the story itself, or about the ways in which all stories are necessarily intertwined with the contexts and circumstances of their birth, or about how new creations spring from the play of chance and order and of struggle and ease, or about how simplicity sometimes emerges only after the fact, or about the question of how it was I wrote what I wrote, and why, and why it was that I wrote this and not something else, I realise that to say anything about any of this, I would need to tell a whole other set of stories. But as I look round for a way to trace these stories, I realise that I don’t know where I could possibly start.
And, for a while at least, I have given up the fight.
The sheep is lost in ease; there is no regret.
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