to: ellipsis
from: jcj
23 July 1996
subject: letter twenty-three W
attachments: couriers
: from the electric book
: the education of everyone
dear ellipsis .... and everyone
As I woke this morning I pictured myself combining
the opening words of the I Ching with those of the
Book of Genesis, and now I have done it. Its
title, which came to me in the same moment, is
east/west begins nowhere
The Creative: The first hexagram is made up of six
unbroken lines. In the beginning God created the
heaven and the earth. These unbroken lines stand
for the primal power, which is light-giving,
active, strong, and of the spirit. And the earth
was without form, and void; and darkness was upon
the face of the deep. The hexagram is consistently
strong in character, and since it is without
weakness, its essence is power or energy.
And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the
waters. Its image is heaven. And God said: Let
there be light: and there was light. Its energy is
represented as unrestricted by any fixed
conditions in space and is therefore conceived of
as motion. And God saw the light, that it was
good: and God divided [my emphasis] the light from
the darkness. Time is regarded as the basis of
this motion. And God called the light Day, and the
darkness he called Night. Thus the hexagram
includes also the power of time and the power of
persisting in time, that is, duration. And the
evening and the morning were the first day.
The Receptive: This hexagram is made up of broken
lines only. And God said, Let there be a firmament
in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the
waters from the waters. The broken line represents
the dark, yielding, receptive primal power of yin.
And God made the firmament, and divided the waters
which were under the firmament from the waters
which were above the firmament: and it was so. The
attribute of the hexagram is devotion; its image
is the earth. And God called the firmament Heaven.
It is the perfect complement [my emphasis] of the
Creative - the complement, not the opposite,
for the Receptive does not combat the Creative but
completes it. And the evening and the morning were
the second day. It represents nature in contrast
to spirit, earth in contrast to heaven, space as
against time, the female-maternal as against the
male-paternal.
And God said Let the waters under the heaven be
gathered together unto one place, and let the dry
land appear: and it was so. However, as applied to
human affairs, the principle of this complementary
relationship is found not only in the relation
between man and woman, but also in that between
prince and minister and between father and son.
And God called the dry land Earth; and the
gathering together of waters called he Seas: and
God saw that it was good. Indeed, even in the
individual this duality appears in the coexistence
of the spiritual world and the world of the
senses. And God said Let the earth bring forth
grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind,
whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it
was so ...
And what is the point of this, you may ask, just
when everything needs to be drawn together?
Well now I've typed it, and signalled the two
points I find most interesting, I see that this is
the context for my theory of 'reversing the
reversal'.
What I mean is this:
By 'the reversal' I mean the Renaissance, and its
antecedents in ancient Greece and at the end of
Stone-Age thinking, when masculine gods and values
displaced feminine and the notions of dominance
replaced those of receptiveness. And eventually
this led, as I understand it, to the replacement
of God by Man (though not Woman) and via Luther
and such people to the protestant/ humanist
Reformation and then to the specialised
experimental sciences and to capitalism and
socialism and modernism and the worship of reason
at the expense of intuition, and of the power of
machines and markets at the expense of all things
human or spiritual or artistic, or even friendly.
There was also the romantic reaction to all that
leading to the French Revolution and then to
representative democracy.
Alienation from self and nature, and from any kind
of wholistic thinking, has become the norm as we
live amid the consequences of what was and in the
prospect only of such horrific visions as you find
in William Gibson's Neuromancer and in George
Orwell's 1984: the people of the future seen as
powerless insects, apart that is from intrepid
heroes fighting losing battles with the state of
fallen cultures and the fantasies of fascistic
power. Oh, what a waste of time!
News from nowhere is just what its title implies,
for William Morris's vision of a future in which
the people rule themselves without any kind of
government has never taken any root in this bleak
reversal, as I call it, of what I see as 'right
way up'.
For in almost every other utopia, from that of The
republic of Plato to the Utopia of Thomas More,
and onwards (apart from the one by Denis Diderot)
there is the self-appointed presence of some group
of wise guardians who use force, just like any
present government, to make the people conform
'for their own good', just as the governors, the
managers, the teachers, and even 'the moral
majority' still say. The alternative being 'chaos'
in place of 'law and order'.
Hence prisons, hence churches, hence schools and
hence the fear of each other which comes I feel
from fear of deepest self. Thank goodness for
Sigmund Freud, even now, for he looked goodness in
the eye and found it bad.*
But what a delusion lies behind all this, says the
writer! For 'chaos' is the dominant order of the
universe seen with uncomprehending eyes and
wishes. The imposed 'order' of the parents and the
governors and the architects and the planners, and
the ruler in each of us, is no more than an
expedient to get things done quickly without
bothering to learn and to adapt to the
'capability'** of the place and of the moment and
the self. It's just a question of time, and of
patience, and of not over-riding the natural
rhythms of the body and all it reflects.
The scandal of hierarchical control, still almost
universal in all things social despite the
decentral teachings of the artists and the
scientists of the early twentieth century (I'm
thinking of Werner Heisenberg, and Neils Bohr,
Sigmund Freud and Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp
and John Cage and Buckminster Fuller and Joseph
Beuys, and so many others of course, of course, so
many who, without fanfares,*** must have
understood that the non-dualistic and the
non-hierarchic is the only way to go ... and now I
discern that this sentence is losing track of its
syntax, never mind, never mind, for the rules of
the grammarians are not those of the tongue, what
ever the theorists say.
But what about this theorist? I ask myself in the
midst of my argument, but for the moment I
continue just to get to my eventual point.
And what is that?... But I see I've written more
than a thousand words and I have three other
letters to write today.
Pause for tea and reflection, even yoga.
And now I come back to the point of these
digressions, though to me they're not that,
they're my normal way to think when I get to the
connectiveness of everything.
But what I want to return to (to see again its
connection with all this and the internet) is not
the historic reversal of female deities and
values, or the displacement of intuition by logic,
but the 'right' or 'natural' ways of thinking and
doing that should be restored.
That's what I call reversing the reversal. It's my
code word, or mnemonic, or magic spell if you
like, for putting right whatever's so wrong (with
my apologies to u+n and to Edwina Mare and William
Dragon - are you reading this I wonder?).
At the centre of this reversing is whatever led me
to combine the opening lines of the I Ching, or
book of changes with those of The first book of
Moses called Genesis to give them their full
names.
The first point is that, in the ancient Chinese
version of things, opposites are combined as
'perfect complementaries', whereas in Moses'
version God divides the obvious unities (or
complementarities) of night-and-day and
earth-and-sky to create a heaven of abstract
'light' set apart from the earth, and a little
later in the garden Eve tempts Adam with the
earthly apple of knowledge and everyone thereafter
is born to evil and to sin.
The second point is that, whereas in this Western
myth reason and knowledge are made into a rigid
masculine quality (seen as goodness and light),
and intuition is made into an unreliable female
quality (seen as evil and darkness), in the
Chinese myth these attributes are reversed.*
If you read a little further into the Book of
changes you will learn that rationality is
portrayed as female, and earthly, and flexible,
and warm, likened to the mare, tirelessly roaming
the plains and combining swiftness with devotion.
What could be more different from the academic
mind with its books in its cloister? And intuition
is portrayed as masculine, as a dragon flying in
the sky, awakening the creativeness and rightness
in everyone, and making actual what is still
potential.
I could say much more of these opposed myths but
that is, I hope, enough to let you see how
essential it is, to the correction of whatever is
so manifestly and deeply wrong in Western thought
and practice (he says with a nervous look towards
Edwina and William, and even towards u+n; my
creations are beyond me), to reverse our way of
thinking about these dual aspects of life.
As I often say in lectures to people studying
design: remember that your intuitions have to come
first and your rationality has to support them.
For if you try the reverse (which is the Western
tradition) you will simply drive your creativity
to fly away through the window for it cannot abide
being boxed into any kind of rational frame. The
box or frame of rationality is a good thing, most
essential if you want to make a new reality, but
only if you use it to stand on so as to get a view
of what lies beyond.
Well, this is much too long a letter if I am to
respect my plans.
At which I realise that I have been ignoring a
summer thunderstorm in the skies outside my
windows and that it's a time to forget planning
for this flowing of my thinking and to enjoy the
storm itself.
I was brought up to like thunder and all such
skyey happenings by my father who taught physics
and would wake us up to look out at a storm or
fire or flood in the night. We lived on the coast,
open to waves from the deep Atlantic and to
boisterous and changeable weather. And that is
what I miss living here in the mild climate of
London and cut off in consumer culture from ideas
and all disturbances of mind. Not to mention the
body. Oh my lover where are you says someone.
And now I hear big raindrops and I have to get up
to close the skylight that's open right above my
head. And the lightning's striking close.
But to return to this letter, now that I've closed
the windows and all I hear is gentle rain.
I'm not going to react to 'Intersay one' or to Dr
Bellamy's utopia until tomorrow. Today is a day of
emptiness, a time to think wider questions. But
before ending I must tell you of the readings that
I've just chosen to connect this letter to the
next.
(That choosing-while-writing is a reversal, in
itself, for I began this way of completing the
book with the idea of 'prepared pages' in which
all the attached texts are pre-selected and what I
write just fills the spaces between them. The
various crises that assailed me before several of
these letters came, I see now, of the rigidity of
that plan. It left no room for letters like this,
which something in me wanted to realise at least
in words. And now here I am choosing new texts
from my archives to fit these freely flowing
somethings, freed at last from fixed formats.
fffffff.)
Yes, between this and the next letter, if you can
bear to wait to do it, you can read three of the
fictions that I like best from past decades:
'Couriers': my version of an aboriginal folktale
from the north of Australia (but changed into a
story of our time, an antidote, I think, to the
garden of Eden myth).
'The electric book': I've described this already.*
What I'd like to attach if I can find it is the
opening chapter, where the idealist Steve
encounters the Cardinal and all kinds of
worldliness, and a later one (volume 4, chapter
12) in which Hobgoblin encounters C G Jung. That
was the chapter I most enjoyed writing, inspired
by the sight of two people at a hospital clinic
where I had to go that day, and I thought it would
stop me but what I saw there changed everything.
'The education of everyone': this is the successor
to 'The electric book' and what I wanted to write
this year had you not asked me to write this. So I
owe it to myself and to the patient characters in
'e of e' to give it some attention now. The story
is again a rewrite. (I believe that all my
writings have been moving towards rewriting for a
long time now, and to me it feels more creative,
or at least more flowing, than is the 'pure
invention' of the west: there's something crude
and arrogant about 'creativity', is there not?)
This one is my retelling of The story of the
stone, from David Hawkes' translation of the
classic Chinese novel by Cao Xueqin, and others.
My version is to do with non-dualism.
Preludes enough, I should think, for tomorrow's
letter in which Dr Bellamy will reveal more of his
version of the internet as we know it (we being
him and I, and u+n, and any other virtuals who
show up).
so for the last time but two I wish you good-bye
for the evening
jcj