2011.12.30 — I Ching, Chomsky, Poetry, C.G. Jung, and R2's The Signal[, and Barrack Obama] — a fushigi* Collection.

Today's *fushigi collection began over a week ago when I began struggling to write a poem in response to a visual prompt supplied by Rose Mary Boehm at Houseboat, the Photo/Poetical blog RMB is moderating — and which I am extremely happy and surprised to be a part of.

As the poem evolved I decided that I required something from the Chinese book of Changes, The I Ching.

I grabbed my copy of the Richard Wilhelm / Cary F. Baynes Princeton University Press edition and flipped it open at random to see what came out. I was disappointed, initially, to see that my random flip had put me outside the hexagram readings and inside the section called Ta Chuan / The Great Treatise. However, what I read there could not have been more on point to complete the poem and tie in with what I was reading in Noam Chomsky: A Philosophic Overview by Justin Leiber.

This is what I read from The I Ching:

2. The Master said: Writing cannot express words completely. Words cannot express thoughts completely.

Are we then unable to see the thoughts of the holy sages?

The Master said: The holy sages set up the images in order to express their thoughts completely; they devised the hexagrams in order to express the true and the false completely. Then they apprehended judgments and so could express their words completely.

(They created change and continuity, to show the advantage completely; they urged on, they set in motion, to set forth the spirit completely.) (pg 322)

I've emphasized the bit I incorporated into the poem. After undergoing the group's critical eye, and being severely pared down, it evolved into a piece of flash prose that I titled What Cannot be Expressed:

Far from urbane strictures, while passing through yet another distant land, I paused, stopped reading, marked my page. Unexpectedly I remembered the day that I read 'live life as a tourist' on the bumper sticker of a rusted VW van in rain. I was a young man then and, because I could read, I thought I understood. And when I became that well-booked tourist I thought I was happy.

The bus slowed at a corner crowded with raggedly-dressed ebullient villagers. Behind them my word-drunk eyes mistook the makeshift grain bag windbreak as a soiled deconstructed yin-yang art-piece. I laughed at how easily the eye is fooled by false appearance and because the book in my hands was the I Ching. With a bemused shake of my head at this odd coincidence I returned to the book, where I read Writing cannot express words completely. Words cannot express thoughts completely.

At that moment the stony weight of verbiage I had made myself blind to left my heart and in an animal panic I pushed my way past the press of shoulders and jabs of elbows. With my hands grasping my mouth and books I stumbled down the bus's step-well and crashed though the rickety doors to splash down on the rain-soaked earth.

Now silent, the villagers' heads turned and their eyes watched my hands flail uselessly as my body wordlessly heaved its stomach into the muck.

The idea of the problem of words not containing the 'real' meaning of existence was the point I was making in the poem, of course. This is not an unfamiliar theme with me, as both Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu discuss this problem. However, I did not think of going to them when I wanted to include a quotation, which is whom I normally would go to. For some reason the manner which I thought of the photo as a deconstructed 'yin-yang' symbol nudged me towards The I Ching,

which is where I went, this time. And proceeded to flip open to that exact page on which was exactly what I was writing about. Curious.

But now here is where things become curiously fushigi. And, I apologize for what is to follow because it is a rather complex discussion on philosophical issues of language. But one that is truly fascinating, and makes for a very subtle fushigi.

Long after I'd started writing What Cannot be Expressed, but in the morning before flipping to The I Ching I was continuing to read with great fascination Leiber's description of the problems and proposals in

establishing what would constitute a universal language generation mechanism, basically an effort to address how humans can learn language let alone learn how to speak. (It is not an exaggeration to say that Chomsky's effect in revolutionizing the philosophical science of linguistics was at the same scale as Einstein's effect on physics: it was forever changed.) What Chomsky proved was that a list of all the words and all the sentences of a language cannot describe how a language works because meaningful sentence generation is infinite and so cannot be captured by any list. The consequence of this, which is still being argued by some die-hard empiricists, is that an empirical study of language-constituents will be inadequate to explain the language. Chomsky has argued that meaning, called semantics by linguists, plays an important, perhaps even pre-verbal role, which he assigned to something called deep structure. Without quite saying it, at least in Leiber's overview of Chomsky's work, Chomsky is saying that meaning pre-exists words, and words pre-exist sentences.

Wow, when I write it out like that, there would appear to be virtually no significant difference between what the Chinese Master said about language 2500 years ago and Chomsky is saying today!

But to solidify the fushigi here is what I read that morning, and even flagged with a little sticky note on which I wrote A[nswer]: because the 'deep structure' is preverbal. What was I answering? A series of questions Leiber posed on behalf of those hoping to keep language empiricists alive by arguing that Chomsky is incorrect. Paraphrased, they argue that within deep structure meaning and syntax are synonymous, and as such if the right syntactical form can be discovered there a natural language generating mechanism capable of creating meaningful sentences will have been ascertained. Anyway, here's the paragraph. I have italicized the particular questions my sticky note was addressing:

The general thrust of the generative-semanticist proposal for improving transformational grammar is very simple: if some semantic features of sentences can be specified in their syntactical deep structure why can not all such features be specified? Why split the syntactic and semantic components at all? Why not equate ultimate syntactic deep structure with semantic representation? Or, more speculatively, one can ask, why not take the system of semantic representation to be something like the familiar predicate logic (with perhaps a few additions), and the base to be such a system supplemented with a relatively small number of "atomic predicates," or semantic primitives, universal to human thought? The words of particular languages, just as their surface syntactical structures, would decompose into extremely abstract and complex syntactic-semantical deep structures; the features constituting the lexical-syntactical peculiarities of a language would be given as a series of transformations relating the syntactic-semantical deep structures (or "natural logic formulas") of the "universal base" to their particular realizations in the language in question, similarly for the peculiarities of other human languages (122).

Like I said, complex language to argue that syntax might be enough to create a language if it is at a 'deep' enough level in the 'deep structure' of what ever it is in being human creates language. (Does not that sound very much like Jung's idea of the collective unconscious — which Jung argues is preverbal or even non-verbal and is expressed in archetypes that struggle to express their meaning in dreams and stories?)

Well, that is the main fushigi, but another one cropped up that I'll throw in. It began yesterday, when I used Photoshop Elements — which I almost never use because it is counter-intuitive to me — to play around with my poem version of What Cannot be Expressed and Rose's photo. After playing with it for an hour or two, I came away dissatisfied with the result, as was RMB. But here's what I did:

I think I could have refined it using individual pixel adjustments to make it more readable, but I don't really have the time for it. Today, while I was preparing to do this blog, I went to the Houseboat blog to get links and text and was suddenly struck by something very, very peculiar. I re-read RMB's excellent poem, Magic Markers on Houseboat, and noticed, now, something fushigi-ish with the poem's title and how it closes:

…
Wondrous transformation:
sackcloth and ashes
become precious lace
with the help of magic markers.

What stood out this time,when I read Magic Markers, is how it connects to the font with which I chose to use in my overlay onto the photo.

The font I used is … can you guess? Marker Felt, which I picked from over a hundred available fonts.

To close on an even more peculiar note: last night, as I was beginning

to work on this blog, I turned on CBC R2's The Signal, with Laurie Brown. And typical of me when I'm working, the music is more background entertainment than the locus of my attention. (If a particular song or artist grabs me, then I will concentrate). At some point, I guess about half way through the show, Brown began talking about one of the artists. I didn't pay attention until she commented that the composer stated in an interview that the last person to ask about what their music means is the composer. That is for others to decide.

Well, a few days ago I picked up and looked through one of my latest and most delectable book finds: Volume 15 of the Collected Works

of C.G. Jung, The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature, and found an amusing little comment he'd made about poets. I was amused initially because of my participation with the Boathouse/Houseboat poetry group, and our critiquing each others poems as to their structure, impact, meaning, etc.

Poets are human too, and what they say about their work is often far from being the best word on the subject. It seems we have to defend the seriousness of the visionary experience against the personal resistance of the poets themselves (p.94).

Fushigi Addendum 2012.01.01.
RMB today sent me a link to an announcement that there is an immanent paradigm shift in how the world's economy is going to be managed because of an expanding spiritual awareness on the part of our economic and political leaders. A New Global Economic Restructuring is an announcement presented by James Martinez of recent recognition by some important economic and business people that if humans are to survive they cannot continue to do what they are doing. During the somewhat disjointed discourse my ears picked up when I heard him say, citing President Obama,

… And that theory fits well on a bumper sticker. But here's the problem: It doesn't work. It has never worked. It didn't work when it was tried…' Funny, that, because that is what my poem was about, from a personal spiritual level and used bumper sticker in the exact same way: as being too small to contain real wisdom, but which was acted on as if true.

It is bemusing that Obama was cited in a delivery that was given in the context of a spiritually motivated human change in economic behaviour. And, even funnier, is that this quotation comes from the Osawatomie speech given by Barrack Obama December 7, 2011, in which he avers that Reagonomics a là Milton Friedman is wrong.

Thank you, RMB, for helping to initiate and cap off a truly bizarre collection of fushigis.

Helpless — Finished 2010.09.04

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
This is a disturbing book, one that once begun kept me turning the pages. It is very typically Gowdy, meaning that the protagonist is someone amoral who has been humanized. And that is what marks Gowdy apart from the good writer — the ability to bring to her readers a feeling of understanding, and even some empathy, for a completely unsympathetic character. It seems anti-social to think and feel that a child abductor could be human, and not just a caricature of evil. But this is the power of Gowdy's writing.


Gowdy commented that the story she wanted to explore with Helpless was the anguish of a parent whose child disappears. And on the surface the disturbing part of this book is of a mother's horror of a child being abducted by a person or persons unknown. But somehow that story did not dominate the novel. Perhaps, during the writing, the writer's challenge of the abductor's motivation and humanity took over because that part becomes the central driving element of the novel. And what makes the book as disturbing, psychologically, as it is — and it is very disturbing — is the manner of Gowdy's portrayal of the kidnapper.


In her hands the human proceeded along an insane course of action within the bounds of fully justified logic and sound reasoning. There is a disturbing, unsettling empathy that is generated by this character as he proceeds along his path not as an insane evil creature, but as a frail human who has successfully denied to himself the nature of his nature. His self-delusion allows him to perfectly rationalize his actions; within his scope of self denied understanding his motivations are truly honourable and in this psychology he echos our own failings of self understanding, honesty and/or awareness. Not that many of us have stalked and kidnapped children! But where have we, for example, not fallen victim to own self denials, to our own delusions about our motivations or sense of social propriety? Who here on the planet has not rationalized and justified small selfish behaviours as being for some kind of altruistic 'best'? Where have we chosen to live a lie because it served an end which was made to look generous but served our ego's need? When have we mislead someone around us to support us, or manipulated someone to collaborate with us to assuage our feeling of doing something amoral? And how often are we unaware of why it is we do the things we do, ignorant of what motivates us?


And so what makes this book so disturbing is that it powerfully attacks our rationalized albeit unconscious complacency with not knowing ourselves. Ron didn't know what evil lurked in his heart until he took action. Nancy, his girlfriend acquiesced to his evil because acquiescing served her unconscious needs. Thus she was able to deny the un- or quasi-conscious contrary truths. And who can know what evil lurks in the dark corners of our own hearts and souls that we have kept hidden from ourselves because we do not have the courage to explore those recesses? That is disturbing!


Many have commented that the ending felt rushed and left them unsatisfied. This I find puzzling. Well, let me rephrase. From a purely rationalistic perspective, the ending arrives before all the 't's are crossed and 'i's dotted, and with, ostensibly, too 'soft' an ending. And I can see how this gives a feeling that there hasn't been the proper closure normally associated with such a story. But psychologically, I find the ending to be nearly perfect, and even spiritual. The paedophile discovers in the sheen of the child's damp skin the mirror into his soul, into his blackest truth. And even more remarkably, he in a great act of spirituality, accepts the truth of himself, and is then able to turns himself away from his path towards seeming inevitability because he could not longer deny the truth of himself. That many dislike the ending may be because, in a typically Gowdy way, the person who had this epiphany — and he shakes in fear of seeing that face of god in his soul — is such an abhorrent character that this person's journey of self discovery through the abduction of a child, would seem to be an utter waste, from a spiritually meaningful way. Furthermore, Gowdy adds a delightful complexity to the ending with the girlfriend's own smaller epiphany. She doesn't experience an epiphany of self awareness, but, instead, chooses to see the person in front of her, without any sort of self deception or illusion, and accepts her fate as his co-kidnapper.


And this may seem strange — it was to me when it popped into my head, but as I wrote this review how the booked ended reminded of one of the toughest instructions from The I Ching:

[When] one is faced with a danger that has to be overcome...[w]eakness and impatience can do nothing. Only strong [individuals] can stand up to their fate, for [their] inner security enables [them] to endure to the end. This strength shows itself in uncompromising truthfulness [with themselves]. It is only when we have the courage to face things exactly as they are, without any sort of self deception or illusion, that a light will develop out of events by which the path to success may be recognized. This recognition must be followed by resolute and persevering action. For only [people] who go to meet [their] fate resolutely [are] equipped to deal with it adequately (Wilhelm/Baynes 25).

And this is also why this book is so disturbing: a pervert, despite some reluctance, in the end displayed the strength and courage to face himself exactly as he was, and became resolved to meet his fate. Who amongst diurnal man have had the courage to do that? To be shown up by a paedophile, now that is disturbing!

The I Ching. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967. Translated into German by Richard Wilhelm, and into English by C.F. Baynes. It has an introduction by C.G. Jung. ISBN: 069109750X.