Yu Gang reached into his pouch. Rooting around inside its narrow aperture, his fingers padded against the bundle. A sheaf more fecund than any yielded by the poor harvest. Further denuded by the locust plague of Red Guard hooligans sent from the City.
He extracted the yarrow stalks and laid them reverentially on the silken fabric that was their stage and their arena. A final fanning of his fingers revealed the grains that had winnowed themselves chafing against their flax enclosure. He turned the bag over and let the chaff float down. Like everything in this damned landscape, the powdered grains were swept away on the damp breeze, long before they could settle into the ground. The Book of Changes? He could only snort.
Of course, he could employ coins instead of agricultural yarrow. The modern way. But did not coins degrade in value and in silver content faster than his cooped up stalks? Coins, the supposed symbols of progress. The pollution of the way of the white ghosts to the West. Their spectral effluvia, cold to the touch, but metallic and unyielding, most unlike ectoplasm. He cast the first set of stalks.
Dul - "The Joyous" Open. He had not had this shake out in a while. Its image represented in Nature by the swamp or marsh. Well, he was immersed in that for sure. It was supposed to typify tranquility, but there wasn't much of that to be had these days. Still, perhaps this portended hope of new forces at work under Heaven's sky. After all, there was the fixed and there was the unchanging. Yarrow stalks, the everpresence of Nature. How could it proffer change to the habitual generations of peasants? After all, even this diagnostic was modelled as just shrunken versions of ploughed furrows.
Gen - "Keeping Still" Bound. The sign of the mountain. Snow covered right now. Impenetrable. Completion or standstill, who was to say? Certainly he hadn't seen another human being in four days, let alone exchanged a greeting. From the union of these two, emerges Hexagram 31. Xian. "Conjoining". He couldn't help but smile in his isolation. There was a submeaning of wooing, which was even more risible. He had his sheep removed to help pad out the uniforms of the stripling boys in the Red Guard. There was nothing for him in this reading. As there was nothing for him in this barren land.
64 possible outcomes. 64 hexagrams. Even his rudimentary education had permitted him to calculate the permutations of these combinations. Permutations leading to death, or worse cultural re-education if he was caught in the act of superstition by the Red Guard. But with no one else to communicate with, how else was he supposed to construct his future? To take his decisions? May as well cast stalks to the wind as a means to deciding his fate.
In the West, they had not long unravelled similar numerology of 64. The possible hexagrams of DNA that make up the cast of a man. Yu Gang of course was ignorant of this. And the molecular chains went on for considerably longer than just 6 lines. But all cosmic wisdom was bound up in 64 combinations just the same. He was genetically constituted to hexagram 5, "Attending". Waiting for nourishment and uninvolvement during the lonely vigil. The white ghosts could only laugh their hollow laugh.
This post was last edited by sulcus, 13 Jul 2009, 23:34
"A,B&E", "Not In My Name" and "52FF" (flash fiction anthology) all available
on Amazon Kindle"How a psychopath makes sweet love. I can get you ringside. Royal box even."
Another lightweight
13 Jul 2009, 23:26
