#will buckingham

We both shook our heads.

'A-merika POL-itik,' he said. He paused for effect. 'A-merika POL-itik number eleven. That is why they went to the moon. Not for rock but for politics.'

'Whether they go for rock or whether they go for politics,' his friend said, pulling on a cigarette, 'it is a bad thing to go to the moon. People should not do these things.'

Following David MacIver’s thread here as my guide: https://twitter.com/DRMacIver/status/1265999120042467329

I’m going to start out by commenting on passages from ‘Sixty-Four Chance Pieces: A Book of Changes’ by Will Buckingham.

In light of the book’s structure, I won’t pick a page at random. Instead I’ll cast a hexagram using either an online calculator, the three coins method, or yarrow stalks. Then I’ll pick a passage from the story that comes up. My success criterion is that I write a single sentence commenting on or inspired by the passage. Keep track of all posts here.

Day 1 (casting coins): ䷸ - hexagram 57, 巽/Compliance

P. 298

“The scholar took off a shoe and waved it at the bird on the other side of the glass. The magpie didn’t respond. It regarded him side-on. The scholar removed his jacket and waved that. The jacket didn’t seem to work either. Next he tried his shirt, his trousers, his vest, his underpants; but the bird ignored him. The scholar was naked except for his watch and his socks.”

In this story, the scholar has been hired by a gangster chief to get rid of an annoying magpie, and, as this passage suggests, it’s not going well. The scholar only succeeds when the Chief threatens to shoot him, and he submits completely, begging for mercy - at which point the bird miraculously flies away.

Interpreting this psychologically, one could think of different parts of oneself being directly at odds with each other in dealing with a problem. At the moment I’ve had mild-to-moderate pain in my left hip and knee for years, probably caused by overpronation in the foot of that side. While I have explored various exercises and stretches to deal with it, and have had more opportunity to experiment in lockdown, to some extent it is just something I’ve had to deal with.

Curiously, the only thing that pretty much guarantees relief from this pain is sitting in open-awareness meditation, and even then only if I’m not deliberately trying to do it. At a certain point, there is a tension in the hip that simply unwinds, or perhaps the sensation just no longer registers as pain. Like the scholar in the story, it is when I give up on ‘doing’ something about it, and simply kneel in submission (another translation of the hexagram), that the problem dissolves.

needs no authority

but authority cannot exist

without the possibilities

it protects against