Day: June 5, 2023

Pujiang Park | Lines 12 & 18 | Desiring-machines

An interesting question of interpretation and translation arises when considering the first hexagram that I threw for this trip: number 27. Minford, in his Bronze Age Oracle section, renders the hexagram as “breasts” while Rutt, in his Zhouyi, translates it as “molars.”

“the corners of the mouth (providing nourishment),” or “nourishing” (huang) or open quotation “jaws of it all” (Hinton). Today the character 頤 / 颐 yí in a literary context means “chin, cheek” as a noun or “to “nourish” or “take good care of one’s health” (Pleco).

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Quotes & Changes

One premise of this project is that language comes & goes through us as we come & go through it, changing us as we change it. Whether within the “same” language or between & among languages, various translations, transcriptions, transpositions, partial and overdetermined transmissions & transfers give rise to both practical moments of precise description and productive misprision, creative acts of interpretation and (con)fusion, pure error, and myriad other irruptions, carefully crafted articulations and dissipations of meaning making and unmaking.

Here, relevant quotations from multiple sources — among them pieces of histories of Shanghai, annals of urbanism, bits of poetry and poetics, excerpts from texts of theory and practice, deep-time interrogations of the Anthropocene, various necessarily speculative constructions of the 易经 & 周易 (best known in what we call the “West” as the I Ching), and so on accumulate.

We move, we observe, we forget & recall, we stop and read what’s before our eyes, and we use it, whatever it is, as a way to read ourselves in relation to the world.

Middens, palimpsests, traces of energy storage & flows…

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