Note on blog posts: Like all aspects of n Lines & Changing, these posts are incomplete. Moving forward, these and future posts will provide additional documentation on algorithmic walks, psychogeography, urban geography, digital and aleatoric poetry and poetics, ecopoetry and poetics, the history and use of the I Ching/Book of Changes/易经, related research, and more — including reflection on what it means to do such work in the shadow of the question of the Anthropocene.
Additional posts will document talks, performances and events as well as the use of walking algorithms and aleatoric (chance-based) compositional methods in creative writing workshops.
The I Ching was “the consummate written text, in that nearly every trace of human actors is absent from it. Its language is in this sense disembodied, and, by the same measure, empowered to roam freely throughout the natural world. It is in this sense shen, a ‘spirit’ or ‘spiritual,’ a text less of culture than of Heaven-and-Earth, of Nature.” ” (Kidder Smith Jr., “The Difficulty of the Yijing.“)
The I Ching does indeed have ‘no form’ (in the conventional sense), thanks to the unique nonverbal, cyclical device of the Sixty-Four Hexagrams. It neither begins nor ends anywhere. (John Minford, I Ching: The Essential Translation of the Ancient Chinese Oracle and Book of Wisdom)
…writing that leaves things alone… (Clark Coolidge, The Crystal Text, 8)
The paper intervenes each time an image, of its own accord, ceases or withdraws, accepting the succession of others; and, as it is not a question, as it usually is, of regular sound patterns or verses but rather of prismatic subdivisions of the Idea, at the instant they appear and for the duration of their concurrence in some exact mental setting, the text imposes itself, variably, near or far from the latent guiding thread, for the sake of verisimilitude.
— Stéphane Mallarmê, “A Throw of the Dice,” translated from the French (“Un Coup de Dés”) by Henry Weinfield, Collected Poems, 121