The Great Vessel Blog

Opening the Inner Thesaurus or Sounds as Eggs

Amongst other things, the mythic images and sounds that make up an old divinatory tradition are called ji. They are hidden triggers or seed-syllables for the performative linguistic act of divination that exist at the liminal borderline between the oral and the written. Each of these ji triggers a return to, transformation within and emergence from the fertile chaos or linguistic whirlpool that exists in what chaos theory calls the water of the synapses.

This is the diviner’s place and moment and its force lies beyond the reach of our usual discourse on language. Reading and voicing the Ji is not a hermeneutical task; they are a knock on the door, a sign of presence belonging to something “other”, a context or field with its own identity and its own things to say. Its purpose is “not just to learn something, but to experience something and be set right.”

In traditional Chinese thought the perception of Ji brings an intuitive sense of differences (trace and deferral) based on Lei “natural category”, correlations of pattern that occur not by wilful analogy but because their elements are “of the same kind.” These categories are presided over by an omen animal called the Small Fox, a sort of dream-animal both male and female. The “traces” of the ji (actually related to the “klang” or phonetic associations characteristic of “primitive languages,” primary process and the working of dreams) act in the Xin or Heart-Mind to awaken patterns of a world of analogies linking cosmic, human, moral and supernatural that simply “rise up”.

The diviner was the medium for this living world’s coming-to-be. Stirred by the seed-syllables, “wind-tossed and fluttering,” the diviner’s heart-mind is moved through endless associations, forgetting itself in the wanderings. He or she sings out what they see and hear, sketching the animate spirit as they are rolled round and round with the courses of things. From this “wandering” the Bright Omens arise, the “hole that reveals the (w)hole)”.

In modern terms the context for all this is what we call an intertext that “already-always” contains the energy through which we learn to see the past not as a linear progression of fixed moments but as an endless series of re-creative fiction-making opportunities. In the continuing evolution of the Chinese language I would suggest that the system of seed syllables and “radicals” collected in the Han potentially represents such a system. Though sinologically and academically scandalous in the extreme, I would further suggest that if we “wander” through this system rather than attempting to analyze it historically or intellectually, it can open the on-going Inner Thesaurus of Change “as an endless series of re-creative fiction-making opportunities” at the boundary of the oral and the written.

Seen in this way, the system becomes a network of reciprocal intelligibility in which the content of each myth comes to consist more and more of other myths. Its resists total enclosure by any external constraint, guaranteeing the continuity of culture while at the same time inviting and triggering (ji) its transformation. As a continuing dialogue linking the mythical and the mimetic, it opens a shifting and ambiguous landscape where “the Real becomes Not-real when the Unreal’s Real” - the instantaneous movement that characterizes intertextual communication.

See:

Stephen Owen, Traditional Chinese Poetry and Poetics: Omen of the World, Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985.

Jing Wang, The Story of Stone: Intertexuality, Ancient Chinese Stone Lore and the Stone Symbolism in Dream of the Red Chamber, Water Margin, and the Journey to the West, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1992.

Stephen