21 August 2022 | Issue 30
"What's the I Ching?" Isabella asked after my post on coincidence two weeks back.
I forgot not everybody had a bringing up where Gurdjieff themed dinner parties were a norm. Or indeed have an Anne installed, as a countercultural revolutionary ready-at-hand, to not remember the seventies.
For those without a set of yarrow sticks lurking in the garden shed, the I Ching is an ancient Chinese divination system. Where the aforementioned sticks, or coins, are tossed and a hexagram produced. Said hexagram is then looked up in the handy user manual, and a course of action suggested. “You will be buying a stripy deck chair” as the Evening Standard horoscope once foretold, or “Monkey alone, weak. Monkey together, pox”, that sort of thing. 1
There are online versions available.
While I have zero belief in divination, I do find myself at times needing inspiration. The I Ching comes with several levels of detail. Starting with the names of the hexagrams. They are wonderfully both vague and evocative, “Biting Through”, “Abundance or Fullness”, “Splitting apart”.
Brian Eno is credited with inventing a lot of things. I would temper that notion and suggest he’s rather canny at realising in popular consciousness a lot of things. Casting lots is one of them.
Let’s take a moment to listen to “Baby’s on fire”
Most famous for bringing ambient music into the mainstream with "Music for films" (we all know that Erik Satie is the progenitor), personally I think we should be appreciating this sublime track, recorded in 1973. Remember, Bowie was still doing twelve bar blues at that point, it was Eno who gave us extraterrestrial "Low" Berlin Bowie. Thirty years before Cannonball by The Breeders.
No one has ever accused Eno of inventing the Leibniz biscuit. But Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz has been accused of ripping off the I Ching.
If you are unaware of the Choco Leibniz, then you have a treat in store for you. It is, modestly put, the greatest chocolate biscuit ever made. Not because the ratio of chocolate to butter biscuit is so perfect, which admittedly alone warrants giving it the crown. But for the way it must be eaten. The chocolate layer is slightly larger than the biscuit base, and there exists a scalloped chocolate overhang just slightly wider than a front tooth. The correct, and only way, to eat a Leibniz is to nibble away the chocolate overhang from all four sides of the biscuit, rotating it in your hand as you go, in one continuous motion. Only then can it be consumed as you would a regular chocolate biscuit. It’s deeply pleasing and therapeutic. It is the bubble wrap popping of biscuit eating. 2
I'm always harping on about Germanic philosophers plundering Eastern thought without giving credit. This time I'm going to defend Leibniz, who instead added a new flavour to the pattern (biscuit themed metaphors are big in this week's post). Leibniz had to wait 1200 years or so to develop binary as Europe had no zero.
To popularise mathematical binary notation - essential for computers to work - he needed Leonardo Fibonacci to publish the concept of zero in 1202. The big nothing is Indian in birth, spreading West through Arabian mathematicians, and East to China via Buddhism.
Leibniz having finally caught up and developed his version of binary, then had the arrogance to want to show China’s Emperor his logic, to demonstrate he got it, a thousand years later, and use that to prove the superiority of his religion.
Bahlsen did name a really nice biscuit after him though. Given his sheer effrontery it's amazing it's not called the Choco Hubris or the Sheer Gall biscuit.
It's true Leibniz didn't rip-off the I Ching, he even credited it in the title of his paper "Explanation of the binary arithmetic, which uses only the characters 1 and 0, with some remarks on its usefulness, and on the light it throws on the ancient Chinese figures of Fu Xi". He did, mind you, plagiarise the work of both Thomas Harriot and Juan Caramuel y Lobkowitz. Harriot’s Wikipedia page is worth a read, he comes across like some real life Tom Hardy in Taboo. 3
6th century BC the I Ching is created. 3rd century BC Indians turn a space into zero. 1202 Fibonacci imports zero. 1703 Leibniz plagiarises Juan Caramuel y Lobkowitz. 1886 Bahlsen create the Leibniz biscuit. 4
Side note. Juan Caramuel must be feeling pretty pissed off no-one named a biscuit after him. All things considered.
Eno is renowned for many things, the one I think deserves most applause is "Oblique strategies". Created with multimedia artist Peter Schmidt in 1975, it's a deck of cards with wonderfully vague and evocative suggestions printed on them. Aha, yes, rather like the I Ching.
Eno and Peter Schmidt developed the cards especially for musicians who felt creatively blocked, rather than those needing the correct moral path — I've found a good bass line is often as useful as any divine guidance proffered — David Bowie's "Boys Keep Swinging" was composed and performed using suggestions from the cards.
I've always fancied a set. Later editions were edited to apply to more general creative enquiries apart from music production. This targeting for creative lateral thinking in some ways makes them less suitable for a general casting of lots.
stoney.sb.org/eno/oblique.html
In 2001 I thought I had published the first ever generative music CD-ROM . Entitled "Morpheus" by the instigator of the project, John Eacott. Being a fan of The Matrix movie I could already see back then this was going to be a problem when it came to internet searches. 5
I wrote the sleeve notes for it, quoting Eno.
// In 1979 I was sent to interview a man who had invented an instrument made from magnetic tape and plastic guttering called the kaleidotron, sitting amongst banks of electronic equipment in a windowless room he told me of the work he had with a Swiss academic using the cern computer. They had calculated all the possible pop songs using the twelve notes of the chromatic scale, and had reached the conclusion that all possible songs would have been written by the mid nineties. They were wrong.
// Somehow I am reminded of a quote by Eno that I can't remember along the lines of most modern pop songs can be recognised within a bar, not because of the melody but due to their sound. The emphasis had slipped from standards to definitive recordings.
// Later came the Akai 900 and Afrika Bambaataa and the definitive recording slipped from being the whole story to becoming a word. Samplers killed the stage star and today glamour airport lounges are filled with DJs not guitarists. Deck culture - remix culture - a pat ending would be to say that the definitive has become a standard again, with its many interpretations. But it's not that simple is it.
// There are people who are creating music that has escaped the boundaries of linear recording, where remix means play, or play means remake, remodel. Emergent music. When I was told of the work these musicians were producing using the software programme supercollider I knew that mushimushi must publish it. End of story.
// Julian Baker, London, 2001
Eno had released "Generative Music 1" five years earlier on floppy disk, but it required not just a PC but a particular sound card to be installed. Morpheus came on CD-ROM and used software called Supercollider that not only generated the compositions but also created the actual sounds. So I like to think that I released the first generative music cd-rom, before Eno released "Reflection" in 2017. Take that Brian! He may be consoled to learn that the first single I ever bought was a second hand copy of Roxy Music's Virginia Plain when I was 13. Apparently Eno was forced out of Roxy by Bryan Ferry because he got all the girls after the show.
In one of the conjunctions that cause Jungians and the mystically inclined to have warm internal radiations, while I was recently searching for a source reference, I came across The Long Now Foundation. They want us to start writing the year as 02022 in order to engender the type of long term thinking we are going to need to survive another thousand years as a species. 6
And who should be a board member, but Eno. I met John Eacott at a symposium on generative music at Westminster University. Where I was also fortunate enough to get to chat with Jem Finer who had just created Longplayer — a piece of generative music that plays for a thousand years — using Supercollider. Composed in order to try and understand species length periods of time, the year 02000 having raised all sorts of philosophical dread.
Eno is creating the bell sounds for The Long Now Foundation's 10,000 year clock, and the foundation are now custodians of Longplayer, which uses the chiming of Tibetan Temple Bowls as its audio source.
Since I don't believe in coincidence, no Jungian undulations for me, I'm going to propose something along the lines of a "life mesh" (‘web’ having already been co-opted). The notion that, as we live our lives, we lay out threads. Which grow into an ever more tangled mesh of experiences, memories, meetings. So give it a few decades, and tugging on one of these threads, jiggles a whole host of others. I'm resisting reading Eno's biography in case he's already written a chapter on my new theory.
On a side note, doing a Pecha Kucha a few years later, alongside author Tony White, I ran into Jem Finer again, mesh! mesh! mesh! Who must hate the fact that while being a respected artist with a background in maths and computer science, he can not be introduced without mentioning he cowrote "Fairytale of New York'' with Shane MacGowan. Apologies for bringing it up again, but it serves as the opposite of Leibniz's hubris, that you can write the greatest Christmas song ever, and not even mention it on your CV. 7
John Eacott also has a great composition that's generated by the tides of the River Thames, worth investigating when it's next being performed.
www.thethamesestuarylibrary.org/library/audio/floodtide/
If you have £50 spare my recommendation is a set of Peter Schmidt and Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies cards. I don't, so I have another recommendation, and there's always the online version.
https://www.enoshop.co.uk/product/oblique-strategies.html
You can see the prompts are focussed very much on creative problem solving. There are times when your problems are more mundane. This is where the I Ching comes in. Let's take a dilemma that regularly occurs in my life. What to watch on Netflix. Almost unsolvable without divine guidance.
Cast your coins, disperse the yarrow sticks, press the on-screen button, and retrieve your hexagram. Let's suppose you are given the wonderfully vague and evocative “Biting Through”.
A good interpretation could be Netflix's new Jamie Foxx vampire hunter movie "Day Shift". Thank you I Ching!
For under £50, what could be finer than a packet of Bahlsen Choco Leibniz biscuits.
This week I was elected to speak to grandson, aged 11, who had questions about the birds and the bees, his mother and other family members ducking the responsibility. I was unaware I had put myself forward as a candidate, but duty must be done. So off we went for a walk together.
"What's sex like Granddad?".
"Well.... you know when you touch yourself in bed...".
There followed much shambling, mumbling, lack of eye contact, evasion, and general furtive behaviour. After reaching agreement that if we are going to have this conversation, I wouldn't lie to him, and he would be honest, we continued.
"What's sex like Granddad?".
"Well.... you know when you touch yourself in bed... That's a rich tea biscuit. You know what a rich tea biscuit is, right?"
Nods.
"and you know what a Hobnob biscuit is?"
Nods.
"Well, when you touch yourself in bed, that's like a rich tea biscuit. But when a girl touches you, that's like having a Hob Nob".
I felt an understanding was reached, with most of our dignities intact. I just hope Hobnobs aren't offered around when he first meets any nascent girlfriend's parents.
www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/no-sex-please---prefer-3615253
Further reading
If you want a book recommendation may I suggest Paul Auster’s “Music of Chance” where I stole the title from. Buy here
Or of course a copy of the I Ching. Buy here
Illustration by Fatima Fletcher
The amazing artist Fatima Fletcher has agreed to be the artist in residence.
Please show Fatima your love by following and liking every single one of her posts at www.instagram.com/fatima.fletcher, and visiting fatimafletcher.com, where her work is for sale, she is available for commissions.
Her wonderful Ruff Ruff coasters are for sale at fatima-fletcher.square.site/s/shop
Send to a friend
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References
https://leibniz-bouvet.swarthmore.edu/letters/letter-j-18-may-1703-leibniz-to-bouvet/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Caramuel_y_Lobkowitz
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Harriot
https://archive.shine.cn/sunday/now-and-then/I-Ching-and-binary-algorithm/shdaily.shtml
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2008/nov/17/theatre-peachy-coochy-performance-art
http://jemfiner.net/bio.html
Legally I have to tell you I might get five pence or something from Bookshop dot org should you purchase something, but really I just want to stick it to Amazon and keep independent bookshops alive. Yeah, rebel me, bringing the man down from the inside etc etc.
Monkey together, pox. Laughed out loud
Nice! ...and a great illustration too!