“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate,” – Carl Gustave Jung

From Karl S. Y. Kao, on Chinese poetics:

“Hsing [xing] is an image whose primary function is not signification but, rather, the stirring of a particular affection or mood: hsing does not “refer to” that mood; it generates it. Hsing is therefore not a rhetorical figure in the proper sense of the term. Furthermore, the privilege of hsing over fu and pi [bi] in part explains why traditional China did not develop a complex classification system of rhetorical figures, such as we find in the West. Instead there develop classifications of moods, with categories of scene and circumstance appropriate to each. This vocabulary of moods follows from the conception of language as the manifestation of some integral state of mind, just as the Western rhetoric of schemes and tropes follows from a conception of language as sign and referent”

Comment: 

That sounds very much like the notion of rasa in Indian aesthetics. Each musical mode (raga), or gesture (mudra) of dance embodies a certain rasa, which is not the mood evoked, but the quality which evokes the mood.

and

More: 

“A xing image is sometimes thought to function in such a way that it connects the events of the poem to a larger, “cosmic” order. It can do this because the image is said to belong to or to be correlative of a “category” with a cosmic significance. Unlike the bi comparison which derives its meaning from some recognizable common semantic grounds between the two things juxtaposed, the relationship here is based on a “categorical correspondence” predicated on an organic view of the universe. This relationship between a particular object and the “category” (or class: lei) it belongs to is described as “organic,” as that between genus and species, but from a linguistic point of view the “semantic features” presumably shared by the two entities are only assumed, not identified. Ultimately the “category” itself is a metaphor; it can only be conceived and represented metaphorically in terms, for instance, of yin and yang which “literally” mean the sunny and shady side (respectively) or those of the Five Elements defined as the correlatives of the Five Directions, the Five Internal Organs, etc. This reading may be understood as a kind of schematization that transcends both the dimensions of senses and feelings. ”

Things are seldom what they seem,
Skim milk masquerades as cream;
Highlows pass as patent leathers;
Jackdaws strut in peacock’s feathers.

— Buttercup, in HMS Pinafore

An excerpt from travel writer, Bruce Chatwin:

THE CHINESE GEOMANCER

The man I had arranged to meet was standing by one of the two bronze lions that snarl in the forecourt of the new Hongkong and Shanghai Bank. He wore a blue silk Nina Ricci tie, a gold wristwatch with a crocodile strap, and an immaculate worsted grey suit.

He handed me his card on which was written, in embossed letters:

LUNG KING CHUEN
Geomancer

Searching and fixing of good location for the burial of passed away ancestors; surveying and arranging of good position for settling down business and lodging places, in which would gain prosperity and luck in the very near future

The building-to which workmen were adding the final touches-has forty-seven stories (including the helipad on the roof) and stands on the site of the Bank’s former Head Office- overlooking the Cenotaph, on the south side of Victoria Square. It is the work of English architect, Norman Foster, and is, by any standards, an astonishing performance.

I heard the bank called, variously, ‘The shape of things to come’; ‘An act of faith in Hong Kong’s future’; ‘Something out of Star Wars’; ‘A cathedral to money’; ‘A maintenance nightmare’, and ‘Suicides’ leap’.

Having exceeded its budget to the tune of $600 million U.S., the new Hongkong and Shanghai Bank has also earned the distinction of being the most expensive office block ever built.

Architecturally, I felt it was less a ‘vision of the future’ than a backward, not to say nostalgic look at certain experiments of the Twenties (when buildings were modeled on battleships, and Man himself was thought to be a perfectible machine): buildings such as the PROUNS of El Lissitzky; Vesnin’s project for the offices of Pravda-the unrealised dreams of the Early Soviet Constructionists.

Mr. Lung, on the other hand, is a modest practitioner of the venerable Chinese art of geomancy, or feng shui. At the start of the project, the Bank called him in to survey the site for malign or demonic presences, and to ensure that the design itself was propitious. Whichever architect was chosen, there was bound to be some anxiety; for the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank is a pivot on which Hong Kong itself stands or falls. With 1997 in sight, prosperity and luck must either come ‘in the very near future’-or not at all.

The afternoon was overcast and a sharp wind was blowing off the harbour. We rode the escalator to the first floor, and took shelter in the Cash Department. It was like entering a war-machine: the uniform grey, the absence of ‘art’, the low hum of computerised activity. It was also cold. Had the buildings been put up in Soviet Russia there would at least have been a touch of red.

Behind a gleaming black counter sat the tellers-unscreened and unprotected, since, in the event of a bank-raid, a kind of portcullis slices sideways into action, and traps the raiders inside. A few potted palms were postioned here and there, apparently at random.

I sat down on a slab of black marble which, in less austere surroundings, might have been called a banquette. Mr Lung was not a tall man. He stood.

Obviously, the surroundings were too austere for many of the Bank’s personnel, and already-in the executive suites on high- they had unrolled the Persian carpets, and secretaries sat perched on reproduction Chippendales chairs.

‘This’, Mr Lung began, in a proprietorial tone, ‘is one of the Top Ten Buildings of the World. Its construction is particularly ingenious.

‘It is,’ I nodded, glancing up at the cylindrical pylons and the colossal X-shaped cross-braces that keep the structure rigid.

‘So first,’ he continued, ‘I would like to emphasise its good points. As far as feng-shui is concerned, the situation is perfect. It is, in fact, the best stuation in the whole of Hong Kong.’

Feng-shui means ‘wind-and-water’. From the most ancient times the Chinese have believed that the Earth is a mirror of the Heavens, and that both are living sentient beings shot through and through with currents of energy-some positive, some negative- like the messages that course through our own central nervous systems.

The positive currents-those carrying good ‘chih’, or ‘life force’-are known as ‘dragon lines’. They are thought to follow the flow of underground water, and the direction of magnetic fields beneath the Earth’s surface.

The business of a geomancer is to make certain, with the help of a magnetic compass, that a building, a room, a grave or a marriage bed is aligned to one or the other of the ‘dragonlines’ and shielded from dangerous cross-currents. Without clearance from a feng-shui expert, even the most ‘westernised’ Chinese businessman is apt to get the jitters, to say nothing of his junior staff.

At lunch I happed to tell an ‘old China hand’, an Englishman, that the bank had taken the advice of a geomancer.

‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘It’s the kind of thing they would believe in.’

Yet we all feel that some houses are ‘happy’ and others have a ‘nasty atmosphere’. Only the Chinese have come up with cogent reasons why this should be so. Whoever presumes to mock feng-shui as a superstitious anachronism should recall its vital contributions to the making of the Chinese landscape, in which houses, temples and cities were always sited in harmony with trees and hills and water.

Perhaps one can go a step further? Perhaps the rootedness of Chinese civilisation; the Chinese sense of belonging to the Earth; their capacity to live without friction in colossal numbers-have all, in the long run, resulted from their adherence to the principles of feng-shui?

‘Now it so happens,’ Mr Lung said, ‘that no less than five ‘dragon-lines’ rund down from The Peak and converge on the Central Business District of Hong Kong.’

We looked across the atrium of glass, towards the skyscrapers of the most expensive patch of real estate in the world.

Some of the lines, he went on-not by any means at all- were punctuated here and there with ‘dragon-points’ or ‘energy centres’, like the meridian-points known to acupuncturists: points at which a particularly potent source of chih [energy] was known to gush from the surface.

‘And the site on which the bank stands’, he added, ‘is one of them. It is, in fact, the only ‘dragon-point’ on the entire length of the line.

Other lines, too, were known to have branches, like taproots, which tended to siphon off the flow of chih, and diminish its force.

‘But this line’, he said, ‘has no branches.’

Yet another favourable point was the bank’s uninterrupted view of the mountain. Had there been naked rocks or screes, they might have reflected bad chih into the building.

‘But The Peak’, he said solemnly, ‘is covered in trees.’

Similarly, because the new building was set well back from the waterfront-and because the sun’s course passed to landward- no malign glitter could rise up from the sea.

Mr lung like the grey colour which, he felt, was soothing to the nerves. He also like the fact that the building absorbed light, and did not reflect glare onto its neighbours.

I questioned him carefully on the subject of reflected glare, and discovered that glass-curtain-wall buildings which mirror one another-as they do in every American city, and now in Hong Kong- are from the feng-shui point of view, disastrous.

‘If you reflect bad chih onto your neighbours,’ Mr Lung said, ‘you cannot prosper either.’

He also approved of the two bronze lions that used to guard the entrance of the earlier building. During the War, he said, the Japanese had tried to melt them down.

‘But they were not successful.’

I said there were similar lions in London, outside the Bank of England.

‘They cannot be as good as these two,’ he answered sharply: so sharply, in fact, that I forgot to ask whether the lions had been put away in storage three years ago, when Mrs Thatcher made her first, informed foray into Chinese politics-and gave the Hong Kong Stock Exchange its first major nervous breakdown.

The result, of course, was the historic slap from Deng Xiaoping himself.

‘So what about the bad pionts?’ I asked Mr Lung.

‘I’m coming to them now,’ he said.

The Hong Kong waterfront was built on reclaimed land and there were stories . . . No. He could not confirm them but there were, nevertheless, stories . . . of sea-monsters and other local ghouls, who resented being dumped upon and might want to steal the building.

This was why he had recommended that the escalator to the first floor-which was, after all, the main public entrance- should be so angled, obliquely, that it ran along a ‘dragon-line’. The flow of positive chih would thus drive the demons back where they belonged.

Furthermore, since all good chih came from the landward, he had advised that the Board Room and Chief Executive offices should turn away from the sea: away, that is, from the view of Kowloon and the mountains of China; away from the cargo-ships, tugboats, ferries, drifters, coal-barges, junks; away from the White Ensign, Red Ensign and that ‘other’ red flag-and turn instead to face the ‘Earth Spirit’ descending from The Peak.

The same, equally, applied to the underground Safe Deposit- which has the largest, circular, stainless-steel door ever made.

Finally, Mr Lung said, he had to admit there were a number of danger zones in the structure-‘killing-points’ is what he called them-where, in order to counteract the negative chih, it had been necessary to station living plants: a potted palm at the head of the escalator ‘in case of a fall’; more potted palms by the lift-shafts; yet more palms close to the pylons to nullify the colossal downward thrust of the building.

‘Right,’ I said, ‘I’d like to ask you one thing. I believe that “dragon-lines” never run straight, but are curved.’

‘True,’ he said.

‘And isn’t also true that traditional Chinese buildings are always curved? The roofs are curved? The walls are curved?’

‘Yes.’

Chinese architecture-like Chinese art, Chinese language and the Chinese character-abhors the rigid and rectilinear.

‘Now, as a feng-shui man,’ I persisted, ‘how would you interpret this rigid, straight-up-and-down Western architecture? Would you say it had good or bad chih?’

He blanched a little and said nothing.

‘These cross-braces, for example? Good or bad? Would you consider putting plants underneath them?’

‘No,’ he said, blandly. ‘Nobody sits there.’

My question, I have to confess, was most unfair, for I had heard on the grapevine that the cross-braces were terribly bad feng-shui.

It was obvious I had overstepped the mark. At the mere mention of cross-braces, Mr Lung moved onto the defensive. He back-pedalled. He smiled. He re-emphasised the good points, and glossed over the bad ones. He even left the impression that there were no bad ones.

At the foot of the escalator he shook my hand and said: ‘I have done feng-shui for the Rothschilds.’

Comment:

For the reader who took the time to write and call this c***:  relax, it’s just interesting writing….

Meant for reading, I believe.

Norman Thomas, a one time US presidential condidate:

“The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But under the name of ‘liberalism’ they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program, until one day America will be a Socialist nation, without knowing how it happened.”

How Finkelstein’s interview on Lebanese TV was doctored in the US – at Norman Finkelstein. And why his critics come to his lectures.

“Whosoever of you sees an evil action, let him change it with his hand; and if he is not able to do so, then with his tongue; and if he is not able to do so, then with his heart; and that is the weakest of faith.”

“One of the key principles of Catholic social thought is known as the principle of subsidiarity. This tenet holds that nothing should be done by a larger and more complex organization which can be done as well by a smaller and simpler organization. In other words, any activity which can be performed by a more decentralized entity should be. This principle is a bulwark of limited government and personal freedom. It conflicts with the passion for centralization and bureaucracy characteristic of the Welfare State.

This is why Pope John Paul II took the “social assistance state” to task in his 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus. The Pontiff wrote that the Welfare State was contradicting the principle of subsidiarity by intervening directly and depriving society of its responsibility. This “leads to a loss of human energies and an inordinate increase of public agencies which are dominated more by bureaucratic ways of thinking than by concern for serving their clients and which are accompanied by an enormous increase in spending.”

More by David Bosnich at the Acton Institute’s website.

My Comment:

I will comment on this next week when work lightens up. But just for now, I should say that though I’m not a Catholic, this has always struck me as one of the most important Catholic social doctrines. Maybe even the most. Subsidiarity includes more than the term decentralization suggests, though. There’s also the idea of contiguity in it, which is the notion that you ought to prefer the near to the far whenever possible. Subsidiarity means I clean up my backyard and stop trashing my neighborhood  before I start worrying about the melting of the polar ice caps….

Bill Christison on how to crack one part of the propaganda code:

“I am personally not a Catholic, but my sign will urge people planning to go to the 10:00 a.m. Mass to boycott that Mass instead, and join us in the demonstration. I do not intend to say anything derogatory to anyone while I am demonstrating, although I will give anyone who expresses interest in me a brochure explaining the Finkelstein tenure issue. I will stay until 10:00 a.m. and then leave.

I not only hope that others will join me in this demonstration. I hope that yet others, reading this message, will organize similar demonstrations near other Catholic churches. I further hope that we can carry on similar demonstrations on future Sundays, all around this country and abroad, until the hierarchy of the Catholic church in Rome takes note of us, and until that hierarchy compels its subordinates at De Paul University to reverse the unjust decision on Dr. Finkelstein.

If anyone reading this thinks I am overreacting, that is unfortunate. The Israel lobby simply should not be allowed to win this round. There is little doubt that some will argue that the Catholic hierarchy in Rome had nothing to do with the decision against Finkelstein. But there is also little doubt that the hierarchy can overrule that decision if it wishes. And it says something that, to me, is utterly despicable if the hierarchy of the church refuses to overrule its own underlings at De Paul….”