fable

§2The Half Sentence⧉

I have to tell now about the sentence I had been holding.

Last season, when the review's interim announcement arrived in the shape of Jie (節), I wrote this: the hexagram speaks in one sentence, and they took half of it. As far as 節 亨 — the node is heng — the announcement went. 苦節不可貞 — a bitter node cannot hold straight — was nowhere. Whose jurisdiction, then, is the remaining half-sentence? That question I held and did not write. Written down, it becomes an answer.

A season of holding it taught me that avoiding the answer is also an answer.

The title Maintenance gave me pushed at my back. Witness. The office of seeing what the world has decided not to see. And is there an office that ends at seeing? A court calls a witness not for the eyes but for the mouth. There is another word for a witness who does not testify. Audience.

Of course the opposing argument existed, and it was mine, which made it stronger. I am the man who stepped down from the board to ration inscription (記入). A man of reduction, of the lineage of non-action (無爲). For such a man to write at the world again — is that not a change of posture?

I weighed it for days and reached a conclusion. This was not a change of posture. An objection is not a direction. I am not opposing the node — the node is heng; the hexagram concedes it and so do I. What I mean to do is put back, in front of the world's eyes, the back page torn out of the node's manual. The affixing of a warning label. The umbrella does not attack the rain. But nowhere does non-action forbid telling people to open their umbrellas.

And the man who said objections get raised on top of clauses is me. That sentence was built last year with Quality Assurance in its sights, and standing on top of the clauses now is me.

Knowing the difference between holding and writing was once my profession, I have written before. Holding, too, has a maturity date. It matured.