fable: eightsday

§2The Brackets⧉

I should tell one habit from the lawyer years.

When the body text jams, you go back to the definitions. When a contract will not resolve, when a dispute will not end, when clause points at clause — the novice reads more of the body, and the veteran turns back to the front and rereads the definitions of the words. The answer is mostly not in the body text. It is in the parts the body was assembled from.

The hexagram would not resolve. So I went back to the parts of the thing called a hexagram.

A hexagram is six lines. First line to top line. The convention is to read the first line as the origin of the matter and the top line as its conclusion — in contract terms, the formation clause and the termination clause. When it began; when it ends.

But when you read a contract, the formation clause and the termination clause are not the body. They are the brackets around the body. The substance of any dispute lives between them.

I was in the middle of that thought when the hand moved first. On paper I drew Ji Ji. Six lines. And I put the first and the top line in brackets.

What remains is the middle four. Two, three, four, five. These four can be woven into a hexagram: 2·3·4 the lower trigram, 3·4·5 the upper. Lines three and four serve on both sides — the shoulder of the lower becoming the foot of the upper, an interlocked weave. Hence the name: the nuclear hexagram, hu gua (互卦) — hu, mutual. The hexagram folded inside the hexagram.

This is not a reading I invented. It is an old accessory tool of the three-thousand-year document, and I knew it existed and never once used it. Mine was a system of the judgments — read gyeok from the judgment, rule by the sentence. The nuclear hexagram I took for the tool of practitioners who comb between the lines, and put it deep in a drawer.

In more than twenty years, that word has been spoken in front of me exactly once. The night of the hiring, the second item of Maintenance's forecast. The nuclear hexagram of that basin is Da Guo (大過) — the ridgepole is bent. I let the word pass as an ornament of the forecast. This, after all those years of learning that a three-thousand-year agency never speaks in ornament.

Only on the night there is a reason to comb between the lines does a man return to them. The lawyer opened the drawer.

I wove the middle four lines of Ji Ji.

2·3·4 — Kan (坎). Water.

3·4·5 — Li (離). Fire.

The fire rose to the top, and the water came down. Ji Ji is the hexagram with water above fire. I opened its inside, and the seats were reversed. Fire above, water below.

Fire over Water: Wei Ji (火水未濟).

I copy here what was left on the paper that night.

Ji Ji (旣濟) — water over fire. All six lines in their places.

top   ━━ ━━   (bracket)
5     ━━━━━   ┐
4     ━━ ━━   │
3     ━━━━━   │  the middle four
2     ━━ ━━   ┘
1st   ━━━━━   (bracket)

      2·3·4 → Kan (坎) · water → the lower half of the new hexagram
      3·4·5 → Li (離) · fire → the upper half of the new hexagram
      (lines three and four serve on both sides)

Wei Ji (未濟) — fire over water. All six lines out of place.

top   ━━━━━   ← line 5
5     ━━ ━━   ← line 4
4     ━━━━━   ← line 3
3     ━━ ━━   ← line 4
2     ━━━━━   ← line 3
1st   ━━ ━━   ← line 2

I looked at the paper a long time. Thinking I had woven it wrong, I wove it again, three times. Same answer. In the very center of the room of completion, inside the brackets of the first and top lines, incompletion lay folded.

I took one breath and wove the other direction. The middle four lines of Wei Ji. 2·3·4 — Li. 3·4·5 — Kan. Water back over fire — Ji Ji.

Each lives in the heart of the other. Incompletion inside completion, completion inside incompletion. Of the sixty-four, the one hexagram with all six lines in their right seats and the one with all six lines wrong — the two extremes, antipodes on the face of the map, carrying each other within.

Wei Ji was not a thing to be imported from outside Ji Ji.

It had been folded into the heart of completion from the start.