EIGHT IS MORE THAN A THOUSAND
EIGHT IS MORE THAN A THOUSAND
sketches inspired by the Book of Changes
The text of this post has been translated from Dutch to English with DeepL. It will be manually edited and streamlined soon
In Eight is More the Thousand you will find a collection of sketches inspired by the Book of Changes, the I Ching. The book is ancient, dating back to the Bronze Age - the sketches were written in 2024, the era of rare-earth elements. The language of symbol, metaphor and incessant change mirrors with what I encounter daily in my immediate environment - on walks and bike rides, through reading and study, through searching and especially by chance.
I is translated as 'change', Ching as 'classic'. The original title of the book was Zhou I, referring to the time of its creation, the Chinese Zhou dynasty, 1046 to 256 before our era. Thus the classic about change from the Zhou dynasty.
The written language of the I Ching is archaic. The characters of the time generally have more than one meaning. This makes the contents of the book difficult to understand even for a contemporary Chinese speaker without the explanation of a specialist.
Yet the I Ching is above all a book that speaks with images. Images taken directly from the natural world that give the book a universal poetic value.
Initially, the I Ching was a divination book, written for the administrative elite. Over the centuries, commentaries were added and the book gained great philosophical value.
The Eight is More than a Thousand sketches are inspired by the 64 chapters of the I Ching. I make a effort to translate them to the world I live in - the natural world of clouds and trees, of cultivation and wilderness. But also to the inner world of leading and following, of losing and recovering. The sketches connect outer world with inner world, something that could easily be seen as floaty and vague. On the contrary, keeping the two worlds frenetically separated, thats vague and inevitably leads to alienation.
The visual language of the Book of Change can be understood by children - precisely by children. And also by adults - as long as they dare to think freely, creatively and simply!
The building blocks of the book come in eightfold and represent the forces of nature that surround and compose us. Heaven and Earth, Fire and Water, Thunder and Wind, Mountain and Lake.
In the I Ching these eight so-called trigrams are paired to form 64 hexagrams, which describe as many basic life situations. The book describes how sooner or later each of these situations will change. Nothing stays and each of the situations can transform to any of 63 others. Do the math: that results in an incredible number of possible processes change. It starts with 'eight' and it ends with a huge number - let's say 'a thousand'!
In the Dutch proverb 'Acht is meer dan Duizend', the number ‘acht’ also carries the meaning 'observant'. Thus the proverb means 'paying attention is worth a lot'. Eight as a number is less than a thousand - in the sense of ‘paying attention it is actually worth more than a thousand.
I have no competence as a sinologist or philosopher and you will not find any commentary on the ancient scripture in the sketches. I leave that to a dozen contemporary I Ching translations and interpretations on which I rely.
The photos you, the reader, will come across were taken in a radius of a few kilometres around the house where I live with my family. That house is in the outskirts of a lovely but average village in Salland in the eastern province Overijssel, where nature and culture, history and progress are there for the taking - if only you take the time to look closely.
The many associative leaps in the text invite you, the reader, into various areas: nature observation, history, poetry, current affairs, tall stories and science. And all served up with illustration, clip, literature reference and hyperlink.
If all goes well - and the law of changes allows - these sketches will eventually culminate in a book. The title has already been given away: Eight is More the Thousand!
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