STACKING
chapter 13. LIKE-MINDED #1
This post has been translated from Dutch into English with DeepL. It will be manually edited and streamlined soon.
THE IMAGE of two trigrams: under Fire, above Heaven. From the earth's surface, heat rises. Thermals carry vapour, which, when enough altitude is reached, condenses and forms clouds. The reflected energy of the sun is the force behind the upward thrust. The energy released by condensation only amplifies this phenomenon. Is there anything more impressive than clouds expanding in slow motion? Daily stuff? Nothing special? Instead of booking another trip to the mountains, stay close to home, look up, imposing mountain formations float past you, no day the same. Rediscover the humble pile cloud, the cumulus humilis. Or the imposing cumulus congestus. And at the end of a hot summer day, higher than a Himalayan giant, the cumulonimbus.
On the inside it contracts, on the outside it ferments, swells, expands. Fire below, Heaven above. The image of Like-minded and Community.
Boosting each other up, a cumulative culture, ideas generating ideas. Passing on experiences, misses, and inventions to each other. Standing on the shoulders of someone who, in turn, also stands on the shoulders of another.
The image of the next chapter 14. - Great Holdings - is exactly the opposite: above Fire, below Heaven. Here, the sun is high in the sky and its rays shine on the earth. Everything receives light and warmth. The energy of the sun is at the beginning of all that lives.
The character at the top is called 'tong'. The three lines the form a standing rectangle refer to a door or a house. Within that, a single horizontal line: the number one. And a square symbolising ‘mouth’. The bottom character, 'ren', means 'human'. Taken together, this denotes a group of people speaking with one mouth. A community, a group with a strong connection.
Chapter 13. Like-minded follows chapter 12. Stagnation. The hexagram of Stagnation is straight forward: it consists of three broken lines below, and three solid lines above. Heaven above Earth. At first glance, this seems like the perfect configuration, everything is in its predestined place. But then you realise that this lacks all dynamism. Heaven moves upwards, but was already upward. Earth moves down, but was already there. Heaven and Earth moving apart, alienation and status quo. The rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. The necessary response to stagnation lies in seeking like-minded people and forging coalitions. Cooperation is the defining characteristic of human beings.
First, take a good look at how someone else handles it. So apparently that's how it should be done. Or maybe it is the method to avoid. Imitation is the way - imitate, copy, duplicate, repeat, emulate - and to possibly add something of your own at the end. Better well stolen than poorly invented. Besides cooperation, copying and improving is deeply human.
Highly remarkable that we are frantically trying to teach our children something completely different. While our culture is built on peer learning, copying each other's inventions and cooperating, cheating at school is a mortal sin. If you get caught doing it during an exam, you hang. After all, you are expected to formulate the question in your own words. And above all, not to look around to see what others are writing down. An oppressive contradiction between cumulative culture and individualism.
The all-consuming obsession with originality clashes with the need to think and work together. Children are being groomed for a life in a society, which is shuttered with patents, copyright, and property rights. And the final exam lacks a test for imitation and cooperation.
How easily you allow yourself to be influenced as a writer by reading, prior to or during the period of writing. An insight, a knack with words or sentence structure, pace or tone are involuntarily transferred to your new created text. Anyway, of this influence you are surely aware, because the reading and the writing are close in time. What is no longer actively remembered, and what you unconsciously do draw on, are all those books and newspapers you ever read in your life, the opinion pieces, articles, and manuals, labels on jars, the subtitles and advertisements. Imagine all that, piled up. A cumulonimbus thundercloud easily reaches ten kilometres high. How high does your stack of books and other printed paper reach?
What then is truly original if thinking and writing is infused with the ideas of others? What belongs to whom? There has always been a fine line, that between inspiration and plagiarism. And if that's not complicated enough, the loathed and embraced AI writing assistant is making it all one big mess.
An answer, a direction, a horizon? ... Writing is a slow process, often so laborious, that the writer regularly wonders: why on earth go through with it? But writing should be slow-moving, precisely to keep the jumpy mind bound and let it come to its senses. Slowness gives the words depth and magic. How else could the reader be enticed to start reading it, a similarly slow and time-consuming process?
He is the best kind of writer - the kind who makes you feel like you're a genius, rather than he's a genius.
Book review in The Times on Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers.
I read on my iPad every day. Conveniently, I carry the newspapers, my favourite magazines and books to read with me. No dragging, hardly any weight. Long live the tablet. But saying goodbye to books for good? Know what you're going to miss: dog-ears, the smell of fresh ink, and that of old paper, a forgotten note in pencil, a written dedication, the date when bought, the binding, the linen, the bookmark, a coffee stain, a forgotten dried leaf, a loose quire, the discoloured cover, design, typography, the typeface, the boundedness of that one book, the memory of the first time you read this book, weight in your bag, opening the book somewhere, browsing and flipping through ... A book is so much more than just a text carrier. No, the love of books cannot be easy transferred to a tablet.
If a single book is already a world in itself, how intriguing is a stack of books. A shelf full of them. A bookcase? Is there anything that more depicts human community than a library?
To be continued in ...
