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The I-Ching and the aesthetics of shimmer

Because sometimes you find yourself sitting in a cafe with a copy of the I-Ching to your left and it’s in Polish. But you’ve seen it here before - not in this cafe, but in this city. In English, the last time, at a significant moment, even if proffered by an untrustworthy individual. It came, that time, at a moment of needing to trust. It came back the summer before last, in the wake of a decision that was in some ways good and an in others bad. A gently insistent reminder to attune to The End in Sight. 

I ask myself what hexagram is that? I can’t remember. Can I find it? Will I recognise it in Polish? 64. Przed Spełnianiem. Koniec Przed Spełnianiem. 

When things flow, there’s a sense of continuity and overlap - coexistence of time/space. I feel forward and back, accumulated experiences shimmer. I’m attracted to this aesthetic of shimmering lately. I see it in my head as a collection of loosely woven baskets, which sit inside of one another. Their weavings cross and contradict one another, becoming alternately visible and invisible as they rotate, and all around them/from them, there exudes a porous but very present texture infused with memory. 

There’s something Pepper’s Ghost about it. 

Something too of the experience of sitting here, listening as “Son of a Preacherman” randomly plays and remembering a dear friend I made here, in this same city, who I have since lost track of and who used to live not far from where I am sitting now. 

There’s something significant too in having these encounters - the song, the I-Ching - in the immediate aftermath of two good encounters, all together seeming to affirm that this path is a good one. All this sounds quite mystical, but it isn’t, really. I understand it as a continuously present landscape - like the texture within the baskets - of which I’m only conscious some of the time. 

Its moments of assertion form points of orientation. If I had a multidimensional rendering of my life encompassing time, space and people, I could map them. If I could map them - if I had started years ago - perhaps I could deduce where the most conducive paths lie. Perhaps, though - indeed, likely - I already know where they are and these momentary bubblings up serve to remind me to live how I know. 

Today is one. April 2014 was one, walking through Vršovice with the hairs of my arms standing on end. Another was in London, late at night in the Phoenix Artists Club, when a performer whose show I’d gone to see told me that he was clairvoyant and that I needed to make a show about learning to play the Anna Magdalena Notebook. 

This flow, this shimmering, this coexisting of our experiences - like a kind of hazy, personal Wirkungsgeschichte, possessing texture and dimensionality, provoking goosebumps and hovering in the air around us - is what I want to put into the space, in front of people. 

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