"At Hand and Afar"

Pliny was wrong (again); also, the oracle at the equinox

Emblem lit in the news! Albeit something catercorneredly, but one takes what one can get. For the record, the porcupine, pace the author of Naturalis Historia, can’t launch its quills from its integument like little darts — its armament is entirely passive, defensive, a deterrent to the ravening mangeur manqué des porcs-épics in the form of an algesically-instructive face- and/or mawful of wickedly barbed collagen tubelets not easily disengaged from the skin of even the possessor of an apposable pollex.

And so Ursula von der Leyen’s conceit (copped, it would appear, from Spaffer Johnson) of Ukraine transmogrified into a “steel porcupine — one that potential invaders cannot digest” was both impeccably empirical — certainly by comparison to Pliny’s understanding of the relevant zoölogy — and, one supposes, choreographically diplomatic, eliding as it did the warding force of offensive actions that a polity whose borders have been violated might undertake against the territory of the aggressor (those actions prosecuted, by the by, with munitions gingerly supplied by very much interested well-wishers of the nation-state sort).

Alas, secular accuracy ofttimes dilutes the didactic titer of emblematic convention, as here; function in contradistinction is wanted, especially when an emphasis on the polar comprehensiveness of the prince’s capacities (military in the event) is the point of the figure. In this context — to reframe/-purpose Aubrey’s observation on the frequently rickety but generally ingenious geometrical invention of Hobbes — one would fainer err with Pliny than hit the mark with the president of the EU. But it pleases one given to antiquarian puttering to see a tenuous iconographic throughline take on a grain or two more of ousia as it ekes out however many decades remain to it in the collective consciousness.

The image above is taken from a posthumous omnibus edition of Joachim Camerarius’s/Kapellmeister’s 1595 Symbolorum & emblematum ex animalibus quadripedibus … (Nürnberg: 1654). Habitués of my slapdash grab-bag may find of interest this engaging analysis by Nicole Hochner (published in the March 2001 number of the journal Renaissance Studies) of an early deployment by France’s Louis XII of the porcupine topos, which had currency in emblem literature from the genre’s inception with Alciato at the beginning of the 16th century’s middle third through to the end of the 17th, and a little beyond.

Spring Yijing: Shuddering Equipoise

The penny-signaled evolutions in this vernal-equinox iteration of the prognosticating armature are problematically crowded — as (to adduce a familiar parallel) is the 1611 AV OT — with much material interpolated by the translator to clarify culturally-shaped semantic telegraphy but sketchily parseable by the Indo-European-speaking brain, and of suchlike I always try to exclude as much as is possible from my versions, my object being to effect a wider opening of the forecast to interpretation by the reader (although, Brevis esse laboro and all that). Extravagantly wilful planing away of Anglophone glosses and expansions has here amplified my inevitable Prokrustean finagling with tortuously degendering the language of a text from 9th-c. BCE China (a fool’s errand if ever there were one, and, as always, sue me) to render the whole mishegoss distinctly decentered, with Canon Legge’s fusty Englishing taking quite the beating this time around. Dragons, look to your heads! (You’ll find out.)

In Statu Quo

Kun/Durance Vile

Peradventure progress and success. For the firm and correct, the great one, there will be good fortune. That one will fall into no error. If that one make speeches, the words cannot be made good.

The bipartite first shows its subject with bare buttocks straitened under the stump of a tree. That one enters a dark valley, and for three years has no prospect.

The unitary second shows its subject straitened amidst wine and viands. There come anon the princely red knee-covers. It will be well for that one to act as at sacrifice. Active operations will lead to evil, but that one will be free from blame.

The bipartite third shows its subject straitened before a rock, laying hold of thorns. That one enters the palace, and finds not the spouse. There will be evil.

The unitary fourth shows its subject succouring very slowly one straitened by the carriage adorned with metal in front of him. There will be occasion for regret, but the end will be good.

The unitary fifth shows its subject with nose and feet cut off, straitened by the Scarlet Aprons, but leisurely in movement, satisfied. It will be well for that one to be as at sacrifice.

The bipartite sixth shows its subject straitened, as if bound with creepers, or in a high and dangerous position, and saying, “If I move, I shall repent it.” If that one do repent of former errors, there will be good fortune in going forward.

Mutatio

Qian/The Formative

What is great and originating, penetrating, advantageous, correct and firm.

The unitary first: the dragon lying hid. It is not the time for active doing.

The unitary second: the dragon appearing in the field. It will be advantageous to meet with the great one.

The unitary third: the superior person active and vigilant all the day, and in the evening still careful and apprehensive; dangerous — but there will be no mistake.

The unitary fourth: that hid, as if it were leaping up; but still in the deep. There will be no mistake.

The unitary fifth: the dragon on the wing in the sky. It will be advantageous to meet with the great personage.

The unitary sixth: the dragon exceeding the proper limits. There will be occasion for repentance.

[And then a feature unique, I believe, to this, the initial entry in the array of Yijing’s hexagrams* — after a remark on some numerological terms not germane here, as they are uniformly disregarded in my renditions, this umbral formulation:] If the host of dragons appearing were to divest themselves of their heads, there would be good fortune.

*Note, 22.iii.25: Had I casually looked one guà ahead, to #2, the all-yin (“bipartite” in my versions’ jargoning) opposite of #1, Kun, “The Plastic” — which, yes, appears in Pinyin to bear the same name as the #47 that is the “In Statu Quo” figure here, but is written with a different character (perhaps a pitch diacritical got lost somewhere along the way in my materials?) — I would have discovered that to two hexagrams are affixed a seventh interpretive manticism. In my defense: while my Chinese is way worse than Pound’s, I’m not a fascist, lol.