It's Rin Chen 'Byung Gnas Season!

"Ratnasambhava" to you

“Jewel-born”, the Dhyani Buddha of equality, of flavous emanation, assimilated to the stoicheion of earth, governor of the south. So, Libra-ish (well, except for the element; color, and cardinal direction, who knows, nobody agrees). Above, the usual Ripa (Padua, 1625: the last Tozzi ed.); following, the almost huffily concise 1709 English gloss of the Italian’s three prolixly-explicative grafs:

A Man at perfect Age, cloth’d like the Vernal, and likewise girt with a Starry Girdle; holds in one Hand a pair of Scales equally poiz’d, with a Globe in each; in the other a Bunch of divers Fruits and Grapes.

Most of these are declar’d in the Vernal, they being the same. The Age denotes the Perfection of this Season, when Fruits are ripe. The Balance, or Libra, is one of the twelve Signs.

“[G]irt with a Starry Girdle”, lol. The Miraculous Miracle of the Imperial Empire!

My wonted settling of laud and honour on the seasonal junctures of the year comes in tardily for 2024’s first day of Autumn, as Sunday last was, aptly, a crafty passage for solar-Libra me (Gemini ascendant and Aquarius moon for those at home either keeping score or compassing astromantic designs against your humble correspondent). Cooking was perpetrated — three dishes, Pakistani-, Spanish- and U.S.-inflected, dressed and served forth — a presession conference on parts for a tune was held with the drummer; and … this:

Somehow a few weeks past was mooted the not-wholly-novel household topic of sundials and my long-unfulfilled yen to possess an exemplar of such (a) distinguished of design (i.e., no fucking cutesy dragonflies or hummingbirds supporting or functioning as the gnomon! we’ve got real ones!), (b) sporting a proper (even if shopworn) emblem-lit-grade Latin mote, and (c) not ruinously dear. Which discussion impelled me as the like always will to trawl around on the internet to gauge what might be on offer that met all three criteria — that desultory poking-about for once yielding a hit, the pictured priced to move (move me, anyway), a little less than the cost of a half-pound of Point Reyes Blue (GOD FORBID THAT ANYBODY WOULD THINK THAT THIS IS A SHAMELESS THOUGH AS YET UNCOMPENSATED TESTIMONIAL OR SHOULD I SAY PLUG) asked for it. Being a vertical dial, it nominally requires something whereof we have not one: a south-facing wall both suitable for affixing something directly and invasively to and on which the artefact would be duly prominent. To supply that lack I in the next month sketched and measured and cut up and glued/taped cardboard and paper; piled up for a pedestal granite-carving refuse (rather a lot of which is for some reason strewn about the grounds); bought a tub of patching cement for casting a stele massy enough to support the brass, as well as some supplemental brass bits — a rod to replace a missing gnomon (“as is” saved me a few dollars here) and some screws — and bricoler’d it together in time (heh) to align it for noon EST on the 22nd. Calibrated for some latitude not this, it’s fast against the clock antemeridian and slow post-. The running clock right but once a day. Hu!

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A note on my right hand: one day early in August I chanced to rake up from the strata of organological impedimenta in my basement studio a specialty plectrum known as a Jellifish, tines of guitar-string metal set in a rounded, pick-scaled plastic rectangle that was supposed to produce a shimmery effect but never worked for me. While examining it I realized that I was holding it in the correct position, the doing of which had since the beginning of ’24 been impossible owing to the instinctual, unsystematized and nonobjective grip I use, it depending on proprioceptive feedback very nearly extinguished by the entrapment of my median nerve, which (as recounted in previous LIBER FRONTIVM posts) was relieved by my carpal-tunnel procedure in May; the insulted pathway has since moved multiaxially towards restoring itself to full sensibility at a subjectively-consolidated rate of 1 mm per diem. As I had imagined would be the case, one day I couldn’t do it, and the next I could.

Several recording sessions involving me playing guitars and mandolins have eventuated since then — new music due on Bandcamp in late October — and on 20 October I’ll hold forth in improv mode at Athens Porchfest 2024 with E. Serson Brannen’s In Sonitus Lux. I’m not all the way back — my thumb is still something dodgy with regard to the baroque guitar repertory — but I suspect that by the time the medicos’ posited half-year threshold is crossed in early November I’ll be close enough for science. Thanks to all who lent me their support and good wishes during a period trying for me both psychically and somatically. Aum shantih.

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While casting three of the new, weird postmodern pennies to conjure up these hexagrams at (“nearish”, more like, for the reasons enumerated supra) the hour of the equinox, I recalled to mind that Zhongfu (and, yes, that is indeed the Pinyin version of the title of ol’ Grasshopper’s ’72-’75 TV series) had put in an appearance in May of ’22 as the change from Huan/Dissolution. As astrology, so the counsels of Yijing, except without even the phthisic curb of the facticity of planets and their (admittedly loopily analysed) courses: a welter of arbitrary vectors of event or circumstance whose notionally metaphorised counterforces leave open to question — particularly if the oracle is had resort to often enough — which successions and supersessions of readings might be imagined to countervene and to cancel, and to overlap, one another. Has in some discrete regimen of our (my?) reality Zhongfu’s sway set the tenor of things for over two years, just now to be supplanted? You, as unhelpfully exhorts the Herald in the film of Marat/Sade (but not, I think, in the play?), must choose.

I commit in this vaticination new offenses against Canon Legge’s translation by adjoining to my culturally-imperialist because bruxistically woke-ifying gender flattenings a minimally more compressed poetic idiom. As ever, sue me.

In Statu Quo

Zhongfu /Inward Grace

leads even pigs and fish to good fortune. There will be advantage in crossing the great stream. There will be advantage in being firm and correct.

1. One resting within that one’s self. There will be good fortune. If that one sought to any other, rest would not be found.

2. The crane crying out in hidden retirement, “I have a cup of good spirits”, and the young responding, “I will partake of it with you”.

3. One having met with that one’s mate now beats the drum, and now leaves off, now weeps, and now sings.

4. The moon nearly full; a chariot horse whose fellow disappears. There will be no error.

5. The perfectly sincere links in closest union. There will be no error.

6. Rooster mount to heaven! Even with firm correctness there will be evil.

Mutatio

Xiaoxu/Small Restraint

indicates that there will be progress and success. Dense clouds, but no rain coming from our borders in the west.

1. One returning and pursuing that one’s own course. What mistake should the said fall into? There will be good fortune.

2. One reverting by attraction. There will be good fortune.

3. Suggested: the idea of a carriage, the strap beneath which has been removed, or of spouses looking on each other with averted eyes.

4. One possessed of sincerity. The danger of bloodshed is thereby averted, and that one’s apprehension dismissed. There will be no mistake.

5. One possessed of sincerity drawing others to unite with that one. Rich in resources, the said makes common cause with the neighbours.

6. The rain has fallen; a stay. We must value the full accumulation of virtue. But a spouse, however firm and correct that one may be, is in a position of peril — the moon approaching the full. If the superior prosecute measures, there will be evil.