| Chapter 2: | Spirits of the Zhou yi—An Essay on Wine |
|
|
level of synthesis (#29). At the same time, the shift from drink and food themselves to vessels carrying them, from contents to containers, marks the new level too. The vessels are to be handed in at the window and not the door; this inversion also marks the movement away from basic oppositions of positive nourishment at drinking/eating versus negative oppressive drinking/eating to some intermediary image focusing on formal mediations—conveyance, containers, service style—rather than contents and circumstances of their consumption.
Turning now to the frame’s most remote node, the single reference to drinking is quite extraordinary, clearly differentiated from the set’s other members and bearing a distinct textual mark matching its formal placement there. To begin with, it is the “book’s” end, a circumstance giving pause for thought. It is the last hexagram’s last line, concluding a textual locus given to meditation upon what is not yet concluded. There are certainly plenty of suggestive indications fueling thematic discussion here, concerning which one can defer to philosophers, while insisting on the possibility of the text’s structural reading. Briefly, though, much of the final hexagram pair’s contemplation of finality recalls the Viking text Sayings of the High One (Hàvamàl), warning,
These cautions about imminent change evidently stem from hard experience in northern regions. In the Chinese case, alcoholic spirits are brought together with a hint of ice in the final hexagram pair, where the little fox may be crossing thin ice, risking wetting its tail; where the brave man, drinking, risks not only getting his head wet but losing it.
Intoxication brings about blurring of previously clear demarcations; what is better than the fox to manifest boundary-crossing circumstances at the textual terminus? Whereas the text opens with the clearest possible distinctions between hexagrams of all yang and all yin, in a mode