| Chapter 2: | Spirits of the Zhou yi—An Essay on Wine |
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Lévi-Strauss described as “diatonic” in analogy to music, the conclusion is in the same structural sectors of mythical thought as the shimmering rainbow, fish poisons, emotional saturation, intoxication, foxes, and small intervals—that realm structurally well characterized as “chromatic” in the sense of a Carlo Gesualdo or a trout glistening under water like gold or flame.
The tentative nature of one crossing ice is a well-known theme in ancient China. In Laozi #15, adepts of Dao are “hesitant like one wading a stream in winter . . . giving way (huan) like ice just about to melt”—the word huan is commonly duplicated, suggesting ice melting, huanhuan (ran) (
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Huan is Zhou yi Hexagram #59, and indeed, in this hexagram the reader does see an individual in the throes of dying, dissolving, gushing something, disintegrating. Crossing thin ice is an apt image of attenuation, extremity, and imminent finality. Accordingly, the Analects recalls how Zengzi (a very important direct successor of Confucius, whose death is recorded in the Analects by five contiguous passages) cited Poetry Classic as he lay dying. Indeed, Zengzi cited a phrase curiously repeated in two contiguous poems of the Poetry Classic, “Xiao Min” and “Xiao Wan” of the “Lesser Elegantia.” To be perfectly clear, “Little Min” and “Little Wan” are poems located at numbers 5 and 6 of the 10 poems constituting the “10 Jie Nan Shan”—because “Lesser Elegantia” are commonly composed of ten-poem groups—and these two are in the central positions (#5/6) within the “Jie Nan Shan” group. They are peculiar: they both end with the lines Zengzi quotes when he dies. The lines read (the middle line omitted in “Little Min”): “Watch out! In fear and trembling!Like approaching the brink! Like walking on thin ice!” Why are these Poetry Classic lines repeated in a pair,in an unusual way for poems found in this classical collection? It is a good question.3
Moreover, later treatments of this famous episode of Zengzi’s death associate it, and these lines concerning walking on thin ice, with Hexagram #64. One sees this by comparing the Shuo yuan, entitled “Jing Shen (Respect and Caution),” with the roughly contemporary Hanshi Waizhuan. The Shuo yuan collection (presented to the throne in 17 BC)