The Shijing chapter QIN

The Shijing chapter QIN

John Bjarne Grover

It was while I translated the chapter QIN from Shijing, which means the poems 126-135, that I stopped and pondered some peculiarities in #132 'Cheng feng'. I had come to understand that very much in politics seems to be hinged up on the name form 'GRYFICE' - apparently on the background of FITZGERALD Kennedy. Uninterestingly, the word in norwegian suggests flatulences ('FISE') in the early morning ('GRY'). It was this I noticed as potentially relevant (in an unfortunate way) to my book title 'The Endmorgan Quartet' when I saw the first line of Shijing #132 including the title CHENG FENG which can be translated 'daybreak wind/breath'.

There was the story when I came up from Venice to see this flat in the late autumn 2009 - I had a couple of days to see the flat but there was nobody there who could arrange a meeting so I had to go up to just look at it from outside and hope the best. I had taken the chance that there would be someone to open the outer housedoor - I had come up from Venice with a night train and did not know if there would be anybody to open the housedoor at all. If there were only 2 flats behind the outer housedoor, the one for me would of course be empty and the ones in the other could have gone to work already and would be home only in the evening, if at all, so it was a chance to take. When I arrived in the morning there was luckily a woman standing in the housedoor, keeping it slightly up. She seemed to wait for somebody - she stood in the half open door in the autumn chill without outdoor garments. I did not take the chance to ask her for permission to enter - since I was obliged to see the flat before signing the contract or at least see it from outside - so I opened the door without asking for her permission and went in. It later occurred to me that this could have been the previous tenant who generously waited for my arrival - in which case it was a mistake to not ask, of course. But on the way out again a minute or two later she was gone. It remained in my mind as a problem - and it somehow tried to make itself comparable to a rape. 'You should have asked for permission to enter' - yes, of course, but if this were the only chance I had etc. (In addition, I was obliged to enter and she would not have been responsible for keeping the door shut). Now I see from Shijing #132 that this little element of abuse in fact is an integral part of the poetic story: It is (albeit in only a fraction of it, so to speak) in the word 'FENG' = 風 which means the breath or breeze etc - and it can also mean a little element of abuse: Examples mentioned by Mathews dictionary is 'to satirize', 'to ridicule', 'to make inquiries'. This 'wiktionary' reference makes notice of 'to mock, to ridicule, to satire' and 'to advise in mild tone'. Hence it seems that the 'wind' also has a slight albeit unimportant aspect of 'mock' about it.

It was when I came to the refrain of line 5 that I recognized this again: This refrain is RU HE repeated: RU HE RU HE = 如何如何 which in chinese means 'but how? but how?'

However, if this combination 如何 is broken up a little, say, somewhat like a door, it comes out more like NÜ HE = 女呵 which means 'woman/female breath/laugh/yawn'. Ah, there is the wind again, the breath, from line 1.

This peculiarity caught my attention even more since the name of the previous tenant turned out to be not unsimilar to line 4 + this rewrite of line 5.

Looking more closely at the history of development of the signs, one finds that the element of 'breaking a door open' could be seen in the graphics - see e.g. the 'Chu Slip and silk script' of 風.

One understands that it is possible to make constructions which e.g. moves the responsibility for the 'breaking of wind' in the early morning from the male to the female gender. I am not aware of any such intrigues but one sees how it could have been done.

This early story could have been the reason why I met her again later - I was coming home and saw her go in the door just before me. Inside there were two police - one of them asked her if she had a key to a door in the corridor but she did not. An impulse told me that I had a key and could help, but maybe that was to intrude into the police work, so I just passed the scene. This happened on the same spot as where the two 'avatars' had entered closely after me - I reported this story with the avatars to the police but do not remember now which of these stories were the first. Could be the police was there on this background - if the order were not the opposite.

'Shivers' (from cold or whatever) can be called 'bever' in norwegian (not the same toneme as in the word for the animal 'bever', though), which means that a certain association to 'bever-pelsen' vs. 'be-verpelsen' could be spotted in the story. This could lead the associations back to the role of 'Gryfice' when spotted in the underwood of US republican names - probably since it could tend to invoke associations to an apparent link from the name of Fitzgerald Kennedy to Auschwitz.

But my book title 'The Endmorgan Quartet' (volume 2) is not about such things. Rather the cover to my book could be recognized in Shijing #145 - and I noticed when I translated the chapter QIN in #134 that the last line (my version tells 'the rose of your precious stone') could be telling of the cover to volume 4, whether that be interesting or not.

In fact the chapter QIN can be seen as an account of how 'ex nihilo' sensations, could be also matter, take shape and present themselves in the matrix of redundancies in the human psyche. The last poem #135 could the be seen to be on the theme of the poet's 'revelation' elsewhere - and the ideas of frugality and missing balance could perhaps even be seen as a theoretic background of my humble economy and more recently the bank account balances missing after the loss of the post in the PO Box. In fact my hungarian bank rarely sends me such balance printouts - and when my little house in Szolnok has sunk down some 10-15 cm in the one corner, it could be suggestive of just this idea of a sedan chair about to lose balance. If the story applies of the ancient chinese emperor who died on an inspection tour and whose corpse had to be transported home before the news of the death was announced, with smelly effects in the summer heat, possibly including the use of camouflage smells from accompanying fish, there is the shared element of 'smelly' sensations. This again has a counterpoint in the idea that the norwegian Heimskringla, the stories of the first viking kings from the time when Norway was (or could have been ) the world's superpower #1 and ruled the oceans from Washington to Konstantinopel, were composed from pairs of words similar in norwegian and hebrew and with a reference to excrements and similar smelly stuffs in the hebrew. (See my translation of Ouyang Xiu part 5 for a similar effect for english and chinese). This meant - if this story be true - that when the norwegians in 1814 started thinking of the once golden superpower era, there would also tend to arise a bad smell whenever there was talk of hebrews - and therefore the state that was reopened in 1814 after all the centuries in oblivion came to be declared as antisemitic. There could have been 'smelly' reasons - and it is perhaps possible to see a complex of potential political intrigue on basis of the following elements:

1) Shijing chapter QIN including #135
2) The chinese emperor = smelly on the sedan chair (see #135)
3) My house in Szolnok???
4) Heimskringla = 'smelly' sagas --> antisemitism?
5) Böhme's Aurora philosophy - if abused for turning Szolnok/Italy 90 degrees?

Deplorable spirituality it would be, though, with such obsession with windbreaking etc.

It seems that the QIN chapter could be about the phenomenon of 'strange things happening' - such as the xylophone and things like that. I had translated #126 and 127 in the summer 2020 before I left for Venice - and it is of course possible to see the xylophone sounds as being created in such a framework.

27/4-21: It is possible that the construction explained here implies an inherent change of gender - and one observes that the name of my younger official sister 'Tone Helene Grøver' could be contained in it: The toneme is what makes the 'bever' ('beaver') differ from 'bever' ('shivers', 'trembles'), while the story of the avatars seemed to leave me with no other solution - if use of force were to be avoided - than to lay down on the floor: This could be called 'hele ne[d]' = 'the whole [body] down'. It is possible that the last name 'Grøver' could be spotted in the construction via the element of slightly 'abusive' interpretation of the 'feng' when it seemed that best solution was to open the door without asking for permission. But I would guess that the 90 degrees 'G-røver' just inside the door - contained in 'be-verpelsen' = 'the be-layment of the eggs' - would obtain if I had used the key: I had seen her go in the housedoor just before me and unless the police on the inside had opened the door for her, it meant that she had a key to the door inside as well. If, therefore, she denied this when I was there, it could have meant that I ignored this wish of hers if I came up with a key and opened the door for the police - in which case it perhaps could have been called a 'be-verpelse'. My name could contain such an 'egg-robber' = 'egg-røver' in the form of a 'jumper-and-egg-røver'. Dirty administration could perhaps have planned such an intrigue on the names, for the purpose of illegitimate recognition of my work as 'Tone Helene Grøver', the dream of smart methods for fast success, cars and beautiful women - as in the life of an 007 James Bond perhaps (and indeed it may be that the name and number of James Bond is constructed on basis of my 'John Bjarne[s]' with the 'LOO' upside down) - but it should be considered too silly and childish for serious administration. But maybe unserious western administration could have hoped for it as a proof that the foundations of chinese culture (here the script) is too weak.

When I changed the spelling of my name from 'Grøver' to 'Grover' in 1999, a lot of things happened in the course of the handling of the case. The bombing of apartment buildings in Moscow was one of them - it could have meant an imitation of this 'Gry-fise' element. Anne Enger Lahnstein was a central norwegian politician - she was chief of three ministries (culture, oil and prime ministry - in the latter she was normally deputy) before the bombings but pulled out of politics in the course of that autumn. Her name can be seen to mean the 'landmark' (cp. also 'Myanmar' vs 'my L-an[d]mar-K') or 'land-stone' for the slash-shaped form of Norway, as in its national letter 'Ø' - cp. also 'Hitler's postcard to 'Eugene Paisseau'. When the state of Norway was made in 1814, the motto was 'united and loyal until Dovre falls' - Dovre is the snowy mountains on the border to Sweden while Dover is the place with the white cliffs to England.

Source:

Mathews, R.H.: Chinese-English Dictionary. (A Chinese-English Dictionary Compiled for the China Inland Mission by R.H.Mathews, Shanghai: China Inland Mission and Presbyterian Mission Press, 1931). Revised american edition 1943. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Simon, R.: Shijing. Das altchinesische Buch der Lieder. Chinesisch/Deutsch. Übersetzt und herausgegeben von Rainald Simon. Reclam Bibliothek 2015.