You Let Your Magic Turtle Go

The Chinese philosophy book The I Ching has a great effect on me. Maybe because the language and ideas are often poetic. Once when I was in a state of utter confusion, I asked the I Ching what I should do and the reading was: Keeping Still, Mountain. Do nothing, because when you don't know what to do, there's no point in doing anything.

I think this is true and quite profound. The I Ching is also unafraid to be dark. If something is amiss, it will warn you clearly, whereas Tarot cards tend to promise a mostly sunshiny future except for a few weird daggers or upside down cups.

Two days ago in a trough of discouragement about my writing, I threw the I Ching to ask it, Should I stop writing my novel and just write comedy? The hexagram was one of the very darkest: The Abysmal, Water. This is a reading I dread getting, as there is almost nothing positive in it. As I read it, I was puzzled by the frequent mentions of danger. Would it be dangerous to give up something I had invested a lot of time and care in? Would it be like turning my back on a part of myself? Would giving up one more thing have a simply awful effect on my life?

When you throw the I Ching, the lines you get are sometimes 'changing' lines. In this case, in the fifth place a line changed from a yang to a yin -- from a solid to a broken. Maybe this would be more hopeful, I thought, and maybe it would give me the answer I was hoping for: Give up your novel and just write comedy. But it didn't. It was The Army, and it was all about conflict and protecting your flanks. Where in the I Ching is the cheery reading that will say, You are a comedy writer, not a novelist? It's not there, I know, but sometimes oblique comments can help you. Like last year when I was thinking about going to get a PhD, I consulted the I Ching and it gave me six Yang lines -- The Creative. It's unusual to get a solid reading like that, all one kind of line, and I was electrified. I felt I couldn't turn my back on my creative side ... but now I can't write the novel I promised myself I'd write.

Another time I asked it, 'Should I be a music writer?' and the reply was like 'Yes, Yes, Yes!' Again six identical lines, and a reading of astonishing positivity and promise of prosperity. I coudn't do it, though, because I'm obsessed with the idea that I have a great work of literature in me that I must produce. But sometimes I think this was a misconception, and it has nothing to do with who I really am, which is actually a scholar, critic, and comedy writer.

Oh well, anyway. Did anyone see the Channel 13 documentary about Joseph Goebbels last night? Gosh, he was an odd looking little man. But full of smiles and vigor. He really jumped on that job, Minister of Propaganda, though he initially felt it as a humiliation. Kenneth Branagh read his diary and it was full of human notes: frustration, excitement, comments on the weather (many), yearning for women, fits of depression. He seemed quite human, which of course he was. But he's the one who killed all his children, with his wife's help, and then he and his wife committed suicide when the Allies were pressing in on Berlin. In the movie Downfall, Goebbels is portrayed as a humorless, apopleptic maniac. It's odd and disquieting to encounter him as someone who loved beautiful days, the "soft touch of a woman," all his children, and Doestoyevsky's The Idiot. Yet he was the chief architect of the formidable propaganda machine that roused Germans into frenzies of unthinking loyalty.

One last thing. Hitler was really strange looking, too. Not the least bit handsome, and it's hard to see the charisma people like Goebbels talked about. He was small and weedy, with lank hair and that bizarre, fake-looking mustache. As I watched footage of him speaking in fits of harsh gutteral Germanic exclamations, it was hard to picture how people found him 'moving' and achieving 'pathos' and wanted to call him 'father' (feuher). Oh and the other weird thing is there was some footage in color and holy fuck. This all didn't happen very long ago. The architecture looked contemporary and the smiles and the body language and even some of Goebbels' syntax all seemed eerily modern. Freaked me out. It just wasn't that long ago.