Robin Magowan
I CHING
There was a time when I had knelt to the Gods. I had been sick,
love sick, and then suddenly successful. So she whom I loved and was
my sticks and stones had become mine - hand, heart, liver. I could
not desire more.
So it was then, at this height, that she proposed we ' play the
I
Ching,
the Chinese game of fate. I rolled the hexagram, "Abundance":
Abundance has success.
The king attains abundance.
Be not sad.
Be like the sun at midday.
It was, I learned, a very good number - none better. I would fall
of course, but not for a while. Meanwhile I should consider myself
fortunate, revel in that, when the drop came, realize that a drop of that
sort was maybe just like one of rain, bad only from the point of a cloud
ego. Since I had been choking on that abundance, was that abundance,
had it around me like glass (when it broke where would I be?), I was
naturally obliged to pay some attention to these words, see that the
problem in climbing anything is not in the getting up, but in the getting
down. My notion of happiness only went one way. To get out of this
alive I needed another two-directional one.
The hexagram told me I was now the happy man I had set out
to be ten years earlier. Who killed invisibly, parasitically, from the in–
side. Very best disease next to their most glamorous, sickest smile. Watch–
ing them go mad, and perhaps only mildly discomforted by the rope I
found looped about my office doorknob, or the follow-up ·black glove
left a week later on the bare desk. Which meant if I was going to kill,
I should start with my own much too long neck.
Afterwards I realized how shaking and trembling I had been with
