# [D31:5M] Vision: [[The Survivor is Having Cats for Children and does not Know Their Names]] Hexagram: [[Thirty First Hexagram]] Trials: [[Thirty First Trial]] Archetypes: #mother #moon #fish #tenthousand #snow #tree #heart #gallstones #mountain #darkwindow #lake #feet #flames #star #sky #bomb #head #floor #black #sun #cave August 6th, 1945 1. If, like one surviving a drought or flood, giving birth no longer to human children but to hellish little creatures cooing and mewing as in ancient times. If, coming to think of it, like which ancient times? If, no longer women but men now, returning to the world that which belongs to it: the exasperated bones of what once he believed was his own body. 2. If, like mother, winter belongs to the lei of yin.  If, as the silver moon wanes over the cold still water, the fish in the lake should shrink.  If, for now, the fish must be attended with great care and removed from the lake until time enough has passed that they return to their former selves. If the ten thousand things happen to be just a little more than that.  If, like finding the yin within yang within yin, for example, that snow will sometimes float upward, even as it falls; will burn to the touch and mark the skin forever. 3. If, like the cosmological constant, the stability of the universe itself is but a minor provision, an artistic license even, propping up the world's most important theory about time, that time kinda-does-kinda-doesn't exist. If, like trauma and madness, whether emergent or fundamental.  If, like a soul, which sometimes seems and sometimes doesn't seem, but always is relegated merely to seeming.  And if, by simply assuming that the seeming does more than seem, that it should suddenly bear inscription, like a tree or a stone might. If, like the cosmological constant, the anthropological constant.  If, like the mind, the heart. 4. If, like ten thousand demonstrators gathered inside the Imperial Ballroom of the Hotel Americana, signs lifted, reading something like (profit-driven healthcare entity here) "needs a heart transplant."  If, like someone not wanting gallstones, depression, or colon cancer living in any average plutocratic apartheid-type situation.  If, like someone waking after a long sleep, you suddenly cannot account for the unfamiliarity of your surrounding environment, which seems airless, and now that you think of it, possesses not the slightest breeze about the air, nor scent, and though your can't put a finger on it, you know something absolutely was changed in the night. If, like the mountain beyond the dark window, you should find, kicking out from under the covers, a new sort of dryness about your feet, and that both are peeling. If the mountain is simulacra of mountain. If lake is memory of lake. 5. Then listen: do nothing about it. Let the fish learn to walk, the feet turn to bread. Let the flames drink the water, the stars burn out the sky.  You want to make the world a better place. I do not think it can be done.  You want the bombs to ricochet off the schools and hospitals and return to sender. Listen to that friend out there saying, "I gave my life to art, and all I have to show for it is a head full of meds and a dead wife." Do not offer him comfort like a liar does. Do not look away from others looking away. Remain where you are and resolve to do nothing about it.  Doing nothing, let it seem that nothing is done. For while you are undoing, make an offering of your own life to the floor beneath you, to the bones and the things that creep blackly beneath it, to the sun's light cast upon the moon, to the moon's reflection cast upon the melting ice.  Ask of each not to interfere.  Ask the rushing water that crushes the quiet monk.  Ask the mountain above, ask the cave.  Ask the silence that follows. What can any do, but by not doing, answer?