Redtree Times

The Writing’s on the Wall (1995)

The way of the Creative works through change and transformation, so that each thing receives its true nature and destiny and comes into permanent accord with the Great Harmony: this is what furthers and what perseveres.

—I Ching (Book of Changes), Ch’ien (The Creative) ca 1000-750 BC

I originally used passage above in an earlier and credited to Alexander Pope, who it was attributed to online at the time. I was not doing as much authentication at the time, but when I came across it recently I immediately questioned the attribution to Pope. It only took a minute before I found that it came from the I Ching, the ancient Chinese Book of Changes, which was a method of divination.

Fortune telling, basically. I don’t fully understand the methodology and can’t say I have much faith in divination, so I am not going to try to explain it. But the bulk of the wisdom attached to it rings true after several millennia.

For example, the Creative working through change and transformation. Much of the art that moves people across a broad spectrum comes from some form of crisis and catharsis. Being transformed by our experience of the hardship in this world is a universal human quality.

We all suffer at some point in our lives, and we find comfort in both expressing it and being heard. And in empathizing with others who are expressing their own experience.

I can’t speak for other artists, but I feel that transformation and change have been the major impetus in my work. I was going to add   for better or worse, but I believe it has been for better in my case. My work would be infinitely less without my experience of life. It would certainly feel less authentic.

Well, that’s my opinion, for what it’s worth.

This is a subject on which I could go on and on. I’ll give you a break today.  Plus, I simply didn’t want to do that this morning. I need more time to think than I have right now.

I mainly wanted to correct my attribution of the passage and share the song below. I could have sworn I had shared this song before but it turns that I have not. It is an emotionally charged cover of a Black Sabbath song, Changes, from the late soul singer Charles Bradley, who had a full-throated, gritty delivery that evoked the deepest  depths of feeling. He died in 2017 at the age of 68 after finally attaining wider recognition in his later years after toiling in obscurity for much of his life.  His was a long and hard road and his voice oozes with his life experience.

That is the way of art– revealing the meaning, beauty, and connective nature of our suffering.