The Internal

Kevin Grey below makes an analogy between the Ronald Johnson fragment and an
I Ching hexagram. I hadn’t seen it myself (being a bit slow) but do now, and Johnson certainly would have been aware of the I Ching. I was more delighted by the ear, art, heart and hearth embedded within the poem. The six lines make a solid block, and there is something solid and reassuring about composite numbers. It is the primes that stand out like peculiar lone beacons.

It would be nice to find someone who teaches the internal of the I Ching. I’m sure there is an internal aspect, but it has probably been lost. The problem with the internal is that it needs someone who knows to be able to take you there, not just to thrust you in but to give you support (hold you up) whilst you’re there. It cannot be done any other way. A transmission of energy. The world opens up, or opens in to a new and richer space. This is not the same as receiving instruction. The job of the good student is to prepare and ready themselves for these forays with their teacher into the internal. This requires the strength and purity of character that only the pain and grind of hours upon hours of solo practice can develop. In a sense the student has to be strong enough to support the teacher so the teacher can leap further into the flames of the internal. The teacher can then shower the student with some of this fire. This is the way of it. This is why a teacher of the internal teaches: he needs the company and stimulation of a well-trained and well-destined comrade to have access to areas he cannot venture into alone (or areas where alone does not exist). He is as much a student as the student, just a little deeper in. This is why it is the internal and the investigation of the internal that keeps the work alive and vital.

Back in 1978, during the summer vacation I went to work in a tungsten mine in Portugal. The mine was accessed through a long adit cut into a mountain, and it was a good half hours walk down the low, sloping tunnel to reach the active stopes. I was assistant to a mine captain who was responsible for a group of about 10 young miners who were drilling and blasting. It was the mine captain’s job to say where to drill, how far to drill and then to load the holes with dynamite and blast. The tungsten was mineralised as wolframite in a quartz matrix that also contained iron and copper pyrites, zinc blende, mispickel, and a little galena, native copper and native silver. After the stope had been blasted and the dust had cleared we would venture in to investigate the newly exposed quartz vein. Within the vein were vugs: hollow cavities from the sides of which grew quartz crystals encrusted with small golden cubes of pyrite along with varying quantities of the other minerals. Illuminated by the light from our miner’s lamps they appeared as treasure troves, especially since the gleaming, pristine minerals would be constantly changing colour, going through iridescent hues of green, blue, yellow and red, as they began to tarnish. Some of the quartz crystals were bigger than me. These magical experiences were the closest analogies I have found to what it is like to venture into the internal with one’s teacher.