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That's interesting, David, because my I Ging describes 44 as the prince inclining to a mouth, with a resolute (dancing?) woman on the left, the whole meaning tolerance or lenience. My rather Jungian translator/interpreter calls the bottom broken Ying line I the dangerous Anima figure whom the Yang lines are trying to deal with. Line II is the strict but understanding sub-lord controlling the latter, thus the fish container, though he has not lost contact with I, unlike IV who has a container without a fish: this is Freud's uneasy culture repressing too much, where V manages to sublimate successfully; he calls the container the (phallogocentric?) ego, which seems to have frozen or transformed into an outsider's unapproachableness in VI. Your scaly being is thus both slippery "meaning" (the obscure object of desire?) and the elusive monstrous anima (ditto). What 44 seems to illustrate is the conflicts involved in the hypostasizing of life & meaning in the interests of "order". If _langue_ can be grasped (very incompletely) as a shifting but somehow transcendental (not transcendent!) system of differences, _parole_, which is all we know directly, seems to flow with the dark undercurrent of sense but resolves into a stutter of separate semantic/syntactic fields when we look more closely. Meaning may resemble desire, then , in being resistant to containment, both in either of your 2 meanings and in Bion's sense of motherly "holding", though it (containment) can never cease to grasp. This is all as obscure & difficult to me as to anyone else, of course, that's why I'm rambling (after a period of silence). The wind bloweth where it listeth, "I" can't finally master it. Last night I saw film of the snowy haired Pound being interviewed by (2 or more invisible) Frenchmen: the voices seemed to come rat-ta-tatting (oh Gallic cafés, oh endless coffee & conversation) from the off ~ When you chose silence, about 6/7 years ago, wasn't it, did it mean that something had finished ? ~ Did you mean to say something by your silence? When you chose silence, did you thereby recognize your work was done? etc. All the time Pound sat there, silently, & one thought God! he's not going to answer; the voices dried up, a tremulous yet imperious presence remained, then his mouth hardly moved: Le silence m'a choisi. End of clip. Perhaps Pound became line VI of hexagram 44? Best Martin