How Thought Takes Written Form: Reading Mercury in an Old Text
An old text links Mercury with writing, learning and adaptability, yet gives talent no assured place. Water and its channels offer a way to reflect on expression, readable prose and the circumstances of its use.
When you read old books enough, you notice that some passages are in no hurry to give you an answer. They are more like a person sitting across from you, slowly taking a matter apart and explaining it. Take the line "The Chen star is quick and keen, and has literary composition." The Chinese line, 辰星快利有文章, has only seven characters, but on rereading you feel many questions crouching inside it: What does "quick and keen" mean? Is "literary composition" the thing that gets written, or the drive that makes one write? Between quick keenness and literary composition, is what lies between a sheet of paper or a river?
The Chen star is Mercury among the Seven Governors. When the ancients discussed stars, they often placed it together with wisdom, with cleverness, and with a disposition that flows and will not stay fixed. The general discussion of the Chen star in Zhang Guo's Astrological Compendium says that when Mercury is associated with the body or life palace and is also in a temple or flourishing position, "it governs deep planning and far-seeing strategy, broad wisdom and great measure, and outstanding literary composition," and also says, "Its nature is without fixity: encountering good it is good, encountering evil it is evil." These two words, "without fixity," at first read like a verdict, but on reflection they are like a mirror. Borrowed today to think about literary thought, they can also yield a picture: water has no shape of its own; poured into a square vessel it is square, poured into a round vessel it is round. The Chen Star Song Judgments put it more bluntly: "Wisdom, intelligence, and much wondrous skill; learning that stands out from the crowd and is not ordinary; its feelings are unsettled, its nature gentle and good; encountering the round it is round, encountering the square it is square." Read together, these lines almost draw the temperament of literary thought—it is agile, it is changeable; borrowed today to describe literary thought in human affairs, it seems to put on a different face.
The same meaning, brought before different people, is expressed very differently. Put this into life, and it can be verified almost everywhere. A person who holds the thought "this matter must be done slowly" may say to his mother, "Don't worry, I'll do it with you"; to a colleague he may say, "Let's take it in two steps, first build the framework"; and on paper it becomes "haste defeats the purpose." The meaning has not changed, but the indirectness, the consideration, and the sense of measure are each different. "Encountering the round it is round, encountering the square it is square" was originally a line in a song judgment on astrology. Borrowed today to think about the everydayness of language, it also has something readable in it: for words to land, one must first see whether the ground underfoot is square or round.
But agility of literary thought does not mean the writing is readable. Agility is the water in the mind; writing is the riverbed through which it flows out. Water can surge up all at once, but the riverbed must be dug inch by inch. In life there are people like this: in conversation they are full of sparkling phrases, but when it comes to the page only a few lonely aphorisms remain, like pebbles scattered on a riverbank—pleasant to look at, but unable to form a road. There are others who are ordinarily reticent, yet when they write they push forward layer by layer, and by the end the reader only feels, "It should have been like this." The Treatise on Nature and Disposition says that among the Five Phases water governs wisdom, "its nature is round and changeable," and also says, "diligent at the beginning and slack at the end, east and west without fixity." The five Chinese characters 勤始而怠终—"diligent at the beginning and slack at the end"—sting. The coming of literary thought is often accompanied by a heat; while hot, one wants to write everything, but when the heat recedes the paper is still blank. This set of old sayings carries an evaluation of stellar nature; borrowed today to discuss writing, it can remind us: water can flow, but it can also scatter; it can be round and changeable, but it can also be without fixity. Those who write probably all have to struggle a little with this temperament of "scattering."
The Chen Star Song Judgments also has the line "The Chen star is quick and keen, and has literary composition," followed immediately by "its form and color are clear and severe, its color moist and bright." However, "form and color clear and severe" is describing physical appearance and cannot be directly taken as the quality of writing. Today, associating "clear and severe" with clarity and rigor in writing is another step of borrowed meaning: those who write quickly, if their brush is not rigorous, their characters float; those who write slowly, if their mind is not clear, their characters stagnate. Only by placing the old saying and today's borrowed meaning together do we come to think of the tension between literary thought and composition: water must flow, but what shape it flows into still depends on what kind of terrain it passes through.
The word "terrain" lands more concretely in the Chen Star's Palace Illuminations. In the passage on Mercury in the servants palace it says: "Let not the Chen star enter the sixth palace; compositions that crown the age are useless there. Even if one passes the southern palace examination with high honors, one will linger in humble office, drifting east and west." These lines carry judgments about ancient palace positions and status and cannot be applied to today's human affairs, but reading them today gives rise to a thought worth pondering: if one has literary composition, why does one not necessarily have a place? "Southern palace high honors" is the old language of the examinations; "lingering in humble office" is the language of a stalled official career. Put the two lines together and you see a very ancient sigh—compositions that crown the age do not necessarily exchange for a stable place to land. Reading this today, one easily thinks of people around us who write excellent prose yet revise PowerPoints in cubicles, of young people whose papers are beautiful but who repeatedly hit walls in job hunting. The ancients' "sixth palace" and what we call the workplace are of course not the same thing, but that sense of loss, of "uselessness," can still be recognized across the distance of old books. This is not a fated failure, only a gap in circumstance: literary thought is water, position is the channel; if the channel is not dug well, the water spreads everywhere.
Water that spreads out is sometimes good to look at. The Chen Star Song Judgments says it "encountering the round is round, encountering the square is square." If this line is interpreted only as "easygoing," it is shallow. Round and square can be understood as two paths for writing. The round is shaping itself according to things, smooth for others to read, not grating to the eye; the square is sharply angular, sometimes grating as one reads, yet remembered. The same person, writing a letter to a friend, may be round; writing a review for a journal, may be square. The same literary thought, before different people and on different paper, will find its own shape. The ancients attributed this phenomenon to "water nature"; today we may as well see it as a sense of linguistic measure: not that one has no position, but that one knows where the position must land so that it does not become hard stone.
The greatest danger in reading these old texts is to read them as a table for assessing character. The general discussion of the Chen star says, "Encountering good it is good, encountering evil it is evil." This is the ancients' language in the context of stellar nature, not a ruler for judging whether some person is good or evil. The song judgments also list many sayings about conjunctions and palace illuminations, some auspicious and some inauspicious, some in temple or flourishing palaces and some fallen—all said under specific conditions and not to be extracted as guarantees for modern examinations, degrees, or careers. What we read in them is how a set of cultural images is organized: water is used to symbolize wisdom, wisdom is used to explain composition, and composition is in turn placed back into the relations of body and life, palace positions, and conjunctions to be seen. This line of thinking need not be accepted wholesale today, but it can be borrowed to think about one thing—why is it that people agile in literary thought do not necessarily write readable things? Why do people who have literary composition not necessarily have a place?
The answer, of course, is not in the stars. Mercury will not write articles for people, nor will it find jobs for people. But the image of "water" does gather certain questions together: it flows, and so is agile; it is without fixity, and so easily scatters; it shapes itself according to things, and so can adapt, and so may also lose its own riverbed. Those who write spend their whole lives dealing with these three things. When agile, one must guard against scattering; when scattered, one must find a way to gather; when gathered too tightly, one fears losing the watery quality. These are the contradictions of writing that come to mind today along the old images. In the hands of modern readers, astrological texts seem to have become an old mirror again, letting you see yourself as you write.
Sometimes we think that literary thought taking shape as writing is probably like water becoming a river. The water at the source is alive, but a river needs banks. Banks are not the enemy of water; banks are the condition by which water becomes a river. But banks cannot be too narrow either; too narrow, and the water grows urgent, grows muddy, and only the sound remains. Good writing probably all lies between this width and narrowness: wide enough to accommodate indirection, narrow enough to show direction. As for position, that is a matter outside the river. Some rivers flow into cities, some skirt villages, some seep into sand halfway along. When an article is finished, whether anyone reads it, whether there is a place for it—sometimes this is truly not something the writer can fully control. The old book's line "compositions that crown the age are useless" may not be saying that literary thought is insufficient, but rather that the channel was not dug well, or that the channel was dug well but the water changed course.
Read this way, the Chen star is no longer a distant star. It is more like an old saying that gathers the flowing of literary thought, the shape of writing, and the width and narrowness of circumstance under a single name. We need not believe in stars today, but we can believe in the observations stored within this name: clever people write poorly, often not because they are not clever enough, but because the water is too lively and the banks too loose; people who have literary composition have no place, often not because the writing is bad, but because the channel and the water's temperament have not matched up. The ancients did not say these things so plainly; we have merely followed the images they left behind and made today's associations. Each reader takes a ladleful for himself, and each knows where his own river is.
The old texts used in this article come from the Treatise on Nature and Disposition, the general discussion of the Chen star, the Chen Star Song Judgments, and the Chen Star's Palace Illuminations in Zhang Guo's Astrological Compendium. The quotations are from a fixed digital transcription and have not been checked page by page against a facsimile; when reading, the original book's context should still govern, and the old palace judgments should not be directly transferred into judgments about today's human affairs.
If you find anything improper in the quotations, the original meaning, or this article's modern associations, you are welcome to provide a counterexample or correction, and we will revise accordingly.