Wednesday November 22nd 2006 19.00
siu shuut – Slight Snow
Richard Ashworth
Feng Shui Diaries
Solar fortnight beginning:
Wednesday November 22nd 2006 19.00
Hour Day Month Year
fire wood earth fire
bing yi ji bing
xu muw hai xu
dog rabbit pig dog
Month: ji hai the earth Pig.
Solar Fortnight: siu shuut Slight Snow
Stab in the Back
Close attention to what is going on can tell us so much. Abstract stuff around us every minute lets us know what is happening in the world: birdsong, weather or a half-heard remark, the density of a cloud or the shape of a bush. The most unlikely things give me a feel for what a survey may present. Today fear is in the air.
There are armed police at Guildford Station as I arrive to catch my train to Clapham Junction from whence I will change to a train that will take me to Brighton where I will survey Sula’s apartment on the sea front.
This is of course the 8 Fate which is about hanging on – to office, values, assumptions, prejudices, longheld beliefs, Wimbledon titles, places in the European cup and the pound. I was brought up to believe that the British policeman was an incorruptible paragon and this remains a useful idea. But it’s under a strain. The 9 Fate (from 2017) whose central image is the sun, will be about global warming. That can wait –a while. This one is about retaining power. And essentially the policemen are here to ensure that.
British police marksmen seem to specialise in shooting the sectioned and the swarthy but what I fear most is actually not this but that armed police mobilised under emergency powers to save us from our inner terrorist will still be on Platform Four in a decade’s time to deal with littering. I understand that authority has been requested to train 90,000 or so officers in the use of arms. I hope that includes the 10,000 or so already equipped with them.
Guns give me the shivers. You can’t shoot without a gun. I board my train disturbed.
Arriving, I opt unwisely to walk from Brighton Station to Hove. It looked close on the map. I arrive hot half-an-hour late.
Opening with the ba zi (or personal feng shui, sometimes misleadingly called a Chinese Horoscope), we establish that the defining event of Sula’s life so far is a violent episode early on.
“Operation, age 10?” I offer. “Big decision; something about trusting men which you have probably not done since.”
She pales. Shakily she tells me that at age 10 a cyst had been cut out of her shoulder without anaesthetic or warning while she was held down by her father and brothers. The wound had taken a year to heal. A simple lancing would have done. I think of the quivering overpowered 10-year old. Who would trust easily again after that?
“2007 is the year of the shoulder,” I tell her.
Chinese divination began with scapulomancy, that is reading the markings on the burned shoulder bones of sacrificed oxen. Wheels within wheels within wheels.
When I was in Hong Kong I met an elderly lady (hereinafter referred to as Celia) who had fled Shanghai in 1936. She was cagey about the circumstances but the answers to other questions suggested that little of her family had survived. She made a living casting ba zi’s. It had never occurred to me that such a person would possess information more authentic than anyone in Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan or mainland China. Apart from being a sweet accommodating woman who bought me lunch twice, she was astonishingly generous with what she knew. Also she used the Cantonese terms for characters which was is the language that I learned in. Having been berated by Mandarin-speakers the world over for using “baby talk” it was a relief for my linguistic shortcomings to prove an advantage.
One of the san sat stars that rule a ba zi, she defined as meaning “an operation” – the ideogram is a knife. I had previously been interpreting it in much more vague terms.
Sula’s ba zi shows this star at age ten. Thanks to Celia I can be really precise about this.
And age ten because of the construction of her ba zi, was a time when Sula made some powerful and longlasting decisions. A beautiful woman in her early 50’s, she has been in two big relationships, never married and never had children.
Such life choices of course are not generally made in the twinkling of an eye. They form over time with a decision here and a decision there. Her ba zi tracks this. Her current (second) big relationship involves separations lasting months. Also her paramour is having a tough time of it.
It shows. The kitchen is in the North West which is a bad idea for two reasons. One, the area that belongs to the father and by extension the mature man, is being cooked. Secondly while a kitchen wants to be in a secondary sector, the cooker wants to face the healthy tian yi direction as defined by the back (or site) orientation or at least in one of the four beneficial areas. This faces none.
I have her make it white and include discs and coins and metal objects; not that difficult in a kitchen. As the cure implies, metal is often seen as money and always as the breadwinner. The South which represents the mature man outside was a peculiar glassed-in patio. We are on the seafront at Brighton remember. Like the partner, is it in or out? I have her change the blinds to choose exactly what type of chi (defined by direction) comes in. I even make a mistake doing that, my tape contradicting the report. I can often be astoundingly stupid and my mistakes tell me a great deal if I can stay conscious enough to catch them. But then that’s Brighton. Like Perranporth and Weymouth and Bristol and many other coastal towns, it is overwhelmed by water which holds and bounces back every type of chi imaginable, poisonous or benevolent, useful or distracting. All these places possess of course, artistic communities. For artistic perhaps read bonkers.
Sula is quite fragile. She cries easily and we both feel the release. Astonishingly her
brothers blame her birth and therefore her, for her mother’s premature death. This is more violent than the knife wound.
The worst thing about the apartment block is at the back. The rear elevation that every building requires to keep it secure, is missing down the middle. Between the shoulder blades, you might say. There are buildings folding back all the way to the South Downs on either side but not in the middle. I do some mumbo jumbo outside and place a pattern of water, mirrors and solid objects within. As we part, she tells me of the stabs in the back she is presently sustaining: unreliable tenants, tax investigation.
“Make the changes, then let’s talk,” I tell her.
I walk back in the warm November sunshine. The train gets me to Clapham amazingly quickly. There are no bins on the platform and I reluctantly dump my cardboard coffee cup on a windowsill.
“Still no bins,” I say to an attendant.
“Better than getting blown up,” she says.
I cover the fortunes of the animals on my radio show http://www.myspiritradio.com/3-ashworthr.html; those for November 2007 on the current show. Those for 2007 will follow in December and January.
My new super-duper revamped website is at www.imperialfengshui.info and my book The Feng Shui Diaries comes out in April 2007.
Names have been changed.
Richard Ashworth