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Talk at the Summit, and Why the Text Withholds a Verdict

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Talk at the Summit, and Why the Text Withholds a Verdict

Six at the top describes a situation that has been talked about instead of felt. A querent drawing it should look for the point at which an attraction, a negotiation or a persuasion turned into commentary on itself. The text gives no judgement, and the withheld judgement is the reading: the classic will not call this a misfortune, because nothing has been damaged, and it will not call it good fortune either, because nothing has been done.

The commentary's word is volubility, which names fluency rather than falsehood. That is what makes the line uncomfortable to receive. The person is not lying and may be perfectly sincere. They are simply doing all of it with the jaws and the tongue, at the end of a figure whose earlier lines have all been about a body committing itself, and an influence that reaches only the mouth arrives at the summit with nothing to show for the climb.

When the line changes, the upper trigram Dui becomes Qian and the figure becomes Retreat, King Wen 33, in which the superior person withdraws in good order while withdrawal is still possible and still dignified. Read from a line of exhausted talk, that destination is the correct instruction. When words have replaced the thing they were about, the useful move is not to say more of them but to step back and stop spending on it.

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