Someone I knew a bit at college has just published a book on the film director who has been his lifelong obsession. There�s a review at:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2102-880392,00.html

I can�t help noticing (along with the reviewer) how some things, once in the cultural mainstream (alternative channel), are now just very obscure indeed with only a handful of fans and loyal advocates � such as the author here. I can see a parallel between the line that Colin MacCabe takes on Godard and Ian Macdonald�s advocacy of the People�s Music. I think they did the same subject but whether they were a year apart I can�t remember � maybe McCabe switched to Moral Sciences as well. I listened to Laura Nyro�s last studio album as my contribution to the preservation of cultural monuments.

Other novelties of that time have taken root. Apparently there are any number of net I Ching installations. I happened to come across Chris Lofting�s at

http://pages.prodigy.net/lofting/lofting/proact2.html

What really impressed me was the depth that CL had plumbed in linking the oracle to a all kinds of psychological and mathematical ideas. He has, for example, made a connection between the oracle and the personality ideas which others have developed out of Jung�s theories and have now go by the initials MBTI. Both systems are binary � I have exploited this feature of MBTI myself although I have never had the idea of constructing the link which CL hit upon.

I haven�t worked how CL maps the trgrams to the eight personality clusters. He puts introvert/extrovert on one side and works with judging-perceiving, thinking-feeling and fact-possibility. I rather suspect that he doesn�t do a structural matching � instead he works with some kind of analogy between each trigram � say the mountain � and the personality trait which is most like the overall properties of that trigram eg contemplative

This thought made me look for someone whose path I crossed who has worked on metaphor, analogy and structural mapping � I found her page and downloaded some of her articles including one about the way metaphors in psychology have changed over the decades.

I think her thing is that metaphor has a structural equivalence at its root when it really takes off. Two domains which are metaphorically conjoined have some skeletal equivalence. I can see myself spending a lot of time trying to find the best structural equivalence between MBTI and trigrams. Should I call this off right away?

Why this metaphysics? Regan von Schweitzer�s library has a lot of it � attempts to shake out from the more unusual discoveries in contemporary science and mathematics some humanistic conclusions. I actually premiered a piece at an event where Regan organised a walk along a timeline representing the age of the universe � I thought of this when I heard Melvin Bragg today talking to geologists about the same subject on the radio as I drove to work. I have on my desk a book from her collection with the subtitle �Learning About Organisation from an Orderly Universe.� Lawrence and I were into this stuff at about the same time that Regan was getting certain recurring hexagrams � judging from her log. The irony in her death is that it was disorderly and had all the superficial characteristics of randomness. Genuine randomness not the mathematical sort which generates beautiful shapes.

Aldous Huxley starts his novel Point Counterpoint here. One of the counterpoints is between the beautiful pictures of scientific organisation � say in ecosystems or galaxies or quantum physics � and biological randomness which for example in his life made him half blind and killed his mother when he was quite young. He has a famous essay � Wordsworth in the Tropics � where he contrasts the benign Surrey Hills where his parents schools were (and at the bottom of one of the hills my house is) and the ferociousness of spiders, snakes, malaria etc.