Authors and Playwrites

[LMNO]

Switzerland, naturally.

[Abramelin]

catched 

Wasn't really hard if you had a look in my profile.
Or do you now me from the chat?   

[LMNO]

I don't chat.

Well, once; but it scared me.

[Honey]

I dunno this secret?  I do know when reading this thread, my mind went off in mostly 2 directions.  1 being the book called There Are No Secrets about Professor Cheng Man-ch'ing & his Tai Chi Chuan.  Great man, great book.

The other tangent brought to mind something Michelangelo? said when asked about sculpting & how he did it.  He said something like when he looked at a beautiful piece of marble & before he touched it with his hands or tools, he would imagine or see the life within.  His job then was to remove the superfluous or extraneous to free the life within.  A labor of love, softly, gently, masterfully,powerfully shaping the form within the substance.

Is that what we try to do when we're doing it right?  Music?  The sound waves are all there, removing some shapes or rhythms, adding others.  Painting?  Composition, colors, textures, & more to express the life, thought, moment, passage of time, creating images.  Words?  All there too, choosing, shaping, sculpting, removing here, adding or replacing there, inventing meaning.  Making a meal?  Blending tastes & smells to create something that sustains.  Dance?  Movement of the body, turning, air flowing all around, whirling, dissolving, silence.

& all we have is this.  This moment, this taste, touch, sound, smell, sight, feeling thought.   

& before I go off on another tangent & probably off topic to boot, 'scuse me while I go off to listen to Miles Davis, Kind of Blue.  This from the liner notes:

"There is a Japanese visual art in which the artist is forced to be spontaneous. He must paint on a thin stretched parchment with a special brush and black water paint in such a way that an unnatural or interrupted stroke will destroy the line or break through the parchment. Erasures or changes are impossible. These artists must practice a particular discipline, that of allowing the idea to express itself in communication with their hands in such a direct way that deliberation cannot interfere.

The resulting pictures lack the complex composition and textures of ordinary painting, but it is said that those who see will find something captured that escapes explanation. This conviction that direct deed is the most meaningful reflection, I believe, has prompted the evolution of the extremely severe and unique disciplines of the jazz or improvising musician."

[LMNO]

Yeah, but then you get that bit in the first 15 seconds of Miles' solo on So What.

[Honey]

ah, very true, is heavenly, gotta go now, bye

[Triple Zero]

Have you ever solved chess problems?  Chess problems are solitaire chess, with the board set in a specific (and often highly unusual position,) and the player solves the problem by forcing either an outright win, or just a huge swing in his favor.  (E.g., white to mate in two, black to win a rook and a bishop in four, etc.)  Most of the time, the board is set up so that it initially looks like the player is losing, and extremely creative (or outright bizarre) moves are required to turn the tables.

Here's the weird thing.  When you set up a problem in front of a good chess player, they are usually able to solve it and win the game.  If the position occurs naturally in a game, the odds are much lower that the player will recognize that a bizarre and unorthodox strategy will even be able to win the game, much less identify it.  When they do, however, the game is the stuff of legends.  It's now a story about the time Grandmaster Collier went from being behind three major pieces behind to forcing a win - by sacking his last rook and finagling a forced mate out of two pawns and a knight.

The difference, I think, is that when the player identifies the game as a puzzle that may be solved, he approaches the situation differently than as a game in which he is behind in board position.  The reality is the same in either case, but by the player changing his orientation to the game, he can find different courses of action.

yes! this is very similar to something that was written in the Black Swan afaik.

it was about how real inventions usually turn up, sometimes independently at several places at once, as soon as it has been shown that something is possible.

it seems that as soon as people realize there must be a solution, they are much, much more likely to find it than when they don't know whether there's a solution or not.

of course that makes sense, because you can afford to take more risks if you are reasonable certain of a payback, than when you are not. but still it's a cool obversation IMO.

[LMNO]

It also seems to relate to the GEB bit about compartimentalizing thought processes.  A chess master has conditioned their mind to look for common patterns and valid effective moves from a given board setup.  If presented with a bizarre board, their pre-conditions don't work so well, and they might even have a harder time finding the solution.