zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — an almost-Darwin-Award-worthy foolishness, coupled with a masterpiece of Zen art — just the sort of post I’d love to post, for my own sake, even if no-one else is listening ]
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Unbelievable!

That’s a serious journal article about a seriously un-serious drunking game.. And if you can’t read the fine print, not to worry — the two top articles below will brief you nicely..

Readings:

Atlantic, This Is What Happens When You Drunkenly Swallow a Live Catfish

LiveScience, A Drunk Man Swallowed a Live, Venomous, Spiny Catfish.

Acta Oto-Laryngologica Case Reports, A Jackass and a Catfish

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By way of contrast:

Here’s what the book’s about:

Zen art poses a conundrum. On the one hand, Zen Buddhism emphasizes the concept of emptiness, which among other things asserts that form is empty, that all phenomena in the world are illusory. On the other hand, a prodigious amount of artwork has been created in association with Zen thought and practice. A wide range of media, genres, expressive modes, and strategies of representation have been embraced to convey the idea of emptiness. Form has been used to express the essence of formlessness, and in Japan, this gave rise to a remarkable, highly diverse array of artworks and a tradition of self-negating art.

In this volume, Yukio Lippit explores the painting The Gourd and the Catfish (ca. 1413), widely considered one of the most iconic works of Japanese Zen art today. Its subject matter appears straightforward enough: a man standing on a bank holds a gourd in both hands, attempting to capture or pin down the catfish swimming in the stream below. This is an impossible task, a nonsensical act underscored by the awkwardness with which the figure struggles even to hold his gourd. But this impossibility is precisely the point.

Read or view:

Getty Research, Japanese Zen Buddhism and the Impossible Painting

Getty YouTube lecture, Japanese Zen Buddhism and the Impossible Painting

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On the zen of swallowing, or not:

In Zen work, an existential contradiction, Mumon’s “red hot coal,” sticks in the student’s throat; the inability “to swallow it or spit it out” precipitates a crisis to be resolved through an insight that is simultaneously an existential gesture. “If I am whole and complete as I am, why do I feel ignorant and incomplete?” might be one formulation of the conundrum, though encoded in a ritual question like “What is the sound of one hand?” The greater the contradiction, the greater the tension — ”doubt mass” — and the greater the breakthrough, according to Zen tradition.

Source:

Tricycle, Fruitful Contradictions: The Zen of mathematics

[ by Charles Cameron — the Trinity and National Security, Game Boards and Mathematics, Japanese wave patterns, Maestro Harding on the interconnectedness of “all branches of human knowledge and curiosity, not just music” — plus Blues Clues at the tail end ]
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Not only have the last couple of days been riotous in Washington, with more news to track than I have eyes to see, but today, still reeling under the weight of Mattis‘ resignation, McConnell‘s statement in support and other matters, I found myself with a richesse of board-game and graph-related delights.

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Trinitarian NatSec:

Followers of this searies will be familiar with the Trinitarian diagram juxtaposed here with its equivalents from classical Kabballah and Oronce Fine:

That little triptych is from my religion and games avenues of interest, but of course I’m also interested in matters of national security, as befits Zenpundit, the strategy & creativity blog. You can imagine my surprise and delight, then, in coming across a natsec version of the trinity diagram, in a tweet from Jon Askonas.

Here’s my comparison:

My own attention was first drawn to the Trinitarian diagram as a result of reading Margaret Masterman‘s brilliant cross-disciplinary work, “Theism as a Scientific Hypothesis”, which ran in four parts in a somewhat obscure and difficult to find journal, Theoria to Theory, Vol 1, 1-4, 1966-67.

See:

Margaret Masterman, George Boole and the Holy Trinity

Margaret Masterman’s “Theism as a Scientific Hypothesis”

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Game Boards and Mathematics:

I could hardly fail to be intrigued by Calli Wright‘s piece titled The Big List of Board Games that Inspire Mathematical Thinking, eh? And look, the first game they show is a graph-based board game, Achi:

Dara also looks somewhat relevant.

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Japanese wave designs:

Again, those familiar with my games will know of my juxtaposition of Von Kármán with Van Gogh as a DoubleQuote — but let me quote from an earlier post, Sunday’s second surprise — the Van Gogh DoubleQuote:

Here’s the Von Kármán / Van Gogh DQ, which I value in light of Hermann Hesse‘s Glass Bead Game as a clear bridge between one of the crucial dualities of recent centuries — the needless and fruitless schism between the arts and sciences, which has given rise not only the rantings of Christopher Hitchens and his less elegant disciple Bill Maher, but to such other matters as the Papal condemnation and “forgiveness” 359 years later of Galileo Galilei, Charles Babbage‘s Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, Andrew White‘s A History of the Warfare of Science With Theology in ChristendomW, and CP Snow‘s The Two Cultures:

And finally, here’s an ugraded version of the other DQ of mine that seeks to bridge the arts and sciences — featuring Hokusai‘s celebrated woodblock print, The Great Wave off Kanagawa (upper panel, below) and Jakob aka nikozy92‘s fractal wave, which I’ve flipped horizontally to make its parallel with the Hokusai clearer (lower panel) — Jakob‘s is a much improved version of a fractal wave compared with the one I’d been using until today:

That brings me to the Met’s marvelous offering, to which J Scott Shipman graciously pointed me:

Here’s where you get the collection:

Rich pickings!

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Maestro Harding and the Glass Bead Game:

Finally, I’ve been delighted today to run across a couple of vdeos of my nephew, Maestro Daniel Harding, conducting the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra some years back in programs exploring the interplay of mathematics and other disciplines and music:

and:

Daniel is not working the graph-based angle that my games explore, but his thinking here is pleasantly congruous with my own. His work with the SRSO has, he says in the first video here, “to do with all branches of human knowledge and curiosity, not just music — because everything is connected”.

You can’t get much closer in spirit to Hesse‘s Glass Bead Game than that!

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Earlier in this series:

On the felicities of graph-based game-board design: preliminaries

On the felicities of graph-based game-board design: two dazzlers

On the felicities of graph-based game-board design: three

On the felicities of graph-based game-board design: four

On the felicities of graph-based game-board design: five

On the felicities of graph-based game-board design: six

On the felicities of graph-based game-board design: seven

On the felicities of graph-based game-board design: eight

On the felicities of graph-based game-board design: nine

On the felicities of graph-based game-board design: ten

On the felicities of graph-based game-board design: eleven

On the felicities of graph-based game-board design: twelve

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BTW:

I really want to believe the only American television Kim Jong Un has watched is Blues Clues and that’s just what he thinks all American mail looks like. pic.twitter.com/wL9ek5csch

— Delaney Strunk (@delaknee) June 2, 2018

NatSec, yes, and a DoubleQUote. Too good to miss. Thanks again to John Askonas..

[ by Charles Cameron — an interdisciplinary meditation on what falls like rain — savor these two at a time, and take your time ]
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Gary BB Coleman:

Guillaume Apolinnaire:

Prose version, Roger Shattuck:

It’s raining women’s voices as if they had died even in memory
And it’s raining you as well marvellous encounters of my life O little drops
Those rearing clouds begin to neigh a whole universe of auricular cities
Listen if it rains while regret and disdain weep to an ancient music
Listen to the bonds fall off which hold you above and below

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Clearly drums fall like rain. Hammer blows?

C.B. Cook and gang:

Tangle Eye:

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Portia, in Merchant of Venice:

The quality of mercy is not strained;
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:

Eddie Turner:

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Like I said, listen to these, two by two —

The second one here, at four hours, will likely outlast you — but do listen to a minute or three..

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And a grace-note, gifted us from Friday’s New Yorker:

As my fingers began to manipulate over keys, words began to fall in place on the melody like drops of water falling from the crevice of a rock,” Dorsey later said. He gave the first performance of “Precious Lord” at his church shortly after his wife and baby’s death, and the act of uninhibited spiritual praise was forever changed.

Here:

{ by Charles Cameron — and are you maybe reading this zenpundit post in real life? ]
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You’ve almost certainly seen one or more of these Chevy ads, more than twice..

Real people. Not actors.

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Indeed, they’ve been viewed so many times, in so many variants, that there’s now a Progressive ad that pulls the obvious reversal:

Real actors. Not people.

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Then there’s the existential question, referenced in The Atlantic‘s The Reality of Those ‘Real People, Not Actors’ Ads piece:

During commercial breaks at the Olympics viewing parties I’ve been at in the past week, one company’s ads have consistently sent the room into a round of existential questions. What is reality? Aren’t we all actors? Just how excited can a normal person get about J.D. Power awards?

Existential? Holy Moly. But then, according to One Of The ‘Real People’ From That Chevy Commercial Speaks Out:

As The News Wheel reported in 2015, some of the “real people” were actors by profession, a fact explained away by a GM representative who claimed this was just because they scouted for people in LA. Struggling actors who know that faking enthusiasm could yield a better paycheck could explain this.

Phew, that was a close one!

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And every actor surely knows Shakespeare, no? Jaques, in As You Like It? All the world’s a stage? In the Globe Theatre, motto: All the world enacts a play?

But forget Shakespeare and the more things in heaven and earth than are dremed of in his existential philosophy — I think I know what the Chevy ads boil down to:

Real ads. Not truth.

Aha, mini-epiphany! Fast forward, if you ask me.

[ by Charles Cameron — oh damn, cameron’s on about the ouroboros again, when do we get to strategy? ]
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A slide from a youtubed lecture:

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I have found someone who gives emphasis to many of the things I give emphasis to, and which few other peple emphasize. And FWIW, the Jungians do this better than most, but then I’ve been reading and appreciating them for ages. This is new.

Okay, Jordan Peterson. He’s been thinking across a wide range of fundamental concepts for many years now, and considerable fame has accrued to him. How I managed not to notice him until now, I’ll never know. Here he is, anyhow —

— with that ouroboros slide faintly visible behind him. The limits of vision, faintness included, are among his many interests, FWIW.

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I’ve read Tanner Greer‘s recent critique of Peterson, which was enough to catch my inner eye, and then today there was an invite from Zen —

@hipbonegamer you wanted to know about Peterson’s “map” concept https://t.co/YIA1jEVK9U

— mark safranski (@zenpundit) March 25, 2018

Hell yes.

And I’m maybe ten minutes into that lecture, have skipped around a bit, and went back to lecture #7 for a clear shot of the ouroboros behind him, which I’ve now inserted at the top of this post.

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Peterson’s ouroboros is a conflation of a bird, a cat and a snake — wings, claws and venom — birds, cats and snakes being the three classes of being that can kill you from a tree. A “winged, legged serpent” — the “dragon of chaos”. That’s not how I get to the ouroboros, and my equivalent interest is in its recursive nature.

I wrote the poem below, as far as memory serves, in the Anscombe-Geach living room, heart of Oxford’s superb logic team at the time, back in the mid nineteen-sixties, and published it, I think, in Micharel Horovitz‘ 1969 anthology of Britain’s equivalent of the USian beat poets, Childrenn of Albion — wow, of which you could have purchased Amazon’s sole remaining copy for $729.32 as I was writing this — now it’s only $32.57 — is that a difference that makes a difference?

Here’s the poem:

I formatted it more recently in a HipBone Games manner, as a single move with a recursive tail.

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Another significance of the ouroboros for Peterson is that the serpent (antagonistic to us) guards a treasure (to be desired)..

So along with recursion, we have predatory chaos, aka the unknown and indeed unknowable unknown, and the treasure trove or hoard. And as you might intuit, it’s a short leap from there to the word-hoard — poetry in the palm of your mind, with an early mention in Beowulf.

Here are a few gems from Peterson’s seemingly inexhaustible hoard:

there’s no place that’s so safe that there isn’t a snake in it..

even God himself can’t define the space so tightly and absolutely that the predator of the unknown can’t make its way in..

that’s the story of the garden

— and those are from maybe a three minute stretch of a two hour lecture — the word means “reading” — one of forty, is it, in the series?

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Phew. I just received the book, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, from Amazon —

— the print is small — too small for me — stronger glasses coming soon..

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Look, Stormy Daniels was just on 60 Minutes, offering prurient interest under cover of adversarial politics, how could I resist? I could have watched ten more minutes of Peterson video, and grabbed twice the number of notes I’ve made here — but that can wait.

Stormy Daniels and her lawyer, Michael Avenatti, can show you strategy..

Ah, but Jordon Peterson can show you abstraction.

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Consider the recent school shootings. I go back to Columbine.. Peterson goes back to abstraction, mapping, and time-space:

For example, we’re all sitting in this room, and someone leaps in with a weapon.

It’s like this was known territory a second ago, and now it’s not known territory at all. Even though you’d say, well many things have remained the same, it’s like, yeah, but all the relevant things have suddenly changed, right? And so part of the way of conceptualizing that is that you can manifest a geographic transformation by moving from genuine geographic explored territory into genuine unexplored geographic territory. But you can do that in time as well. Because we exist in time as well as space. And so a space that’s stable and unchanging can be transformed into something completely other than what it is, by the movement forward of time. So why am I telling you that? It’s because we’ve mapped the idea of the difference in space, between the known and the unknown, to the difference in time between a place that works now and a place that no longer works, even though it’s the same place, it’s just extended across time.

Consider the recent election:

That’s what an election does, right?

It’s like, we have our leader, who’s the person at the top of the dominance hierarchy, and defined the nature of this particulatr structure. There’s an election, regulated chaos, noone knows what’s going to happen, it’s the death of the old king, bang! We go into a chaotic state, everyone argues for a while, and then out of that argument they produce a consensus, and poof, we’re in a new state, like that’s the meta-story, right, order > chaos > order, but it’s partial order, chaos, reconstituted and revivified order — that’s the thing, that this order is better than that order, so that there’s progress, and that’s partially why I think the idea of moral relativism is wrong – there’s progress in moral order.

Note:

plenty of intelligence

no actionable intelligence

a high level of abstraction

following the logic of evolution

not the logic of logic

too paradoxical for that

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That’s more than enough.

Au revoir, quite literally!