Geometry aka logic as an analytic tool
I talk quite a bit about juxtapositions and parallelisms, because they’re the elements of “creative leaps” (and Sembl / Hipbone moves) and I “practice” noting them for my DoubleQuotes. But one way to clear the xlutter from mind is to concentrate on places where two fields intersect. I’m interested in apocalyptic, for instance, so I take particular note when someone from a Christian apocalyptic POV (Joel Richardson, Joel Rosenberg, eg) writes about Islamic eschatology, or when someone from an Islamic apocalyptic POV (Sh. Safar al-Hawali, eg) writes about Christian eschatology. Reading wherever I notice this kind of overlap means that I learn in two contexts — effectively doubling my knowledge value — where most reading that’s not “targeted” this way only allows me to learn in one…
Again: parallelisms, overlaps, paradoxes, perpendiculars, contradictions — these are all “formal properties” of a given text rather than “contents” — that’s the level of abstraction at which you can make the details sing.
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Hey, I’m not alone. As I was cleaning this post up, Adam Elkus tweeted a link to a post about the CTO of Intel, Intel Labs: Assuring Corporate Immortality by Rob Enderle, which contains this phrase:
This is very orthogonal thinking
There we go! The word orthogonal is so important to me, and is so often on the tip of my tongue but out of reach of immediate memory, that I have a file on my computer consisting solely of the words “opposite oblique orthogonal congruent incongruous antithetical obtuse parallel asymptotic perpendicular right angles” — so if I can remember any one of them, I can easily find “orthogonal”.
Very orthogonal thinking — terrific!
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Norm DeLisle:
June 28th, 2013 at 8:59 am
Have you seen Scott Kelso’s “The Complementary Nature”? The book treats contradictory/complementary variations as dynamic processes. See http://goo.gl/OLl6D
Charles Cameron:
June 28th, 2013 at 6:31 pm
I hadn’t — that and his Dynamic Patterns both look v interesting — many thanks!
Curtis Gale Weeks:
June 29th, 2013 at 7:04 pm
Just a point of curiosity. What would be orthogonal to orthogonal thinking? This may or may not be a koan; could be a trick question.
Charles Cameron:
June 29th, 2013 at 7:43 pm
Subract three, Curtis, then think of the thought you first thought of.
Curtis Gale Weeks:
June 30th, 2013 at 1:29 am
Sorry, I might have been thinking of Schrödinger’s cat while smoking my hookah. Bother.
Charles Cameron:
June 30th, 2013 at 1:50 am
I understand kitties are very popular on the web — Schrödinger’s, or the Cheshire?
Curtis Gale Weeks:
June 30th, 2013 at 2:38 am
Lol my name’s not Elkus, so I’m no expert on kitties. But when you’re smoking a hookah, there’s not much difference in cats — until there is.
Michael Robinson:
June 30th, 2013 at 5:39 am
“It’s one of those psychological “tells” that should alert you, like a facial tick, a hesitation, or that curious (and paradoxical) tight grip on one arm of the chair with one hand while the other rests almost disdainfully relaxed and gracious on the other, in El Greco’s masterful portrait of a Cardinal, now in the Metropolitan in New York: …”
Or equally, such seeming lifelike ‘psychological’ tells may have absolutely nothing to do with the painter El Greco’s direct observation of a particular Cardinal ca. 1600, but be part of the established conventional formula for a particular type of ecclesiastical portrait based on an earlier celebrated model; the same combination of relaxed right hand and left hand had clutching the arm of the chair occurs first in Raphael’s Portrait of Julius II (1511-12) and subsequently became part of the ‘conventional formula’ appropriate for the seated formal portrait of a senior ecclesiastical dignitary.
Charles Cameron:
June 30th, 2013 at 3:57 pm
LOL, okay, Michael, thanks for that! — but you’ve just moved the direct observation back a few painters, no? And later painters in the series presumably pick up on that detail and continue it because it is telling, no? Somewhere there’s an eye for telling detail, and somewhere that detail is telling enough to set up its own slipstream.
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I have to say that El Greco’s cardinal’s hands are more elegantly relaxed and tightly gripping, respectively, than Raphaels. But then I’ve been a crazed lover of El Greco for more than a half-century now.