{"id":62421,"date":"2019-02-11T20:25:19","date_gmt":"2019-02-11T20:25:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=62421"},"modified":"2019-02-11T20:35:23","modified_gmt":"2019-02-11T20:35:23","slug":"remembering-mathematician-and-glass-bead-gamer-bob-de-marrais","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=62421","title":{"rendered":"Remembering mathematician and Glass Bead Gamer Bob de Marrais"},"content":{"rendered":"

[ by Charles Camero<\/strong>n — this is strictly for the record — you don’t need to read it unless — like Bob — you’re a poly-mathematician, para-biologist, meta-psychiatrist or native-born glass bead gamer ]
\n.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

1984. Illustrating for Bob de Marrais<\/strong>‘ article on Computer Graphics<\/strong><\/a>,
\npublished in Digital Deli: The Comprehensive, User-Lovable Menu
of Computer Lore, Culture, Lifestyles and Fancy<\/strong><\/a>, ed. Steve Ditlea<\/strong>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

**<\/p>\n

My late friend Bob de Marrais<\/strong> wrote a five-part short-book-length essay, Catastrophes, Kaleidoscopes, String Quartets: Deploying the Glass Bead Game<\/em><\/strong>, which is so wide-ranging in its scholarship that no single journal had peers sufficient to review it, so witty, subtle, enchanting, and generally impossible that its continued existence on the web and in the time-worn hard drives of a scattering of computers has made of it a sort of samizdat<\/em> — a secret publication passsed from hand to hand, or in this case memory to memory, and in this post I wish to memorialize both the essay and Bob himself.<\/p>\n

Here are five sips, to give you a sense of the work.<\/p>\n

**<\/p>\n

Catastrophes, Kaleidoscopes, String Quartets: <\/h4>\n

<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Part I: Ministrations Concerning Silliness, or: Is \u201cInterdisciplinary Thought\u201d an Oxymoron?<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

We seek deep concepts by silly means. Think of this, for openers at least, as a cerebral equivalent of a well-known Monty Python skit: welcome to the Ministry of Silly Thoughts. [ … ]<\/p>\n

Essential to easy generation of the \u201csilliness effect\u201d \u2013 as in the frivolous juxtaposing of Kings Arthur and Elvis in the last paragraph \u2013 is production of collisions between disparate things, which context makes us associate unexpectedly. No one not on drugs or writing late-night standup material would be likely to seek a link between the latest news from robotic interplanetary exploratory vehicles and political upheaval in the Hispanic community in the general vicinity of Miami. But when Elian Gonzales\u2019 mom fled Castro\u2019s regime on a flimsy makeshift boat and died at sea while getting her son to (what she thought would be his) freedom, Jay Leno noted how scientists had just discovered water on the Red Planet, \u201cand in an unrelated story, a boat of Cuban refugees washed up on Mars this morning.\u201d<\/p>\n

Aside from late-night comedic unwinding from the day\u2019s events, there is only one other area where such juxtapositions are hunted down and put to use. (No, not dreams: that\u2019s involuntary; and besides, many people today no longer have any.) This area is largely deemed, regardless of lip services paid, \u201cabsurd; trifling; frivolous\u201d in academia \u2013 when not, that is, subjected to sober attempts at its production which typically display all these three aspects in spite of themselves. This is the domain of what often passes for an oxymoron in our supremely specialized research establishment: interdisciplinary thought. And this, of course, is what we\u2019re here to talk about.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Compare “the silliness effect<\/em> .. is production of collisions between disparate things, which context makes us associate unexpectedly” with, from this morning’s diggings:<\/p>\n

Brecht:<\/strong><\/p>\n

He [Darko Suvin] cites Brecht as follows: “A representation which estranges is one which allows us to recognize its subject, but at the same time make it seem unfamiliar.” This permits a new cognition of the now and creates a moment which is potentially liberating. Placing familiar objects (or subjects) in unfamiliar settings allows us to see differently. Our old and tired perceptions can thus be revitalized and transformed. — Lucy Sargisson, Fool’s Gold?: Utopianism in the Twenty-First Century<\/a>\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Boulez:<\/strong><\/p>\n

For Boulez, the challenge was to present the borrowed ideas in a new light that could lead to results far removed from the original, which had provided only a single solution. — The Gramophone <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Both quotes via JustKnecht<\/strong>, another Glass Bead Game-player of note<\/a>, discussing his Rattlesnake Games<\/a>. <\/p>\n

**<\/p>\n

Part II: Canonical Collage-oscopes, or: Claude in Jacques\u2019 Trap? Not What It Sounds Like!<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

For this section of Bob’s work, I’ll just post a snippet referencing the Catastrophe Theory<\/a> of Ren\u00e9 Thom<\/strong>:<\/p>\n

Of the many, many ways to frame the two-control Cusp, the most interesting for us is the predator-prey chain, due to Thom himself. Let us frame it mythically: in the Vedic lore of pre-Hindu India, the great god Indra \u2013 the Zeus of the Aryan invaders \u2013 had (or was trapped in) a magical net. Depending on the story told, and teller\u2019s point of view, Indra is the hunter and the hunted too. According to the mathematics of Catastrophe Theory, this is fundamental, not unusual. The theory\u2019s creator typically focuses on the single Cusp as the basis of all richer models .. Its stable \u201csplits and mergers\u201d mode of yoyo-ing between the Two and the One, he tells us, is \u201cthe most fundamental regulatory process\u201d in non\u00adlinear dynamics: not only in the abstract, but, under the guise of the \u201cpredation loop,\u201d in the ultimate concreteness of animal feeding. At least since the emerging of the amoeba, this is, sim\u00adply, merging: \u201cfundamentally, engulfing a prey into the organism\u201d … and herein resides an enigma.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s a rich broth, you see — connecting perhaps to Ali Minai<\/strong>‘s comment tweeted today:<\/p>\n

Polyphony, in an abstract sense, applies not just to human complex systems but to all complex systems. .. One of the most unappreciated facts about natural complexity is that it emerges from interaction of simpler processes, and not from some prior complexity.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

**<\/p>\n

Part III: Grooving on the Sly with Klein Groups<\/a><\/p>\n

No one knows that this tale is a part of an immense poem: myths communicate with each other by means of men and without men knowing it. … The situation which Le Cru et le cuit<\/em> describes is analogous to that of musicians per\u00adform\u00ading a symphony while kept incommunicado and separated from each other in time and space: each one would play his fragment as if it were the complete work. No one among them would be able to hear the concert because in order to hear it one must be outside the circle, far from the orchestra. In the case of American mythology, that concert began millennia ago, and today some few scattered and moribund communities are running through the last chords.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That’s Octavio Paz<\/strong> writing on Claude L\u00e9vi-Strauss<\/b>, and Bob uses it as the epigraph to section III. Just today I was writing of the various friends of mind who are making profound contributions as islands in an archipelago — and how I long for the richness that will emerge when the connections between them are strong, the transmission of ideas between them fluid..<\/p>\n

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I see so many islands in the archipelago of those addressing our many problems \/ risks, not sure how well they (we? hopefully) join together (merge, emerge) as a coherent chain @barbarikon<\/a> @intelwire<\/a> @BryanAlexander<\/a> @onlinealchemist<\/a> @johnrobb<\/a> & a thousand I don't know (as yet)<\/p>\n

— hipbonegamer (@hipbonegamer) February 10, 2019<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n