jwilzewske

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Ivor Gurney’s Slow Movement for Violin & Piano: Composing as a Symptom and a Health Outcome

Besides Schumann, who else? What other notable composers have suffered with bipolar disorder? Ives, Tchaikovsky, Berlioz, Mahler, Saint-Saens, Rossini, possibly Beethoven and Mozart… and Ivor Gurney. Probably lots of others, too—ones whose renown has been narrower, or whose biographers have been less given to disclose behavioral issues.

Ivor Gurney (28-AUG-1890 - 26-DEC-1937) suffered from bipolar disorder—symptomatic during his mid-teens and leading to his first documented breakdown in 1913, followed by a major breakdown in the spring of 1918 after his service in WWI. He never had PTSD nor schizophrenia. Gurney did admit to lying about PTSD (Post-traumatic Stress Disorder; ‘shell shock’) on a pension application, and the ascription of PTSD to Gurney was perpetuated by Marion Scott in the Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians entry on Gurney—in part because of the coherence of the ‘legend’ of Gurney qua WWI poet. But convenience and coherence of a fable doesn’t make the story true. As a result of alacritous repetition and plausibility, the PTSD label ‘stuck’ even though it’s spurious, and the psychiatrists’ diagnosis of Gurney’s condition, not as PTSD but instead as manic-depressive illness (now called bipolar disorder), is today little known. Gurney is arguably the greatest of the English World War I poets, and like the others of them, such as Edward Thomas whom he admired, he often contrasted the ‘populated’ horrors of war with the ‘de-populated’ pastoral beauty and tranquility of the Severn valley and other parts of his native English countryside.

I vor Gurney was a brilliant man who really suffered. It is a very touching and sad story. He had the same teacher as Arthur Bliss at the Royal College - Stanford - and he said that Gurney was the most brilliant of all of his pupils, and, bearing in mind Stanford taught a lot of the Twentieth Century British composers, including Herbert Howells and Walton, Gurney was a big thing at the Royal College. There’re lots of British composers who went through that system, but Stanford reckoned that Gurney was the most creative. He wrote a huge number of songs - I think it is something like 500 songs. Many of them are unpublished, and some of them do not really make very much sense, but some of them are absolute masterpieces. There is also a lot of chamber music that he wrote which has never really been performed. It is all sitting in a box in Gloucester City Library, in an archive. This particular piece that we are playing tonight dates from 1924. He was gassed in 1917. He came out of the Army, and he went into hospital, and then into a mental hospital. He then went back to the Royal College for a couple of years, and then went back to Gloucester, where he was from, very close to where Elgar lived and worked in Worcester, but he could not find any work. He had a total breakdown, and his family put him into a mental hospital. He ended up being transferred, in 1920, to the City of London Mental Hospital, which is in Dartford, and he died there in 1937 of tuberculosis. I am actually playing off a photocopy of his 1924 manuscript, and it is written in impeccably neat writing. The music seemed to just flow from his pen. It is not something that he spent days and days chewing over and crossing out and re-writing. It is something that just literally flowed out of his pen. But on the last page it says, ‘I am in agony’ at the bottom. So it is a very touching and sad story about him. But, what we hear in this music, which is great, is again in Gurney’s music this influence of Brahms and the German romantics, the influence of Elgar.”
— Thomas Kemp, Gresham College.

Listening to recordings of Ivor Gurney compositions recently, I was led to go look and see what, if any, new research there’s been on the connection between psychopathology and artistic creativity. And it turns out there’ve been some significant new studies, especially those by Terrence Ketter, Connie Strong, Cecylia Nowakowska, Claudia Santosa and colleagues at Stanford University.

In particular, the possible influences of bipolar disorder and other affective ‘mood disorder spectrum’ conditions on artistic creativity have been examined in detail—not just a handful of famous cases examined via stale correspondence and ambiguous biographical clues, but instead in more than 150 living subjects by performing detailed quantitative psychometric testing.

Ketter’s group has not studied any ‘quality-vs-quantity’ aspect of the creative output of the ‘highly creative’ subjects and the ‘healthy control’ subjects who were enrolled in the study. However, the controlled design of the study and the extent of the testing are impressive and novel. While assaying the character and qualities of ‘fruits’ of the artistic creativity are deferred until potential future studies, the new information about the nature of the cognitive and affective attributes that dispose an individual toward creating those ‘fruits’ is valuable in its own right. Participants completed the following well-established instruments:

Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R);
Temperament Evaluation of the Memphis, Pisa, Paris, and San Diego Autoquestionnaire (TEMPS-A); and
Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI).

Participants were then administered creativity measures as follows:

Barron–Welsh Art Scale (BWAS);
Adjective Checklist Creative Personality Scale (ACL-CPS); and
Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking – Figural (TTCT-F) and Verbal (TTCT-V) versions.

Factor analysis, using principal components as the extraction method, was applied to the 16 subscales of the NEO-PI-R, TEMPS-A and TCI for the control group (N=47), in order to reduce the number of variables. Stepwise regression was used to statistically assess whether and how the resulting temperament/personality factors contributed to each of the three creativity measures.

This landmark psychometric study is corroborative of the many retrospective studies by various researchers in the past—based on biographies of famous persons with high creative achievements, based on qualitative and uncontrolled psychiatric examinations of living writers and artists, based on individual examples of geniuses in the light of their mental status and work output correlations, and based on qualitative surveys of creative traits and skills in diagnosed psychiatric patient populations.

Strong et al., J Aff Disord, 2007, Fig.1

Ketter’s and other recent studies actually lead to some clear conclusions—ones that may positively influence how gifted creative people are treated. Beyond the practical experiences and informal impressions [regarding psychiatric correlates of artistic creativity] that have held sway for hundreds of years, the new scientific analyses indicate that psychopathological symptoms, especially those belonging to the family of bipolar mood disorders (bipolar Type I and II)—plus major depression and cyclothymia categories—do occur more frequently among productive professional writers, poets, visual artists and composers, compared to the rates in the general population.

Comparing to the general population, bipolar mood disorder is statistically more prevalent among composers and writers and artists. Ketter and coworkers do note, as others have done, that the cognitive and other psychological features of artistic creativity resemble many aspects of hypomanic symptomatology. They conjecture how bipolar mood traits might contribute to highly creative achievements in the field of art. At the same time, considering the risks, the need of timely, increased medical care cannot be discounted.

But, unlike many other authors, the Stanford team don’t write about these things from a perspective of backhandedly ‘medicalizing’ the creative condition and its psychiatric diagnostic correlates. They do not opine as to whether the smoldering suffering of gifted creative people should be medically treated. In a parallel and complementary way, neither do they opine that gifted people should be ‘under-treated’, as a means of deliberately optimizing the volume of their creative output or the intensity or affective quality of the works’ content and the innovative originality of it. That would be a matter for the individual and their family to decide—with autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, distributive justice, and other ethical principles and paradigms as guides. Ketter and colleagues maintain a neutral stance as to the concomitant ‘endowment-plus-disability’ nature of creativity that derives from cognitive and affective abnormalities.

A paper last year by Zoltán Rihmer and colleagues at Pszichiátriai Osztály és Kedélybetegségek Szakambulanciája, Budapest, Hungary, likewise concludes that creativity is statistically associated with psychiatric conditions—specifically with affective, and more specifically with bipolar affective illness, and not with schizophrenia or other psychoses.

And, evidently, it isn’t the acute affective (depressive and manic) episodes that are important, but the interludes—the chronic hypomanic periods and the hyperthymic or cyclothymic temperament—that are the context for productive creativity.

This is important news! Regarding mood, an ‘inverted U’ notion has been proposed to characterize how there is a “sweet spot”—an optimum elevation of mood that facilitates creativity to a certain point. Lower mood levels or higher elevations of mood on either side of the “sweet spot” tend to have an adverse effect on creative productivity rates, on creative output amount, creative quality, and on cumulative achievement by the creative person as assessed by others perceiving the created works.

So, suppose you have these traits. Suppose, too, that your livelihood hangs upon your creative output, and you recognize from year-to-year observation of your own work output that there’s a positive correlation between your creative productivity and your hypomanic symptoms. In other words, suppose that you’ve discovered the shape of your own ‘inverted U’ curve. Maybe you’ve tried various medications—antidepressants in your depressed phases, and lithium or aripiprazole or other drugs in your acute manic phases.

Anecdotally, there is reluctance on the part of musicians to seek psychiatric help. This may be due to a misperception that the process of therapy and/or the medications that may be offered will impede the creative muse. More frequently I suspect the reluctance to access behavior health services has to do with financial constraints that the musicians and their families face.

The point of this blog post is this: How far would you go in avoiding care, in order to have more days per year in your “sweet spot”? How far would you go to finagle certain prescriptions that you find enhance your creative performance? In this age of EPO and anabolic steroids for athletes who have their own distinctive physical gifts and who are subject to certain societal and legal norms with regard to the use of performance enhancing measures, are there limits to what you would do—pharmacologically, say—to optimize your own [cognitive, affective, creative] gifts? How would you go about making and defending your choice?

T hanks to a few successes I managed to achieve, I have regained courage. And depression, which could intensify to the point of hallucinations and delusionary ideas, now seldom afflicts me.”
— Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, 28-MAR-1877 letter to Nadezhda von Meck, quoted in Neumayr, p. 242.

U nnatural and grotesque like the witch, humorally unbalanced like the melancholic or madman, these musicians gained power throught their innovations, simultaneously inciting audience fascination and revulsion.”
— Amanda Winkler, O Let Us Howle Some Heavy Note, p. 17.

B ut for the unquiet heart and brain,
A use in measured language lies;
The sad mechanic exercise,
Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.

In [words/notes], like weeds, I’ll wrap me o’er,
Like coarsest clothes against the cold:
But that large grief which these enfold
Is given in outline and no more.”
— Tennyson, In Memoriam, Sec. 5, Lines 5-12, p. 481.

T he ascription of genius is not inalienable but varies over the years with the number and fervor of one’s appreciators... Genius is not an attribute: it is a dynamic relationship between its possessor and society. It indicates, in a general way, what society expects of the genius and how society responds to that person... There are no unrecognized geniuses. A genius is, by definition, someone who is acknowledged as such.”
— D. Jablow Hershman, p. 7.

T he blocks and periods of inspiration that creative people experience are not simply similar or parallel to periods of depression and mania: they are the manifestations of depression and mania as they appear in the course of creative work.”
— D. Jablow Hershman, p. 12.

T he premise that bipolar disorder can provide specific advantages has been supported by Kretschmer, Brain, Andreasen, Fieve, and others. Assume that two people of equal talent graduate from a music conservatory with the intention of becoming composers and that one of them is a manic-depressive. The composer who works harder, has more ideas, is more original, and is also a perfectionist will produce greater, better output.”
— D. Jablow Hershman, p. 11.

I nspiration is neither the invariant starting point of the creative process, nor is it necessarily the most critical aspect, public testimonials notwithstanding. It has become important to assert this not only for scientific reasons, but also because erroneous notions about inspiration have in modern times led to an almost dangerous situation... Since drug-induced experiences seem to be similar in some ways to inspiration, it is assumed that drug experiences will produce creations. Inspiration refers to an intrinsically dramatic experience. It indicates more than the simple achievement of a good idea.”
— Albert Rothenberg, p. 39.

I t may be that Neuroticism/Cyclothymia/Dysthymia provides a creative advantage by increasing access to a range of affective experience... Despite its potential emotional and personal complications, the ability to experience unusually intense (Neuroticism) and varied (Cyclothymia) affects might propel innovation in talented individuals dissatisfied with the current status of art, science, or industry. In contrast, the cognitive flexibility associated with openness may be an asset not only for creative achievement but also for interpersonal relationships. Cognitive flexibility associated with openness permits subjects to better appreciate complexity and symmetry... Although openness was consistently correlated with creativity measures, it has also been related to mood swings... It is possible that increased Neuroticism and Dysthymia provide modest nonspecific affective creativity advantages for patients with both bipolar disorder and major depression, while the combination of this with Cyclothymia in bipolar disorder provides an additional or synergistic creativity advantage that allows the creativity in the bipolar group to exceed that of healthy controls.”
— Connie Strong, Cecylia Nowakowska, Claudia Santosa, Po Wang, Helena Kraemer, Terence Ketter; Journal of Affective Disorders, 2007.

A nd who loves Joy as he
That dwells in shadows?
Do not forget me quite,
O Severn Meadows.”
— Ivor Gurney.

O ut of my sorrow
have I made these songs,
Out of my sorrow;

Though somewhat
of the making’s eager pain
From Joy did borrow.”
— Ivor Gurney.

Monday, December 10, 2007

17 Nov 07

Release (7) letters to parents

A, who has been in prison since the 70s stopped by. His seventy-year old mum came from Florida to visit him today. The staff denied her entrance citing her low-cut blouse. His quick-thinking mum shuffled to the bathroom, removed her blouse and threw it into a trashcan. She buttoned up her jacket so nothing could be seen cleavagewise that may have excited the prisoners, and she was allowed in.

In the tradition of prisoners stopping by, chatting a while, and then requesting an item of my personal property that I’ll no longer need, A. asked for my belt. How could I refuse when he couched the request in terms of him needing a better belt than the decrepit one he was wearing for the special visit scheduled with Mum this Tuesday.

I read Tortilla Flat by Steinbeck today and laughed hard. I like how tuned in he was to the music of the ordinary. Almost as good as Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson which I urge you to read. I’m slacking on The Goodfather Returns as it isn't as gripping as The Godfather.

The meal I will miss most from here is the stuffed bell pepper. It’s stuffed with rice, cheese, celery and other ingredients I can’t remember. I just had four portions given to me by prisoners, who aren’t eating much in the chow hall because today is a food-visit day. Maybe you could find a recipe on the Internet, Mum.

Only three more days.

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Copyright © 2006-2007 Shaun P. Attwood

Sunday, December 9, 2007

16 Nov 07

Release (6) letters to parents

10:45 (Lockdown for count)

Prisoners and guards are asking me why I’m still here, aware that Immigration should have picked me up today. I have to explain that they’re coming on 20th. Only four more days.

Most days I read and write in-between, eating, showering, teaching yoga and working out. This morning I spent two hours taking notes as Fat Boy dictated the rest of the short story "A Homey Who Finds Jesus." Fat Boy was involved in the kidnapping and murder (shot point blank with a shotgun before being set on fire) of another youngster.

Being able to write uninterrupted in your garage is one of things I’m most excited about – not to mention the roast potatoes and chocolate orange you’ll feed me to boost my brainpower.

Prisoners are saying I’m the luckiest man here because the whole yard is going to be moved to dorms in two weeks’ time. I’m just getting out in time. Prisoners are mad at the prospect of being warehoused. The deputy warden has warned, “that any vandalism will not be tolerated.” The heads of each race and their lackeys are spreading the word that anyone who makes noise in the dorms between 9pm and 9am will be smashed and rolled up. It’s uncanny that I’m getting released just before the coming disruption. There’s a rumour that the hardcore at Yard 4 are going to go off and refuse to move. Apparently some of the dorm cubicles have double bunks. Ouch! Iron Man said the last time he was in a dorm he would get up and see the spectacle of Slingblade giggling to himself and masturbating on his bunk at 5am.

The fondest goodbye I received thus far today came from Zack (one of my yoga students): “Piss off back to Wales you bloody Welsh prick.”

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Copyright © 2006-2007 Shaun P. Attwood

Saturday, December 8, 2007

15 Nov 07

Release (5) letters to parents

I spent the eve of the day I was supposed to be getting out talking to friends at Yard 4. During field rec I went down there and paced back and forth outside of Yard 4’s perimeter fence. While we talked, guards yelled, "Keep moving along the track Yard 1.” Yard 1 is not supposed to talk to Yard 4 (as a drug-transaction-prevention measure).

For most of the time I talked to Jack whose mentorship resulted in my first short story "Pee Tested" being submitted to Writer’s Digest and winning the Honorable Mention that raised my confidence and eventually led to this year’s spurt of short story writing. Meeting Jack has been a privilege and an honour, and I intend to help him in any way I can. We hope to co-write a serial-killer novel. I’ve barely blogged anything about him, but behind the scenes he’s been a massive influence on my development as a person and a writer. It’ tragic that such a brilliant mind is stuck in here. I wish I could help him get out, but he has four natural life sentences. I feel a pang, a strange hurt leaving him behind.

I said goodbye to Shane too. How rough he had it in his formative years, and how well he’s turned out. I hope he sticks with blogging. He has a following now, and it’s great that he’s experiencing the feedback and fun of blogging that I’ve experienced. He’ll be out in a few years.

Slingblade trundled across Yard 4, and I yelled, but he didn’t respond. I wanted to say goodbye, and to assure him I’d try to get some organisation or other interested in helping him get out. He should have been released two or three years ago.

Slope came to the fence, happy after reading the latest comments on his Slope and Xena blogs, “I think your readers are starting to like me a little bit. Maybe 'cause I’m a little rough around the edges.”
“And then some!” I said, “or as we say in England: you’re as rough as a bear’s arse.” I had to re-pronounce bear’s arse three times before he understood what I’d said. He replied with a string of hillbilly obscenities that I could barely understand. He’s got a big heart, and I hope he does well if he gets out on parole.

Although Two Tonys wasn’t there, some huge Chicano came to the fence and said, “Hey, do you write to Two Tonys?”
“Yes. I will be. Why?”
“Tell him Chicano Bullet sends his love.”
“OK.”
“Thanks.”

And no Xena to say goodbye to. Word is Xena flashed the wasp at the suicide prevention aide working the hole, traumatising said aide.

There’s no field rec until Tuesday now, so there won’t be another chance to say goodbye to anyone else on Yard 4.

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Copyright © 2006-2007 Shaun P. Attwood

Bronfman: Is Virtuosity ‘Necessary’? Is Sublimity ‘Measurable’?

I t is not true that the entire evening will be as hard as you say. There is one easy part in tonight’s program. I think you call it the interval, the intermission?”
— Yefim Bronfman, jesting repartee with audience, in reply to Cynthia Siebert’s words introducing him, 07-DEC-2007, Kansas City.

There are many instances of virtuosic writing in these pieces and, with Yefim Bronfman, many instances of virtuosic playing. The profusion of dazzle makes apprehending the pieces even harder—we find ourselves wanting to press a ‘◄’ button and hear each passage again. Even the asynchrony in the second movement of the Beethoven Sonata No. 13 (Op. 27, No. 1) is texturally and rhythmically complex—it resists decomposition or deconstruction. But Bronfman’s account of Balakirev’s ‘Islamei’ may be the first time when I had to set aside the whole process of comprending the music, step back from it, throw up my hands and just marvel: How did he do that? ... Intricate sets of nonlinear relationships such that only certain aspects of them can be grasped at a time, to use Paul Cilliers’ phrase, defining complexity.

Look below — think of all the cognition and neurophysiology needed to absorb all that’s happening even in this short little introductory bit: the rhythmic and contrapuntal complexity, and how these link up so seamlessly with what has come before and what is yet to come, not only within these 6 bars but within the next 29 pages. I’m impatient, not a fan of protracted development. Very few composers can pull long thematic developments off gracefully and, even when they do, the listener thinks, ‘Okay, that was impressive, but — was it necessary?’ But with Yefim Bronfman the virtuosic passages not only ‘work’ — we glimpse how the passages are necessary to the expressive goals of the piece. We suspend our disbelief and immerse ourselves in the thing, and we take it to heart and rapidly accept the composer’s/Bronfman’s goals as our own.

I should like now to play something easy: Chopin… Now, Prokofiev, something that is, finally, easy… The Schumann Romance and Intermezzo: at last, easy!”
— Yefim Bronfman, remarks to audience, winking puckishly, prior to performing encores #1, #2, and #3 [Chopin Etude Op. 10 No. 12; Prokofiev, Finale from Sonata No. 7 Op. 83; and Schumann Op. 26, respectively], 07-DEC-2007, Kansas City.

How, then, would we measure virtuosity? Could musical virtuosity be quantified? I think the answer is ‘yes’. A good ‘virtuosity metric’ would not only be longitudinal—a velocity correlate of the number of notes per unit time. Velocity or longitudinal complexity is not enough to capture what we routinely mean by the word ‘virtuosic’.

Virtuosity is also related to the degree of rhythmic irregularity and vertical harmonic complexity and pitch span, the slew rate (how fast the span is traversed, in individual jumps; how long is the cumulative duration that such rapid jumps, hand-crossings, etc., are sustained), the jump rate (how many jumps per minute), the degree of multi-processing and rendezvousing between the parallel processes (in the right and left hands of the pianist, in regard to Bronfman’s playing), and the precision required in all of these moves. This last part—the precision—is important. It’s closely related to ‘system identification’: our intuitive ‘Can you detect a mistake or not?’ criterion.

In regard to these factors, I think ‘processual’ musical virtuosity (or a virtuosic composition) would be measured like complexity in nature is measured—and how it is mathematically measured in computer science: pi algebras, minimum description length, Hausdorff fractal measure, and Kolmogorov complexity measure. So far, only a few have looked at applying Kolmogorov complexity to music (Paul Vitányi; Ming Li; handful of others), but I think it will be a fruitful avenue to pursue further ...

A complex system is one that is thermodynamically open (participates in a matter and energy budget and exchange) and operates away from equilibrium. A complex system is one whose history matters; whose present and future behavior are, in part, determined by its past.”
— J. Ricard, Complexity and Dynamics of Life Processes.

C omplexity results from the interaction between the components of a system, and therefore complexity is manifested at the level of the system itself.”
— Gregoire Nicolis & Ilya Prigogine, Exploring Complexity.

A complex system is one in which there are far more possibilities than can be actualized.”
— Niklas Luhmann, Sociological Theory of Law.

It’s also related to philosophy-of-mind and artificial intelligence and Turing Machines and Searle’s Chinese Box: can a listener tell whether the performer hidden inside the machine/box is human or not? If the sounds emitted are implausibly complex in terms of their cognitive and motor nervous system implications and the composition is syntactically well-formed and precisely ordered, then we ordinarily deduce that the box may contain either a very good synthesizer and a very good software-driven sequencer attempting to deceive us to believing it is a live human, or it may contain a new super-human being whose virtuosic skill is simply beyond anything that we’ve ever before encountered or imagined. (I close my eyes and listen to Bronfman... My conclusion, especially in view of his casualness and humor, is that he must be super-human.)

(On the other hand, if a composition is implausibly complex but doesn’t consist of syntactically ‘well-formed’ expressions——is instead comprised of random sounds whose structure strikes us as arbitrary, chaotic, and imprecise, as, say, in a piece by the late Karlheinz Stockhausen——then we can’t make any such deduction.)

Schumann, Faschingsschwank, Intermezzo, mm. 1-2

In the case of a human performer—Yefim Bronfman, last night—whose sounds, virtuosic in their precision and in their emotional aptness, were beyond our imagining, we experience a sublime sense of wonder: sheer wonderment at possibilities not thought to be humanly achievable. Virtuosity like this is empowering of all humankind. It doesn’t only redound upon the individual virtuoso. And that is really why we find it sublime. Our witnessing such virtuosity can be transcendent, in much the way that gazing through a large telescope on a clear cold night can be so … gazing abjectly into the chasm of possibility.

What I mean to say is that virtuosity and unearthly complexity are psychologically connected with the innate human drive for awe and spirituality. Tonight, Bronfman’s cosmic playing forced me to confront this fact.

K olmogorov complexity is a notion of randomness dealing with the quantity of information in individual objects; that is, pointwise randomness rather than average randomness as produced by a random source. Known as ‘descriptional complexity’, ‘shortest program length’, ‘algorithmic entropy’, and others. Martin-Loef tests for randomness and Gödel’s incompleteness are related to this.”
— Ming Li & Paul Vitanyi, Introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity and Its Applications.

T raditional wisdom has it that the better a theory compresses evidence, the better the theory predicts unknown data. With the advent of Kolmogorov complexity this was rigorously proved in a general setting. Making these ideas rigorous involves the length of the shortest effective description of an individual object: its Kolmogorov complexity. Ray Solomonoff invented the notion of universal prediction using Kolmogorov complexity-based universal distribution. Universal prediction is related to optimal effective compression.”
— Jorg Rothe, Complexity Theory and Cryptology.

D efine it by example—societies, governments, corporations, the stock market, families, the body, an organ system, memory, a cell, an organelle, the weather, ecosystems, flow in a river, the snap of a whip: these are undeniably complex. Chief properties of such systems include: components, modularity, spatial dispersion, interactions among components across space and time, self-organization, multiple relevant spatial and time scales of formation and operation, diversity, instability, nonlinearity, variability, functional activities and the existence of objectives. The latter properties confer autonomy, anticipativeness, and adaptiveness. In other words, complexity admits of degrees and types.”
— Yaneer Bar-Yam. Dynamics of Complex Systems.

S ome systems have a very large number of components but can be analyzed in the full sense of the word. Such systems are merely complicated. Other systems are constituted by intricate sets of nonlinear relationships such that only certain aspects of them can be analyzed at a time. Such systems are properly termed complex.”
— Paul Cilliers, Complexity and Postmodernism.

D istinction between simple and complex is a function of our distance from the system.”
— Roberto Serra & Gianni Zanarini, Complex Systems and Cognitive Processes.

P eople stare contemplating the ocean as it swells and crashes on a rocky shore. They gaze fixedly into a fire until the sting of smoke raises their awareness. People lie on their backs and follow passing clouds or marvel at the glittering of the stars. There are many things that fascinate us, that mesmerize us, that cause us to forget ourselves and our situations as we become lost in a timeless appreciation. ...Kant introduces the dynamically sublime as relating to encounters with the ferocity of nature and the sense of vulnerability this entails, coupled with the triumph of reason over fear. And in his own writings on the sublime, Edmund Burke takes the view that the sensation of incomprehensibility, the fear of hopelessness, coupled with the knowledge that one is able to reason about something beyond one’s senses... causes a kind of delight through internal conflict: a sublime experience.”
— Alan Dorin, Wonder and The Sublime in Art and Nature, in Adamatzky & Komosinski, Artificial Life in Software.

Thursday, December 6, 2007

14 Nov 07

Release (4) letters to parents

Four More Days

It’s just after lunch. No sooner had I hid a cheese sandwich smuggled back from the chow hall in my a/c vent and a banana (traded to me by a Jewish-diet-receiving Chicano gangster for some sugar and jelly) in my food-smuggling jacket, than Officer A, who’s been on the rampage all week searching cells and doling out disciplinary tickets, stopped at my door.
“Did you get your release sorted out?” she asked.
“Yeah. It’s set for Tuesday not Friday though. I’ve got to do an extra four days.”
“That’s four more days to enjoy our delicious food, to think what put you in prison so you don’t come back, and to enjoy the company of your friends here.”
Kat, in line for CO3 H’s office, turned around and said, “Oo yeah! Jon,” and wiggled his body.
Looking at Kat, Officer A said, “There you go, Jon.”
“Indeed,” I said.
“At least you’re not in a prison in England, I imagine they’re worse.”
“Some of them are like dungeons built centuries ago. They cut prisoners heads off and put them on sticks outside the prisons.”
“They don’t still do that do they?”
“No,” I said, and laughed. “But they did back in the old days.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“Four more days is no biggie,” I said.
“That’s four more days of his life he’s never gonna get back,” a prisoner yelled.
“At least it’s not four more years,” the guard said.
“I think I’ll survive,” I said.
When the guard left, Kat entered my cell and said, “With Xena in the hole, I’ll be stopping by tonight to discuss this parting kiss with you.”
Before I could object, Kat spun on his heels and glided away down the run.

2pm
Just before the swing shift arrived, the prisoners made an attempt to get rid of Officer A (her offences now include going into cells when the occupants are absent and reading personal mail). Apparently, she went walking the runs while leaving the control-room door open – a major security violation, as from the control room all of the cells and gates can be opened. The open door was swiftly brought to the attention of CO3 H, who signed a kite written by the prisoners describing the incident, intended to be read by the Captain. However, full of themselves for being about to get one up on Officer A, the prisoners went and bragged about it to her partner, Officer M. Before the kite had reached the Captain, the plot unfolded, and Officer A fessed up to the Captain and perhaps secured her position and reign of tyranny here. Officer A will probably start retaliating tomorrow with more cell searches, tickets, and confiscation of property.
“She’ll be goin’ on a killin’ mission tomorrow,” sighed my neighbour, Black Nine.

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Copyright © 2006-2007 Shaun P. Attwood