Hodgepodge

The Sorcerer and His Apprentice

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Weird idea that hit me yesterday:

Ok, so, if the left hemisphere sees details and parts of things, and the right hemisphere sees the whole picture in low resolution, could that be what's behing showing and telling?

These two ways of seeing things, these very different worldviews, have been known since ancient times. Of course they had no idea it was caused by the differences in the brain hemispheres, they knew only that we have two very different ways of seeing the world and interacting with it.

It's the basis of religions and Stoicism and several other secular philosophies of life.

The left hemisphere tends toward aggression and the negative emotions, whereas the right is calm and centered. And if you think about it, the religions I'm aware of, as well as Stoicism (which I've called a sort of secular religion), are aimed at minimizing the power of aggression and various other overpowering emotional states through gratitude and centering yourself in a peaceful meditative state. And of course meditation is known to stimulate the right hemisphere and relax the left.

Good writing requires judicious use of both modes, striking the right balance between them. And that's what the right hemisphere does. It includes the left hemisphere in its activities, whereas the left hemisphere is tyrannical and wants to cut out the right. This is what McGilchrist was referring to with the title of his first book, The Master and his Emissary. The right brain is the master, the one that should be in control, and when it is it lets the left do its thing at appropriate times. But when the left takes over it usurps the throne and ousts the right, banishes it to some dungeon, and tries to run the whole show. We've probably all seen the Mickey Mouse segment of Fantasia—The Sorcerer's Apprentice, which seems to be based on a very similar story (to The Master and His Emissary), if not a bastardized version of the same one. When the apprentice thinks he knows as much as the master things go awry fast, and the master must step in to restore order.

In a perfect illustration of the Dunning Kruger effect, the left hemisphere always overestimates its own knowledge and competence, while the right, which possesses far more of both, underestimates itself and remains humble. Damn, of course! The Dunning Kruger effect is probably another example of left/right brain hemispheres in action. The right is like Socrates, knowing only that he knows nothing, while the left assumes it knows everything and is wrong.

I'm half and half

I'm fair to middlin' at visual imagination, and the same at verbal (aka literary) imagination. Not great at either one. But they merge together in such a way that I'm pretty decent at both showing and telling. You know what—I'll take it!

A little music, to set the mood.

I posted about her on the Music thread a few times already, but I want to say something about her now, or something in general about blindness and what it can do to the brain. You know me and this brain science stuff.

If someone has been blind since birth or early youth, the brain uses all that territory that isn't being used for vision to map other senses onto. This is why they say (quite truthfully) that if you lose your sight other senses rise up to compensate for it. It's actually completely accurate. In her case obviously much of that unused territory went to hearing, but I'd say some also to the tactile maybe, allowing her to find the right keys instantly by pure feel and proprioception (innate knowledge of the body's position in space).

Which makes me wonder—does she in some sense 'see' music and sounds visually? Or something akin to it? Sometimes I do, usually if I'm very close to sleep or actually dreaming with music playing. There have been several times I've fallen asleep listening to music and at the crucial point where the dream begins the music suddenly expands and becomes a whole world, a world of spinning kaleidoscopic colors and intense feelings of pleasure. As if I'm somehow experiencing the music through other senses. Only twice can I remember it being so intensely pleasant, like a paradise on earth. A few times it was annoying or even intensely frustrating, as if the music was blocking me from some much-needed rest or something. Or maybe I just didn't care much for the song, I don't know. But I love thinking about this stuff—the mysteries of the brain, which creates and sustains us.

Once my friend and I got nice and high, laid our heads down and closed our eyes, and listened to some badass music while letting the imagination well up to see what it would do. I remember one song was Fool's Overture by Supertramp, and that one made me see colored strings vibrating and dancing quite vividly. Another song, I think it was Ted Nugent, made me visualize standing on this weird highly flexible stick that re-curved back down over my head. The bottom end of the stick was sharply pointed. I was skating on it over ice or glass or something. The whole thing had a very psychedelic look and feel to it (unsurprisingly).

First time I've seen her play guitar—of COURSE she's a virtuoso!! Dig her singing too (some of the other people are pretty good too I guess )



I'd put this in the music thread, but I've spammed it enough already today.

I've been absorbing information about Rachel Flowers, and it turns out there's a documentary about her:



You have to pay to see it on Youtube, but it's free on Amazon Prime if you have that. Oh sorry, now I see the preview must be watched on YouTube and is age restricted.

Nothing so far about whether she 'sees' sounds, but she said she hears notes when she eats certain foods. Interesting. Synesthesia. I wonder if that could be caused by the brain mapping one sense onto the rightful territory of another one? If so it seems strange it would be taste, but who knows what's involved? I'm fascinated by this.

When she was 4 & 1/2 she could hear something as complex as a Bach fugue a few times and then play it perfectly by ear. Maybe earlier than that, I'm not sure.

This was posted tonight as a Youtube post. I want to preserve it so I can remember it:

John St Julien Baba Wanyama:

Practicing stillness and holding the presence of God, is not a life of inactivity. It is not a life sitting in the lotus position under a tree. It may start there, but in time when you have learned to remain still, learned to remain with God's presence in the middle of all you are, even in the midst of chaos and noise, trials and hardships. In the midst of adventures, new lands, new voices, that stillness is still there, even though your life around you is a blur of doingness, and activity, a storm of God's will being made manifest in the world. All born from the foundations of the presence known in stillness. When action arises without a decision or a decision maker present, just born from the tranquil presence of calm the great I am brings. In stillness, from stillness the divine presence will make its will and its love known through you, from you and in you. Making stillness your home does not leave you sitting idle under a tree, but if you really truly awaken that natural stillness, by now I know this, there is truly no telling where you will be sitting next, what you will be doing, or indeed who with. Thy will be done, in our bodies through stillness may it be known.

I'm dropping in this post I just made in What Are You Reading Now?:

Fahrenheit 451. It moves back and forth between a very ordinary straightforward storytelling approach and an inner, highly imaginative and poetic approach, mimicking the way the MC's mind moves as he develops his latent imagination, which only showed itself briefly a few times near the beginning. But it becomes more powerful and vivid as it goes on. These more poetic and vivid passages are sometimes so bizarre I can't tell what's going on or even where we are or how much time has gone by. They're ungrounded and exist solely in his imagination, and use very strong poetic metaphors and devices. I'm starting to wonder if there's a connection between his writing and that of J G Ballard, who does some of the same things. They were writing at about the same time.

Sometimes the weird flowery poetic writing gets on my nerves, and sometimes it's the most intoxicating thing I've ever read. I think the difference might be whether I can understand the metaphors or not. Sometimes I get annoyed and am just like WTF is this even supposed to mean??!!
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Now, having realized that about the dialectic between prosaic and poetic writing, I see it fits in with the group of movies I analyzed for just such a dialectic a while back on the blog, between these two posts in my Narrative and Poetic Form series:

• How Terence Malick juxtaposed the 2 symbolic worlds in his film The New World
• Black Swan/White Swan

In each case the dialectic is between what I call Narrative form (straightforward prose writing, such as genre fiction), and Poetic form. And as I sussed out in my So Narrative is the Masculine Way posts just before the movie analyses, Narrative form is very masculine and the Poetic is very feminine, according to how those terms have always been used in philosophy and the like, for instance in the Yin/Yang symbol.

Furthermore, I believe I also mentioned in some of those posts in the series, what I believe is really behind all the various dialectics of this type is that profound, mysterious, and enduring dialectic between our two mentalities—the prosaic and ordinay conscious mind, in which the personality structure is lodged, and the hidden, secretive and eternally mysterious unconscious, the silent partner we can occasionally converse with, and which can even take over at times, but remains elusive.

Of course this also all links up with the post I made recently, I believe just above this, about the traditional comedy team, with a straight man and a magical child, also representing the conscious mind (left hemisphere) and the unconscious (right hemisphere).

Sorry I post about this stuff so much. Yes, I'm obsessed, but it's more than that. I'm discovering these hidden secrets in all kinds of places, mostly in practices and artforms that go way back into antiquity, to a time before the left hemisphere had grown so massive and powerful that it took over completley and effectively buried the right under ridicule and harrassment, and came to believe it's the only mentality we have.

The only way I can continue to make these discoveries is to keep writing and thinking deeply about these kinds of things. Little by little it becomes more clear to me.

Oh, I never did drop those in here. Here they are:

I think it's pretty clear how they relate.

Books and covers, or why is an image not like a story?

@Madman made me realize that my attitude is different toward AI illustration than it is toward AI writing. That actually surprised me a bit, and now I'm wondering why I feel differently about them. I draw and paint and love that as much as I love writing (well, in a way...), so it isn't that I have more to lose in one field over the other.

My first thoughts are that painting and illustration does only showing, it can't do telling. By which I mean you can't directly relate a character's thoughts or feelings through imagery, you can only try to create an impression of them through body language, facial expression, symbolism, etc.

I've come to realize I actually love the experience of writing (when it's going well) more than of drawing and painting, and my understanding of why that is is that writing goes much deeper, to the inner dimensions of characters, into their thoughts and feelings. Ironically this is something I wasn't taking advantage of when I first got here and started writing my Beastseekers stuff. I was remaining in objective POV, writing strictly externally. I eventually realized the reason for that is that when I wrote the orignal Beastseekers stories (at 16) that's how those were done. I also realized that I had a lot of experience reading objective POV, because I had a lot of Doc Savage books, and that's how they were written. I actually had written internally before, many times, but not in the Beastseeker stories.

There's more than that though. Writing also goes into a lot more depth in the setting and a lot of other things as well. It's because a story is analogous to a movie, while a painting or illustration is more analogous to a sinlge photograph, like a single frame from a movie. It doesn't include nearly as much information. You start to get more information if you do a whole series of illustrations, as books used to have years ago, or even more so a comic book. That's much closer to a movie, it's like a collection of photographs taken in sequence that show much more of the story than a single illustration does. One illustration only shows a small slice of the world and the story, like a frozen moment from one scene. I mean, how long does it take to look at a picture, compared to reading a book? A few seconds, maybe a minute or two if it's complex and really interesting? So of course there's way more information in a story.

But also that information goes beneath the surface in a story, and it just can't in a picture. They show only surface, only exteriors.

Showing of this sort is prized in writing because it's harder to do than direct telling, and it makes a story sparkle with vividness. It increases the sensory immersion, but more than that. It increases the sense of life and liveliness. Hints of detail and color and moood and atmosphere etc. Without those (in pure telling) a story can get pretty dull.

It doesn't really go the other way in visual art though. There really is no way to tell—to give direct access to a character's thoughts or feelings, or to story ideas or elements of the world beyond what are seen in the image.

These are my initial thoughts on the subject. I may or may not be able to go any deeper into it, but it's a very interesting one, and I had never thought about it (much) before encountering the problems of AI taking over these industries.

Why I think AI can do imagery better than it can write

I didn't really go into this yet, did I? Not here on the blog anyway, though I did in a thread somewhere (one here and one on the .com site when the message board was down).

My main contention was that AI is not human, doesn't have a physical body, and has never lived life, and therefore it doesn't have the range of life experience necessary to write from the perspective of a human being. They don't love or hate, they've never longed for something they can't have, or known the misery of a broken heart. They don't have to contend with the fact of their own mortality the way we do. All of that. Nor do they have an unconscious mind, with its attendant intuition and inspiration etc.

That's why they can't do the interior stuff the way we can. The deep telling. The thoughts and feelings, the human motivations, the triumphs and tragedies that make us human. Oh, they can do the showing just fine. Exterior imagery is fully visible to all, it doesn't entail probing into the invisible mysteries of consciousness and emotion. That's where they fall flat as I see it. They can copy paintings and photographs and exterior imagery pretty darn well. There's nothing really difficult about that.

I suppose it comes down to the hard problem of consciousness as opposed to the easy problems:



Computers can pretty much deal with the easy problems, those only require logic and computation. The hard problem nobody has been able to solve yet. That's the part about human consciousness trying to understand its own nature.

Funny factoid—I started wondering why this guy's voice sounds so familiar to me. Suddenly, when he said epiphenomenalist I realized what it was. I had to speed the video up to 1.5x, and suddenly yes, he sounds exactly like Ben Shapiro!

The Masculine and the Feminine Way

Well well, lookie what I stumbled across today:



Some solid support for what I deduced about the masculine and feminine approaches to life and story back in the Narrative and Poetic Form series, starting with the post called So Narrative Form is the Masculine Way...

Women want to "Feel heard and seen and loved", while men need to take action, wrestle with the problem. This explains why so often when a woman shares a problem with a man he tells her how to solve it, but what she really wanted was just a shoulder to cry on and an understanding ear.

^ I'm on season 4 of Breaking Bad now. Hank has been in bed unable to walk for some time now, going through hobby after hobby and watching empty mind-numbing television, and is bored out of his mind. Then a buddy from the police brings him some evidence pertaining to the Heisenberg case that at first he doesn't even want to look at, but he keeps glancing that way until eventually he picks it up and cracks it open. This is exactly what he needs, as a man who's been rendered useless—something he can do, an activity that can actually accomplish something concrete, rather than just time-wasting. He needs to act, to DO. Not just be and be validated for it. That doesn't work for men (unless they're very feminine). They need to slay the dragons, not be rescued from them.

It reminds me of a thing that happened long ago, when I was in my teens and living with my mom. It was deep winter and there was a big ice storm. All the trees and powerlines etc were heavily coated with ice. It turned the whole world into a winter wonderland, but it's also extremely dangerous. Somewhere nearby a tree fell and took out the power to the neighborhood, and we were stuck sitting inside with nothing to do for hours on end. I don't remember the details anymore, but my mom felt that we should be together in the living room, and she wanted to talk about the kind of stuff that makes men feel stifled. I was also feeling the need to DO SOMETHING about this problem, the ice storm. A tree had fallen in the back yard, and I took a big bow saw and went out there and cut that sucker into short enough pieces I could throw them down into the woods. Branches weigh like 5 times as much when they're forzen and coated with thick ice.

The work warmed me up quick, as I knew it would. It also completley exhausted me by the time I was done. I went back in, needing to just rest, and mom was all excited, prasied and congratulated me endlessly for what I had done, and had all kinds of other work she wanted me to do right now. That really has nothing to do with 'the feminine way', more that she was toxic and manipulative. Sorry, really the story ended with the last paragraph. She wanted to use the down time to talk about our feelings and validate each other and make plans for things she wanted me to do, and I felt the need to get out, confront the problem head on, and fix it somehow, even just some small part of it. Well, that and I needed to get out before she came up with too many things she wanted me to do (she was actually starting that before I even went out, it would start any time we spent some time together).

Yeah, sorry, I guess I told two different stories that are intertwined. But one of them is on topic here. The kind of work she wanted me to do had nothing to do with the immediate problem (ice and downed trees), it was house cleaning etc. Ugh...

Breaking Bad Beats

Now that I'm finally re-watching Breaking Bad I decided to go back and read some of the entries I made on the old Darkmatters blog back when I was orignally watching it, when it first aired. It shouldn't have surprised me, but it turns out that coincided with my first bout of studying story structure. I had forgotten they happened at the same time.

And now I'm seeing that I use rhythms in my writing that seem to come straight from the show. Like I absorbed them. I didn't realize that was where they came from, and really it took me a long time to understand I was using any particular kind of rhythms (aka beats) at all. I first became aware of it when I was writing a novel called Passing Strange in 2011 (4 seasons into Breaking Bad). It would be many more years until I understood the idea of rhythms in writing. So I absorbed it unconsciously and just used it intuitively. That's often how it works, and then later you grow to realize what you've been doing. The conscious mind is always playing catchup, and some things it never discovers. In fact it's often better when the left hand (hemisphere) doesn't know what the right hand is doing. When you try to take conscious control you lose all the fluid gracefulness and the intuitive connections and it becomes plodding and laborious. You need to concentrate on something else and let the unconscious do its thing.

Quick Mini-Analysis of Breaking Bad—Structure and Characters

It's definitely what I call character-driven drama, but also heavy on the action, and there's a very strong hook and a very strong inciting incident to pull us in irresistibly. Not sure how I would look at things past that point—probably each season as a full story, all contributing to the larger character arc. There are definitely some strong turning points. I'd need to look up a synopsis or something to remind me of them, but I should do it. Studying how stories or movies or shows work helps immensely. It helps you see how these ideas work in real fiction, and discovering it there is very different from just reading about it in a few websites or books. It starts to pull it through your brain in a more active way, you have to ferret out where the turning points are, how they relate to the inciting incident to propel the story forward, etc. And try to determine how strong the structure is vs how strong the character arc is. I'd say offhand they're both very strong in BB. No reason you can't do both in equal measure. If you do it well, it will appeal to people who like character-driven drama as well as those who prefer plot-driven narrative.

And I figured out way back then that the entire show uses the question/answer/question process as explained so well by Bill Johnson in his Story is a Promise website and book. In the essay Bringing the Dead To Life he focused on it only at the beginning of a story, to powerfully draw readers or viewers in, but I noticed it running continuously throughout Breaking Bad. Well of course, it isn't the kind of thing you kick off and then just drop. The whole idea is to draw them onward—you don't stop until the final scene is over.

The entire opening sequence is a massive hook forged using the q/a/q process (Quaq?). Who is this scrawny middle-aged guy in tighty whities, and what's going on? Why is he so desperately driving that RV out in the desert, and why are there two guys lying passed-out or dead in the back, sliding back and forth in a pool of liquid? Why is he wearing a respirator, and holding his breath when he runs inside? And why is one other guy lying, wearing a respirator, in the passenger's seat?

Then he pulls out his phone and starts recording his message to his family, the camera shaking powerfully to show his tension and adrenaline level. Then the sirens approach and he draws the gun and makes his big final standoff, waiting for the inevitable. He believes he's about to be involved in a shootout with police. I might have mixed up the sequence a little, or left something out, but that's the basic gist of the scene. Then it says something like "Six Weeks Earlier," and then we see it from the beginning.

The real inciting incident for Walter is when he sees the woman in green (color of drug money) and immediately coughs terribly and passes out, then discovers he has inoperable lung cancer. And his first response is that he feels like a failure because he wasn't able to leave his family the money they'll need after he's gone.

Family is one of the major themes. All the main characters relate to it in some way or other. Baldness seems to be another theme, and as the show goes on, more and more hairless men show up (Ok, not really a theme, but a recurring motif anyway. They all seem to be doppelgängers for Walt in some way, or maybe they're just showing a sign of the times. It did seem to be a very popular choice at the time).

The real heart of the story is 'breaking bad'—suddenly turning toward crime. Really I'd say it's transformation, or metamorphosis. Walt explains chemical changes to his students, and everything he says applies directly to not only his transformations throughout the show, but those of every major character as well. Each of them has a dark and a light side, some from the beginning and some develop as the show goes on, like for instance Skyler doesn't seem to have a dark side for the first season or two. She seems to be almost a stereotype or even comic relief at first, a light foil for Walt's darkness. But in season 4 she joins him in his criminal enterprise, though she doesn't yet realize just what sort of criminal he's become, that he's killed many people and can intimidate the hell out of hardened murderers or outwit them if the need arises.

I don't think any concept of a three-act structure or any such thing makes sense in a long-form show that has many seasons. Unless a season contains three acts. I have no idea if it does. Maybe somebody has already mapped that stuff out, I ought to check. It's a heavily studied show, for very good reason.

Found it:

• Breaking Bad—Five Act Structure

I probably should have started a new blog thread for all this Breaking Bad stuff, but I had no idea I was going to do several posts in a row about it.

Weird that a show with six seasons had five acts, but then the first season was only 7 episodes, and the last two were only 8 each. All the rest were 13 episodes. And I just read an article where Vince Gilligan talked about 'the final 16-episode arc', so he seems to see the last two seasons as one.

Also, it's very gratifying to hear they used the same approach I do—work out a loose structure but leave plenty of room to improvise.

They also use another trick I've done quite a bit—put characters in an almost impossible situation that creates a powerful shocking moment, and then think of how to extricate them from it. Admittedly though, they usually did much better at the extrication than I do. Though I do seem to have improved going forward. I remember stories from my teen years or twenties where I'd just have ridiculous things happen and I had no idea how I was going to fix it. But these were farcical comedies, so impossible fixes weren't off the table. In those days though I started writing with no ideas for where I was headed. I don't do that anymore.

Now I see how hard they would work on making things work. Much harder than I did in those fun farcical stories. I think writing them was extremely helpful. As I've said many times comedy is a lubricant that allows anything to happen in a story. You can get away with a lot more than in a serious story. But I'm also glad I didn't keep writing comedies. Trying to write the more serious stuff is a lot harder, and it forces you to learn your stuff better. I think I approached it right—comedy through the early parts where you have no idea what you're doing, and then graduating to more serious stuff, which I now realize I did by degrees. A sort of gradual evolution. I don't think I've ever written anything dead serious, or with no fantasy elements.

I keep adding to this post. Many people will probably never see these additions. Oh well. This is mostly for my own benefit, my own journal to help me figure out how to write.

I just realized something. The story I wrote several years into watching Breaking Bad was called Passing Strange. How did I not notice the similarity? I was obviously deeply struck by the show, and I'd say it affected everything about my writing. Mostly unconsciously. Thankfully that didn't mean I tried to copy anything about it.