Articulated flow

You may have heard that everyone is a critic. You may have even heard that critics are all sorts of jaded, bitter, cynical, flippant, crochety and snobbish. I have a hard time reconciling the two, because I see plenty of counter-examples: the people that actually like stuff. And it just so happens that lots of said people don't do the stereotypical critic thing and write "reviews."

In fact, most of them don't write about those things at all.

But for those that do, the bar's not set very high, is it. On average, we get a list of N Things stitched together with a bare minimum of canned connectors and boilerplate structures. At worse, an outburst that amounts to little more than a drawn-out squeal. Why?

Many want to share. Few look forward to actually explaining themselves.

Conflict is something that will never cease to colour our Ring 0 processes. A question is an avenue of attack, one that demands an answer lest we be defeated on the Plains of Logos. Constructing a piece that is simultaneously declarative and pre-emptive rebuttal is exhausting. It's why people will choose fine art without justification, but when pressed for reasons, they will choose kittens instead.

They don't call it a thesis defense for nothing.

Articulation leads to devaluation. We have always known this implicitly. The Devil is in the details, after all. Why not quit while ahead, and save yourself a trip to the ironworks? The Japanese were okay with that, at least at one point in time.

So I accept that you will say that you were speechless when, if that were the case, you shouldn't be saying anything at all. I accept that you shed MANLY tears when you really didn't. You are only trying to communicate your enthusiasm without diminishing it in the process.

What's at issue is how much of the world — life, the universe, and everything — should be simply intuited, and how much should be expressed in minute, unambiguous detail. I can see the beauty of spontaneous alignment that occurs when everyone experiences the same thing, feels the same way, and converges to more or less the same reaction.

It's a generalization of the knowing look, the unspoken exchange, a phenomenon that occurs over and over again in a smug but endearing static cyclicality.

But I find the predictability desperate, like a lost wanderer seemingly stumbling forward, but doomed to sweep out a large arc, eventually dying of thirst on the n-th lap. Were I floundering in the dark, I don't suppose that I'd mind, much less be aware of what was happening. But I do a disservice to not seek out the light switch when I know that it exists.

By now I think you know where I stand, but maybe I ought to undertake that most perilous of journeys, and endeavour to defend my post. Into the ironworks we go.

I think one of the things that makes us so unhappy, besides the similarity to the act of pleading one's case, is the implicit notion of taking apart an entity that is greater than the sum of its parts. I mean, how could we ever hope to convert an image into words, even with a budget of 1000 of them, and not lose something in the process? That's just lossy compression.

You'd be expending energy, to smash your own pedestal, in order to see how it was made. But it's perfectly fine the way it is! So why bother?

But we stand to gain much more by atomizing our world. The endless sinusoid has an articulation that is elegant in its own right, a beauty that is as interconnected as it is intrinsic. Decomposition does not only destroy, it is a necessary step towards ever increasing complexity. It's insight, that ethereal stuff that turns your ruined pedestal into a towering pagoda.

I want to perceive the world not from its floor, but from a perch atop that pagoda.

Or just maybe, the shoulder of a giant.

P.S.

To those aware enough to drop the pretense and just use HTML list elements, I salute you.