Rebuff and Rebuke

My brother responded to being mentioned in the last entry regarding his advocation of synchronicity. His email reply is :-

Why are you sorry for something that you cannot prove or disprove.Is not
a more mystical experience of life more fascinating than a
cold,hard,black and white experience to one's walk from birth to death.
Some questions have no answers and are best left that way unless you
KNOW (feel) the answer without the use of mans languages.Does a word
exist for everything. "it kind of feels like ******* but I can't quite
put it into words" To KNOW something goes beyond the understanding of
Man,or woman for that matter. To feel IT and be IT you must kill
yourself and give birth to another who is also YOU.

Let this be the lesson of the day.
When you stop trying to prove or disprove something and except it
without a mere thought towards it the it may lend itself to your
experiences.If this were to happen enjoy it for what it may be but do
not pull it about like some new creature that needs to be cut
up,photographed,written about to say what it is,where it comes from or
why it exists.

When he called me I did ask him what he was reading at the moment but it was something to do with investment. For the sake of completeness, my reply is as follows :-

You seem to be joining [my wife] in an Anti-Analysis bloc which I have to tell you both is not necessary. My Blogging is simply a train of thought and I suppose I should put some form of disclaimer that I myself don't actually agree with everything I write. Yes! I do like breaking things apart; taking the back off things as it were, but only to understand them where possible. I am quite happy to admit that there are things which we will never and indeed can never understand. As I said, I suspect that all fields of science will attempt to define everything and yet the real world will 'retreat' from our attempts at understanding. Believing this notwithstanding, it is still interestng and productive to try and understand them even if only be means of a random analysis in one's head. You and I both work in fields where a strictly materialistic analysis of
things is required in order to provide the best result. I am quite happy to join with you both in an appreciation of the beauty of the Universe and yes maybe I do try too often to provide myself with an explanation of things in purely scientific terms. This does not mean I am lacking in an awareness of the 'spritual' dimensions of this beauty. The current crumbling of the idea that there was nothing; no space OR time before the big bang has almost proved my point.

Anyway on to something related but probably against my argument. I watched Mind games on BBC 4 on Friday. This was the first episode. It was very much a radio show on the TV. The visual aspect was absolutely necessary though in order to show most of the various puzzles many of which I had seen before and therefore knew the answers not by virtue of my intelligence but because I remembered the answers. I can't actually believe that the panellists had not seen most of the 'tricks' before; maybe they had been told to behave as if they hadn't in order to make it more interesting. Anyway, to my point. One of the items involved taking successive pairs of digits from pi (3.141592654...) and using each pair to create a value from 00 to 99. Where the value of a pair was 1-26, the corresponding letter from the alphabet was substituted. The question was the name of Which British playwright would appear as consecutive letters in this string? The answer was of course any one as Pi is infinite, then any string you care to mention from the word 'an' to any book ever written, any book that will be written and indeed any book which could possibly be written will appear somewhere in pi. This of course was mildly interesting but what intrigued me was what if you used the values of Pi to create not letters but musical notes. So I dutifully went of and downloaded a million digits of pi from here and simply fed the value of each digit into a midi control at regular intervals. I defined each value as being from a genuine scale to avoid using all 12 notes and so I had one octave plus three notes from the next octave. The raw result sound reasonably Ok but I added some emphasis on the every first and third note to give the bars a length and then left it running. I am not sure it would ever be called expressive but at least it was unrepeating even if it did have a long term similarity at all points. I left it running for a while without actually listening to it and when I came back to it it seemed to have changed its mood slightly but that may be simply because my own mood had altered. Of course there are plenty of arbitrary decisions which I made about which scale to use and which octave. I could go further and define a far more complex interpretation of the values, for instance using the first value to define the length of a note or making a chord accompaniment but all this would detract from the purity of the interpretation. I suppose a true sound would use simple ratios and frequencies rather than arbitrary note decisions but are not the notes of the Western 12 note scale defined by maths anyway?

All of this has led me to a greater understanding of how the midi control for the PC works which means I am a step closer to being able to program the self-playing version of In C. I will define a set of instruments and faders with a simjple melody to prove that the mix will work and then define a way of getting each of the channels to pick up the next bit of the score. In addition to this I can program Bell Ringing etc. Now there would be a group to annoy by computerising something.

I didn't sleep a lot last night. I tried to read at about 1am with a view to making myself drop off but unfortunately the book I chose was so interesting the usual heavy eyes did not result. The book is An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales by Oliver Sacks and is in the mode of an earlier book of his - The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat which strangely was turned into an opera by Michael Nyman. The first case was of an artist Jonathan I. who through an accident or stroke lost his colour vision totally and found the world after this a strange and dirty place. He was able eventually to use this devastating loss to create his own powerful new art. I never realised that Goethe wrote lots about the theory of colour. Anyway, lack of sleep means that I am losing my concentration and I should direct it all at work rather than this indulgence.