[FRIAM] Words RE: Words - Narrative Bending - Emergence, oh my!

[Steven A Smith]

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    I've been hosting my colleagues (Matt and Janire, who some may
    remember from SFx) from Wales/Spain this last week.   Janire is
    doing a book signing at PhotoEye Gallery this afternoon at 4PM for
    her book on Ed Grothus and the Black Hole - "Atomic Ed" .

    https://calendar.sfreporter.com/cal/1628254

    https://www.photoeye.com/bookstore/citation.cfm?Catalog=DT496

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The relevance to this braided thread is that I've been following the
discussion(s) here but have not had an opportunity to engage with them
until now while instead engaging in a lot of
across-the-pond/across-a-generation parallax discussions woven around
the theme of recognizing/weaving narratives with non-linguistic tools
(immersive photography/videography/VR/etc.).

Looking for something entirely different, I tripped over the following
article on the topic of Narrative and Complexity Science:

    https://woods.stanford.edu/news/stranger-fiction

With a quote from James Holland Jones:

    /*Jones:*//The human brain evolved to learn from stories. Stories
    encode the fundamental information that people need to know about
    the worlds – physical, biological, social – in which they live. We
    retain and retrieve information better when it is given in narrative
    form. I think that written fiction provides powerful tools for
    modeling complex systems, not that different from what we use in
    studying them in science. When you tweak some element in a complex
    system, there will be both cascading and ramifying consequences./

I think this theme ties in with Nick's fascination with the "magic" he
attributes to programmers (in general, or just those modeling complex
systems?) and "emergence".   I would claim that writing narrative (or
even more acutely so, poetry) is an even more magical act.  

When I think of the brevity of forms such as flash-fiction (dribble,
drabble, twittiture, etc.) or a Haiku (5/7/5) or Zen Koan, I am reminded
of the (useful) ambiguity in mathematics/physics/information-theory 
regarding data-compression, entropy, and cryptography.     I am also
reminded of the varied and recent use of the term "compression" here.

A superficial analysis of what makes these forms work suggests that
skillful use of allusion is one key.   This appears to me to be sort of
a bootstrap or meta-cryptography technique.   By pointing broadly toward
(alluding) a large existing body of cultural understanding, a sort of
code-book is invoked such that each line or even word taps into entire
complex backstories. 

Consider Hemingway's famous 6 word short-story: /
/

/    "For sale: baby shoes, never worn."/

or Masahide's famous line:
/    Barn's burnt down --/
/    now/
/    I can see the moon. /


Mumble,

 - Steve

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