Inside the Clockwork: Quote of the Day May 6

[GetSchwifty]

From Chapter 11, The ELEMENTS OF DRAMATIC STRUCTURE

“By looking through two filters instead of one, we have not only blocked out more of the original ‘Light of Truth’ but we have also added some distortion because of the greater ‘thickness’ between us and Truth. Ultimately, it is this progressive distortion that shifts the Elements from Class to Class.”

It’s hard to know which parts to quote here. The basic ideas here are:

1. Elements are arrived at through a filtration system
2. The levels form a lens, and your view of the element is progressively distorted by the thickness of the lens
3. The dynamic pairs pivot around External State and Internal State as the distortion increases, thus
   "driver and passenger’ members of the quads

Melanie emphasizes that by the time you’ve filtered at the bottom, it’s not always perfectly clear what’s external and what’s internal. Not at all. You’re own discomfort and confusion is the right reaction, and means you are a human trying to understand the inscrutable. More on this later.

Second quote: “All Truth is measured against Knowledge and Thought.”

Meaning, external state, internal state, pivoting and distorted, but there.

“Simply put, we aren’t omniscient. We are not equipped to see the whole Truth directly but must seek to learn more about it by glimpsing a part of it, and then assembling the pieces to try and grasp the whole.”

She notes elsewhere that men and women synthesize a fourth quad from three, but they possess a different three and synthesize a different fourth. Her perspective on this lends a certain amount of credibility to the thought, yes? Because of her personal history, she’s experienced both *not as an outsider but from the ‘I’ point of view.’ You and I probably haven’t done that (not speaking for you, if you have.)

By the way, that she has done this, recognized the difference internally, in herself, and been willing able to speak about it in a brilliant and illuminating way is an extraordinary piece of historically contingent good luck, for you who are like me, inexplicable awake eyes of the universe on a speck of dust in the middle of billions of miles of Not Very Much. This is the age of miracles and wonders. We in this lucky little group have the unheard of benefit of a consciousness that expanded across genders and stayed awake and reported back from the trip in a profound way. Pinch yourself.

Never forget that this is happening as the story unfolds in Time. It isn’t a static 3d sieve. It’s whirling spiral. Never forget that, he said to himself.

This will require some more thinking, and at least a part 2 and possibly a part 3.

(see a better rendering below)

[mlucas]

@GetSchwifty

Melanie emphasizes that by the time you’ve filtered at the bottom, it’s not always perfectly clear what’s external and what’s internal. Not at all.

Love this. It was the whole point behind this thread I started:

Objectivity, but at the wrong level

@jhull I'm splitting off your post in the Black Panther thread to ask you a question, and trying not to expose you to any spoilers. I'm hoping this can help @decastell and others. Basically, I think a lot of people have trouble with seeing the "more interesting" conflicts in a story as the Domain and Concern level, when they really exist at the Issue quad and Problem quad levels. So you might have a superhero movie where there are all these really great, meaningful arguments about superher…

[GetSchwifty]

I’m wondering if the right way to view the filtration process is also as a construction of an element as much as of a selection. We construct the truth based on parsing it out from larger truth. As with many things Dramatica, Filtration is a word that hides reality as much as reveals , or just gives you a glimpse of it. Words themselves are socially made constructed filtration systems, after all. Sausurrian arbitrary signs. We hang onto them for dear life because what else what we got.

By the time you filter the elements at the bottom, you’ve loaded the concept with so many biases, selections, parsings and excisions, it’s all non objective cultural, and who knows how much of the truth is in there? The creators of Dramatica software and theory are humans with biases and thoughts and this is what they meant by all that. It seems like there’s a theory above the theory, which is the playground where they were making the selections.

[GetSchwifty]

this is better, from a retina ipad pro.

[GetSchwifty]

erggh I kind of messed up the blurred quads, will fixed later. trying to figure out some graphics to make them more swirly.

You know, once it penetrates that the elements are blurry in the role they play in the larger categories, the importance hermeneutics becomes clear here, the writer’s instinct, feelings, interpretations, turn out to be the thing that makes it their own, and that is the essential ingredient. You have to feel through this because if it’s all rational to you, it’s already broken.

NOTE PAIRS ONLY RESOLUTION AT THE ELEMENTS LEVEL

Talking about elements only makes sense in the context of a pair, you are only interested in the interaction between them.

[GetSchwifty]

finished reading the rest of the chapter, seems the class information for the elements at the bottom is stored in the arrangement of the Elements. Makes complete sense. Completely non-mystical :-0

the interesting thing that I learned tonight, that I had missed before, is that his pattern is fixed. You WILL find different arrangement of the same elements at the bottom of each class, but a) they’ll be the same pairs (pair resolution ONLY at the element level, never component resolution) and b) that doesn’t change across story forms.

@jhull has an article about how Knowledge, Thought, Ability and Desire form the anchor. It works out as a processing of the same dynamic-companion-dependent algorithm as before, shown here.

THE RED PHYSICS is the base pattern. I’ve marked out the dynamic, companion and dependent relationships. In UNIVERSE, ACTIVITES and MIND, I’ve put a mark in the upper left hand indicating which pair is drawn for the second pair in the knowledge-thought quad.

I checked one other upper left pattern and seemed to work out there too (no critical marks on this one)

[GetSchwifty]

this needs some cleaning up, apologies. Important takeaway - that mysterious thought about elements resolving to class, where they are taken as ‘one thing’ is encoded into the unique arrangments of the elements at the bottom of the class, and those arrangements are now blurred together into a single…Truth. Melanie makes the point; same truth at the bottom of the class, because there’s only one Truth, but filtered through lenses and distorted by the experiences in the class, types and variations. Thus the unique arrangements.

So unless I’m wrong–the structure in the theme browser doesn’t change? Is this right?

HOWEVER, the structure in the Characteristics changes significantly, according to selections for your storyform in the story engine.

I’m already thinking about how to do a better job with this but, weekends over. time for sleep and work tomorrow.

[jhull]

@GetSchwifty

By the way, that she has done this, recognized the difference internally, in herself, and been willing able to speak about it in a brilliant and illuminating way is an extraordinary piece of historically contingent good luck, for you who are like me, inexplicable awake eyes of the universe on a speck of dust in the middle of billions of miles of Not Very Much. This is the age of miracles and wonders. We in this lucky little group have the unheard of benefit of a consciousness that expanded across genders and stayed awake and reported back from the trip in a profound way. Pinch yourself.

And this needs to be on the box cover for Dramatica (if they still sold boxes of software)