~3 min read John Butler's Ocean is a song I regularly return to. The following is one recording of it. It, however, is not the only version of it, nor is it necessarily a song that has one rendition that is the main one. I find this song to be an encapsulation of an idea, that we all know intuitively, experientially—the idea that there is a singular thing that can be experienced of art or life in general is neither true nor false rather a gradient. Here is another version of it to make the point: The run time of the first is ~12 min. The second is about ~5 min. Both songs are John Butler's Ocean, as played by him at different times. One isn't the abridged version. The other isn't the extended version. I recently read a book, the End of the Story, where you effectively get in novel form the entire kaleidoscope of possibilities for the journey of a story that could have happened. It's a short story with all the iterations possible unfurled, along with the angst of making. I do not recommend reading it for most people, because well, it's not meant to be enjoyed as a story I'd wager. In the book the Utopia of Rules, the author David Graeber pushes on this point as well, where he talks to the tendency of bureaucracy to simplify via schematization in order for the bureaucracy to begin to know anything. He compares it both to a chef who walks into a kitchen in disarray and makes a snap decision about what went wrong. Or person wearing glasses that reduces their field of view to 2%. The world has this breadth of colors, of form, of sound, of smell. For analytical purposes we must reduce to compare and contrast, but that doesn't mean the original was so stable. If anything, we'll tend to discard the original from the study for being unstable and move onto something else. That is, the viewer (the experimenter) may discard a line of study simply because the inability to replicate it makes it unsuitable for their work. I have no further emphasis to make beyond this. In fact, if I were attempt to be more specific or dogmatic, I would be undoing my own point. And if I were to apply it, I would attempt to compress this concept into a snappy punch line, and that would be a lie. — Robert This message is 100% organic human effort, so it will have typos. No, I didn't send it through an LLM to typo check it. It was made with just my fingers and my eyes. |