William Buxton wrote:
> Writing something short is a lot harder than writing something long.
>
> To make something simple, you really, really need to understand it.
Bill,
Nouns, adjectives, active verbs and adverbs carry the meaning that is used
in a telegram. That is the root of poetry, the most precise of all
English languages that uses words. ("eyes that feel and ears that see")
Math on the other hand is meant to be a basic language but proofs of even
basic formulas can take days of calculations.
When Kazantzakis asked for a seven page version of a 700 line poem and
then a seven line version of the seven pages, he was asking for the seed
but the seed is not the mature plant.
In the Theater, we say that every word has an information series that is
seven layers deep of both denotative and connotative meaning. That to
write the levels out and then to mix the levels can come up with seven to
the seventh power of different meanings for just a seven word sentence.
That makes the possible meanings to the same seven written words different
for 823,543 people if each one thought one version.
If you then figure the synonyms for each of those words as another seven
layer series, then you begin to understand the reason that Congress is a
snakepit, that the pilot in Sherri Malouf's backyard believes he's right,
that James Carrington and Don Holloway can operate on such completely
different planes without losing integrity while Sherri get's her ears
boxed (so to speak), for simply becoming aware, and that Micro-Soft's
Thesaurus is a plot to rewrite (first English and later) the world in the
language of Bill Gate's New Hampshire-ish prejudices.
What did the John N. ("Warfield" variety on our list) say? forgive the
Oklahoma paraphrase: "It ain't complex if you know how to do it." And
then he sent me a 493 page version of that entitled "Essays On
Complexity." (no complaint here, that was a gift from the gods.) The
short version was the lightening, the long version is the flowering plants
that grows from the ash of the burned forest, of my mind, after the
lightening has struck.
Could we not do this more simply? I don't think so. Not if you truly
SPEAK the PRIMARY word. To be able to sit down at the piano and conceive
of an entire Beethoven Sonata in a moment is a simple act drawn from
competence, as you said. However it isnt simple to perform the piece and
have the audience "get it." The simple organizes the performer's thoughts
as to what must be "gotten" by the audience.
In the 1940s the German composer Anton Webern worked to reduce his large
pieces to a simple phrase or two as an expression of the whole. His work
is rarely performed and is used as one of the examples of graceless modern
writing. It is not graceless but you must be able to add what he took out
or the music makes no sense. He was a musician talking to sophisticated
musicians.
Therefore, I would question your original contention.
I would rewrite it as:
"To make something simple, a communicator's audience really, really must
understand its implications, otherwise communicating it in such a manner
calls into question the communcator's intent."
Regards,
Ray Evans Harrell, artistic director
The Magic Circle Chamber Opera of New York, Inc.
mcore@idt.net
--Ray Evans Harrell <mcore@IDT.NET>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>