Complex Numbers

Patterns

Yay! MadLibs!

PROMPT September 20th

Complete this sentence:

The next time I ___________, I will __________.

The temptation is there to plug in random verbs, so I found a random verb generator and cranked it up.

The next time I settle, I will whisper.

The next time I put, I will hope.

The next time I revise, I will award.

The next time I teach, I will travel.

The next time I interpret, I will assist.

Hm. Maybe if there were an option to limit to intransitive verbs. But, you know, I don't build these things; I just wreck 'em.

So I also tried a sentence generator, pulling entire verb phrases out of the randomly generated sentence. For example, my first result was: "She had a difficult time owning up to her own crazy self." Plug in the phrases and:

The next time I have a difficult time, I will own up to my own crazy self.

This is fun, if maybe a little too on the nose. Let's try more:

The next time I should have been a time and a place, I will be it.

The next time I crash on the shore, I will be a lovely sight.

The next time I play with Legos, I will be at camp.

Okay, so not all of them work. Still fun, though.

Oooh, found another one where you can specify more parts of speech.

The next time I abhor Hades, I will disengage mousse. (I changed the verb tenses, but that's about it)

The next time I immobilize medication, I will cache vise.

Nah... maybe not.

The links I used are here:

https://randomwordgenerator.com/sentence.php

http://watchout4snakes.com/wo4snakes/random/randomphrase

Be careful with that second one. I don't fully trust it. There's also one I found that didn't quite do what I was looking for, but someone might be able to do something with it:

https://www.michaelfogleman.com/phrases/

Anyway, yeah, some of these are nonsense, but nonsense can be fun. Hell, poems -- entire novels -- have been written with nonsense, and people drool all over them looking for meaning (I'm talking about YOU, Ulysses.) Because that's what we do... we look for patterns. Usually this serves us well, especially if we're being stalked by a lioness. Sometimes it leads to impressive accomplishments. Other times, it's just cool -- people looked up at the stars and decided they made little connect-the-dots sketches, and named them, and so we have the constellations.

And then, sometimes, things get weird, like with pareidolia -- seeing a face in a mesa on Mars, or Jesus on a piece of toast. But then, that's also how we get a "man" (or in some cultures, a rabbit) in the moon.

According to Wiki (look, I can't be arsed to check every reference, especially when I'm just playing like I am today), Pareidolia   "can be considered a subcategory of apophenia  . So of course I had to be reminded what apophenia was, and at that entry I found this:

Apophenia... is the tendency to mistakenly perceive connections and meaning between unrelated things.

And this:

In contrast to an epiphany, an apophany (i.e., an instance of apophenia) does not provide insight into the nature of reality nor its interconnectedness, but is a "process of repetitively and monotonously experiencing abnormal meanings in the entire surrounding experiential field". Such meanings are entirely self-referential, solipsistic, and paranoid—"being observed, spoken about, the object of eavesdropping, followed by strangers".

As that article explains, taken to an extreme, it's a disorder or an indication of a disorder. And it can certainly lead to fallacies. But... that's what I do as a writer: I find or imagine connections between disparate things. Hell, a metaphor can be considered an apophany by this definition.

Metaphors are what humans do. It's what we're good at. Like... when airplanes were invented, we called their fixed appendages "wings," even though they're not exactly the same as the flappy wings of the birds which inspired them.

It's important to not take these connections too far, to mistake symbol for referent. This sort of thing is, however, what creativity in writing is all about - at least to me. And I mean, hell, isn't a realistic painting just a case of intentional pareidolia? Take La Gioconda, for example, better known as Mona Lisa -- da Vinci intended it to represent a woman's face, and that's what we see. We don't actually see a person, of course, just a bunch of paint splotches, but our minds are tricked into seeing some long-dead Italian.

Randomness can lead to imagined connections, and imagined connections are the heart of creativity. So...

The next time I write a story or poem, I will be more conscious of apophenia.