3585 Excerpt from The Impossible Reversal = on George Brecht's riddles

[droqen]

p52
     In [George] Brecht's puzzles, that moment of hesitation and nonknowledge is
extended indefinitely. He layers minor paradoxes one atop the next to
keep the obvious impossibility at bay. Indeed, Brecht experiences his
own puzzles as temporal extensions. They are difficult, he writes, "for me
too. For one of them it took me several years to figure it out. . . . I have
enough experience to know that when an idea like that comes to me it
has to have a solution. I have confidence in myself. In spite of every-
thing."⁵²
[Note 52 for the chapter reads: Leeber, "Interview," 88.]

[droqen]

p51
[..] Ball Puzzle (1965)[..] comes in a box that contains a marble and the
instruction "Find ball under bare foot / Without moving, transfer ball to
hand." This task leaves us wondering about its rules. Are we allowed to
ask for help? If so, then the puzzle seems trivial, so that cannot be the
solution. How should we understand the verb find? Must we first scatter
the ball in our house and forget about it before trying to solve the puzzle?
An answer must exist, if only we could make the correct mental leap to
discover it.

[droqen]

there are a number of fluxus games that i don't understand intuitively. (most or all of them, even.)

McDonald's book reveals/revealed to me a number of ways of thinking about all of these confusing and strange games that goes beyond just some surface reaction of mystification.

i finished reading this chapter long ago (some months ago, i think?) and one of the passages that has stuck around in my mind is the quoted one above (p52) about Brecht's experience of his own puzzles: not as something he finishes and releases knowing, but something that he wonders about for a long time and even eventually finds an answer to.

i have also included McDonald's description of considering Ball Puzzle and, particularly, dismissing the viability of a solution due to some internal sense that the real answer must be more beautiful* ("the puzzle seems trivial, so that cannot be the solution").

*beautiful, above, used as a stand-in for some ever-shifting quality which will remain undefined, but in the specific context -- if the answer makes the puzzle trivial, then the answer must not be correct, because we have decided or determined that the puzzle must not be trivial. then, due to that internal determination, any answer that makes the puzzle trivial must by definition not have the certain quality (of beauty, which has no fixed meaning).

[droqen]

there are answers to "what does kill gameplay mean?" that i have dismissed solely, perhaps, on the same basis: because they are not beautiful.

and, i have carried confidence "in spite of everything" that it is worth ruminating on.

it has been a couple years, and i don't understand the relationship of The End of Gameplay to "kill gameplay," but i sought a high score in gameplay (forever) (one of the levels in The End of Gameplay) and i am still not satisfied.

when i revisit gameplay (forever) every movement threatens to become perfect and beautiful and for brief shining moments i, as the bunny, glide smoothly through the air, i pick up all the fruits, i slip diagonally past all the poison, all the walls are climbable.

i listened to the recordings i took of the music of each level in the game on a bicycle ride just today (technically yesterday -- it is 1:27 AM at this moment), and i am still not satisfied.

i had a conversation with J yesterday (actual yesterday), and immediately after the conversation i felt a new sense of what The End of Gameplay was "really" about, and what Starseed Pilgrim was """really""" about, and it explained some things to me that i did not understand about why i have been so dissatisfied by Cruel World and my answers about it