I came up with some MAZE-y song titles and Greg made the songs to go with them. ("Horns and Strings" is actually doing double duty as an anti-mathematics song, requested by another one of Greg's Patrons.) As usual, his wonderful lyrics are surreal but also full of concrete details, creating a response that shifts between recognition and bewilderment and evoking emotions you can't quite place. It's hard to pick a favourite song among these. Do you connect most with the frenetic strangeness of "That's the Trick" or the wistful nostalgia of "Sinking Gratefully Down"? The alterna-folk call-and-response of "Horns and Strings" or the driving fierceness of "Too Many Animals"? Hope you enjoy these as much as I do.
In the end when the doves are done flying and the stream of dinners and dying are done and we're lying here. Will there be time to make a phone call? After the war is done again?
What can we give each other but a break from all this running around?
Or will there still be too many animals for the crowd?
Recall when we heard the jailed men whisper. So we filled our houses with smoke and pulled their teeth out one by one with a shepherd's cane.
Their sour gums suckled still-smacking sounds we hoped would perish. So we forced a thumb straight down the throat and tickled a ride to the closest exit; encouraged them onward through the mook. Then, stood back shaking our heads at the sorry state they're in.
Those wolves, they make great customers; so long as they're occasionally reaching.
A paw for a quarter. A claw for a dollar at some unnecessary door.
A chair to sit in and some kind of answer before the ceiling runs afoul.
Will there still be too many crickets to let this house stay silent?
Will there still be too many animals to end the war?
Will there still be too many animals after the war?
Between human and mouse, whose nose serves them better? Whose ears hear the thunder? Whose tongue savors butter?
Whose eyes rest on that golden pillow melting softly as the sun opens its eye.
The package says it's salted. Surprise! It was rancid the whole time.
Mind your manners. Practice what you preach. Behold! A kid!
They say a goat can chew a tin can cuz it pretends it's iceberg lettuce served as a free side for lunch.
"It is salad," says the menu...
... and there's a sandwich coming. On a bun. In a carriage, maybe. With all the trappings.
While waiting, why not indulge? Look up-see that star? It's a breeze. It doesn't whisper. That shine is speaking soundly. It's probably made of gold. Put it down or risk a sliver.
Now you're married.
Now it was chocolate the whole time.
See that foil fleck off?
Imagine a miniature wonderland of those bugs gazing in wonder at a world of pink glittering snow. We could put them in a globe with all that rust to preserve this moment forever. Just a shake. Just a flick of the wrist.
A horn is a blow-hole, a path tapered and maybe twisting into a start of a kiss, a thought expressed and an end; a sound to get there
A singular sound, sonorous or bleating, begging attention to be paid to itself and, in the end, the listener knows what that means.
Around that sound some songs sing to each other, creeping in and out of doors in conversation with textures of trees and furs and silt
Around that sound like mud or swelling air a battle of colors ease together into a corpulent dawn or sunset
The trumpet brings freedom from swampy shackles uncertain-its call is the brightest star to summon home from far away
The tuba holds us up to keep walking toward an illuminated goal
And when we arrive we are known by the cornet's drone
Around that sound these words are a burden no donkey can carry unless it's dead because that would certainly be true unless it's a corpse baking on a rock, an altar to maggots that will certainly live on.
Is this then the house where all within it are living despite these dust-touched unblinking eyes?
Does the journey end when the hooves stop moving or is that corpse one more curtain for the next surprise?
The horn says you have nothing to say unless you're saying something
For the world that's not words, what can you say about that?
Team spirit? No. Multiplication? No. A gentle fog in a German submarine? If you want.
There are flowers in these trees and the birds are singing tweet-tweet and it's raining sometimes to bring out the green. It's here we start our journey dressed for the cold that's coming.
Here's your hat, then. Here's your napkin. There's sure to be meals where we're going. Here's your basket, an empty flask, and a pound of unmelted butter-in case we run into some bread.
The sun is majestic and we're taking on sweat. Bead by bead, step by step. None of us cares because the day is enormous enough for the laughter to fill in. Enough for this pasture we're in. Enough for a lifetime. Enough for these leaves that keep clogging our socks to speechify crunching as we're trying to talk. Children keep interrupting. I hope you heard what I said.
This coat is too heavy, but I'm sick of the cold. This place once had a river behind where they put the mall. Do we remember the past?
We got where we're going or at least we are where we are; staggering bags of extinguished fire. Some smoke escapes our lips that hang limp and you're trying to smile for all of that. Do we remember the past? And though we both know it'll all fall to pieces, we still sink gratefully down.
2016-02-20
More Musical Maziness from Hello Gregor
The Sleeping Beauty Solution
In delay there lies no plenty;
Then come and kiss me, sweet-and-twenty,
Youth's a stuff will not endure.
One of the things that keeps me interested in MAZE is the way it acts as a departure point for enjoyable free association. This can be a worthwhile result in itself, but Room 5 is an example of how this kind of thinking led me to what I think is a pretty satisfying solution via a convoluted path of mental connections.
I was looking at Room 5 (rendered here in this lovely digitally-coloured chalk drawing by Crouchman) and thinking about the two best doors to take in that room, which are Room 20 and Room 30. Here is a recreation of what happened:
Twenty, thirty, twenty, thirty.
Twenty... twenty....
"Come and kiss me, sweet-and-twenty...."
Where did that thought come from? It's a Shakespeare quote, isn't it?
Google Google Google, oh right, Twelfth Night. Hmmmmmm...
(We now pause for many minutes of fruitless but fun analysis of plot and text of Twelfth Night, despite the only apparent connection between Room 5 and Twelfth Night being the mention/presence of the number twenty.)
OK, so it's a song from a Shakespeare play.
But then why do I associate a pen-and-ink illustration of a young woman with that quote?
Wait, didn't I once own a picture book that had the lyrics of the song as a theme throughout? I remember a man-a forest-a sleeping girl-oh right! It was a retelling of Sleeping Beauty.
Sleeping Beauty.
SLEEPING BEAUTY!
You can check out how the rest of it went on the Abyss. Quite a bit more Googling and checking of books and posting ensued. The short version is, the Grimm fairy tale we now know as Sleeping Beauty was called "Little Brier-Rose," and a briar rose looks just like the one in Room 5, indicating the two safe doors. The solution doesn't have anything to do with the number twenty or the "Come and kiss me..." song, but it was those linked thoughts that led me to the idea.
My fellow MazeCasters roll their eyes at the Sleeping Beauty solution, for the usual reasons ("Those aren't brambles!" -vewatkin), but I think it's solid, and it was one WR hadn't thought of, making it extra-satisfying. (Although he did find the image of the briar rose once the idea was raised.) More importantly, I had a good time getting there, and I learned a lot about the Sleeping Beauty story that I didn't know before. For example, it seems obvious now, but I hadn't thought to read the pricked finger as the onset of puberty, or the hundred years and thicket as a metaphor for a way to allow the fifteen-year-old girl to grow up a little more before she starts entertaining errant princes. (Phillip Pullman describes this reading, Bruno Bettelheim's, in an afterword to "Briar Rose" in his excellent collection of retellings, Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm.)
As an added bonus, I got to relive my childhood terror of Maleficent in dragon form. Brrrrrr!
After all this went down it was driving me crazy that I couldn't remember the title, author, illustrator, or anything much else specific about that children's book, other than that it quoted the Shakespeare song and was about Sleeping Beauty. My mom, ever the librarian even in retirement, found it among the many children's books of ours that she had saved, going only by my vague description of the cover.
The book is The Wedding Ghost, written by Leon Garfield and illustrated by Charles Keeping. In an ASTONISHING COINCIDENCE, it was published in 1985, the same year as MAZE. It's a strange work-a picture book that is not really a children's book-sound familiar? It tells the story of a man, Jack, about to get married to Jill, his plain and solid sweetheart. He receives a mysterious map as a shower gift and ends up finding his way through a dense forest full of bones to the castle of a sleeping princess, a magnificent beauty who, once woken by Jack's kiss, says nothing but "Oh!" Further odd events follow, and Jack somehow ends up married to both Jill and the Beauty.
As a ten- or eleven-year-old I loved the creepy and slightly racy pictures, and these are as fantastic as I remember them. But what was really rewarding about reading the story again as a middle-aged person (how has THAT happened so suddenly?) was being able to appreciate and ponder some of the things it was saying about marriage and love and desire. I am grateful that MAZE and Room 5 helped me find it again.
2016-02-02
SiGNing off
This post is going to discuss a solution proposed by White Raven for Room 8.
You can find his description of it here.
I would like to say first that although I don't consider this solution to be
correct, I approve of it being proposed and posted. I think that solving MAZE
is going to rely on people sharing lots of possible solutions with the
community, an activity which will, for the most part, involve ideas that don't
end up working out. This doesn't mean the people coming up with them are bad
solvers; it means they're trying to solve something difficult. White Raven's
willingness to suggest theories, even ones I often disagree with, is a genuine
boon to the MAZE community. I say all this because I'm about to criticize this
theory, and don't want this to be mistaken for criticizing the theorizer.
The idea here is to find an encoding of "xii," in a room where the correct
door to take is 12. The way he suggests it's encoded, letter by letter, is as
follows:
x: "SGN" from the SiGN sign
i: "i" from the SiGN sign
i: The bowling pin
The i on the sign does obviously match a Roman numeral i. The bowling pin kind
of looks like an i, I guess. But why does "SGN" produce x? The explanation
given is that sgn is the
sign function, often written sgn(x). White Raven says he doesn't know much about the math
involved here himself, but ran this by a mathematician friend. I think that he
may have misunderstood what that friend told him, or perhaps conveyed the
puzzle idea to him poorly. This solution looks like it involved a breakdown of
communication somewhere, anyway.
First of all, the idea of writing "(x)" after a function isn't as significant
as it's being made out to be. It's true that if you want to talk about the
sign of x, you write "sgn(x)." Smilarly, the logarithm of x is log(x), the
cosine of x is cos(x), and so on. This is a feature of notation for functions
in general, not the sign function in particular. There's no reason to think
that, in looking for a way to hide the letter x, Manson would decide on "SGN"
as being related.
One of the more confusing passages of the post: "The sgn function in simple
form is written as ‘sgn(x)' in a function, and the architypical representation
of the function is x=sgn(x).|x| As the math prof put it, ‘sgn is a
mathematical representation of absolute value "x".'" I'm not sure what White
Raven is trying to establish here. It may be an attempt to relate the sign
function to having some kind of relevance to x itself, but if so, it's
misguided.
I'm going to take a moment to explain the functions discussed here, for those
who aren't familiar.
Diane's Math Corner
The sign function, sgn, is about whether something is positive or negative.
You put a number in, and the function gives you a new number telling you
something about the sign of that number. If your number is positive, it gives
you 1. If your number is negative, you get -1. If it's 0, 0. So, for example,
sgn(8)=1, sgn(-17)=-1, sgn(45)=1, sgn(0)=0. You get the idea.
The absolute value of a number is basically what the number would be if it
were positive. We write |x| for the absolute value of x. For a positive
number, taking the absolute value doesn't change it. |5|=5. Negative numbers
are switched to positive: |-5|=5. Zero is again just zero. |0|=0.
You'll notice that these are two different functions, giving (usually)
different results. sgn(12)=1, but |12|=12. The sign function is not a
representation of the absolute value of a number. They are, however,
related.
One way to think about numbers is as points on a line. Everything off to the left of 0 is negative, everything off to the right is positive. The sign of a number tells you which direction from 0 it is. The absolute value tells you how far from 0 it is. If you know both those things, then you can work out exactly what the number is. I'm thinking of a number, which I'll call n. sgn(n)=-1, and |n|=13. That's enough information for you to determine what number I'm thinking of. Neither of those pieces of information alone would do it. All right, now that we've had a fun math digression, let's reiterate that this isn't a way to clue "x." Maybe the notation for absolute value led to confusion at some point, with |x| looking like a way of writing x with some emphasis? Is it possible that Manson also didn't understand the math involved, and also mistakenly thought that "SGN" would work as a clue for x? This seems very unlikely to me, because it would require an incredibly specific mistake. He would have to not only think, like White Raven, that using the name of a function would mean x, but would also have to think that this mildly obscure function was the one to use for that. It's a solution idea that would only occur to someone working from the solver's end, not one that the puzzle constructor would come up with working forwards. Topic for a later post: Communication misunderstandings and Mansonian verification.
