Monday Rules (Part 10)

We're breaking all the rules. Even our own rules. And how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for X quantities.

Rule 10 was added to Sister Corita Kent's list of nine by John Cage, who then proceeded to popularize the list so much that it is usually referred to as "The Cage Rules," which is unfortunate.  You may not have heard of Sister Corita before now, but she was hugely influential as an artist and art educator and deserves to be more widely known.

So what does the composer have to add? In typical elliptical fashion, he tells us to go beyond the guarantees of rules.  Rules are there for safety, and we have to get out of that safe little garden if we are ever to create anything from the vast chaos of the universe beyond.

"Even our own rules," he says.  What rules have you imposed on yourself? "I can't write well enough to write a book."  "I don't know enough music to write a song." "I can copy that photograph well enough, but I'm not good enough to paint my own ideas."  Those are rules.  Break them.

Even if you have useful self-rules, you need to venture outside their protective walls every now and then.  Do the opposite.  If you've read the book, you know that the Lichtenbergian Society started with Georg Christoph Lichtenberg's aphorism, "To do the opposite is also a form of imitation."  STEAL FROM THE BEST by heading in the other direction.

I am at the moment attempting to design Alchemy, the Burning-Man-style event in October. We are once again on new property, and I have to take a blank field and turn it into a "city" that is explorable and interesting. I am also determinedly trying to forget the previous three versions of this event that I designed for previous properties: those designs worked for the land we were on then, but are those paradigms going to work on this property?

So I'm doing plenty of GESTALT and SUCCESSIVE APPROXIMATION, as I look and look for those "X quantities" which would allow me to break my own "rules" of what goes where. (Except for sound camps.  Those guys can play at 4:00 a.m. if they want to, but they're going to do it at the far end of the burn.)