Painting and Programming,
Sketching and Software
And all that glitters is gold
Only shooting stars break the mold
— All-star by Smashmouth
I have never learned anything in true isolation. Every sport teaches corporeal coordination, reflexes, precision, alongside a fearlessness to throw the mammalian vehicle a little further outside a knotion of safety and stability. Every fine-motor skill is transferrable. The interconnections between academic topics, particularly those that teach new ways of thinking, are always fruitful.
Physical and intellectual (barf) pursuits have the same overlap, individully and together. The process of iterative improvements are learned and reinforced via painting and programming, just as they are in physical sports. The sensation of a rough sketch carries through in each, as does the practice in seeing the world through abstractions.
As I'm learning about hardware programming — how do people who do this / talk about it not sound dumb? I always feel like I'm using the wrong terms for everything, which probably means I am learning — I am reminded of early functional programming. It was a fundamentally new way of seeing the world that I had to learn. It wasn't a practiced skill (though, once over the initial hurdle, it becomes one). It was conceptually, categorically novel.
I've been battling the feeling of always-something-else, always-somewhere-else — antipresence stuff. The exact feelings that initial bouts of Zen Buddhism taught me to start recognising the edges of. They are the thoughtloops that prevent us from being fully present in an activity and settling into a flow state where we simply and only do / are doing / are. I think/hope most people have experienced this at some point in their adult life. Barring extreme or traumatic circumstances, we all did so (and remember doing so) as kids.
So often that presence, usually inherent in childhood, is disregarded as ‘‘childlike’’ — a term that, in American English and the culture in which I was raised, carries an inherent negativity. ‘‘Immaturity’’ and ‘‘maturity’’ are a dichotomy prescribed in blanket, unforgiving terms which mark all aspects of youth as acceptable for a time. They are things to move away from, at some point, and those well-adjusted members of society realise when it's high time to stop learning from youth.
At some point, we decide our brains are something to be managed. We come out of adolescence with a fear of our brain-body, instead of a love. So much change has come and gone, so little of which we felt ready for or fully understood. We respond to that fear by reestablishing a sense of control. We develop a manager-brain that attempts to police our thoughts — following the framework for order offered up by our society.
I met my partner in a charcoal drawing class. We've talked a few times about the odd amount of overlap of programmers finding themselves in some form of physical art. Drawing, painting, and sculpting from life (though these are not the extents of what contitutes physical art) have strange connections to programming. The same visual center of the brain that seems to be activated by visually parsing blocks of code (structured language full of semantic meaning) as with looking at a scene or person or other view full of semantic data (an eye, a nose, a vase) and seeing it abstractly — as shapes, colors, values.
When we step back and separate ourselves from the semantic meaning of the world around us — stripping away many of our human-centric projections, which often rely on highly-literal languages — we can learn to see the world in a less-biased way.
Of the many ways mammals communicate, we have found some of the most rigid, literal, and unpoetic. Despite this, our written, spoken, and shown languages (in order of, arguably, increasing expressiveness and flexibility) are still full of ambiguity which is often only distinguished in the later, more-expressive forms. The example most readily-comprehensible by my Ameribrain is the use of tone in spoken English. We can say the same, "simple" sentence, like "That's bad", in many different ways, with many different implied meanings and possible interpretations. We could be deriding the action of a pet, or saying we like something — or e.g the way someone's acting or dressing — outright, or be gently chiding a person for being naughty in an approving, playful way.
Of the human languages, English is among the most literal — American English even more-so. We seem more influenced by military language than by poetry, which says a lot about the language and its influence over our thinking. While we do have ambiguity in many ways, our written language is particularly rigid compared to many languages in eastern Asia, where individual characters may hold a slew of meanings that give writing, and especially poetry, a combinatorial power to express far more than a double on the entendre scale. I think of our adoption and constraint of dizaine ("about 10") from French into dozen ("exactly 12, usually") while still holding onto that looseness (a few dozen landing very differently for an English speaker than a few tens, despite being functionally equivalent).
Our quest for (or tendancy towards) exactness in language is a little absurd. It's made more absurd by juxtaposition against computer languages — those carefully designed to be exact and unambiguous, yet, which all inevitably entail some unusual combination of statements which are still ambiguous in either their communication and readability for a human, or even for the intended outcome for the computer's execution. Even in this electrical-mechanical world, we can't find the precision we expect to manifest in our squishy biological-electrical-chemical one.
Ambiguity is okay. There is ambiguity in our world. Finding ways to accept ambiguity, uncertainty, and chaos is necessary for living, and being able to communicate all of those is essential for acceptance. We are not individual creatures. We are highly-social group-dwellers which have been fragmented and made to live in a way that's completely outside what our body-brain wants and needs. We need that group comfort in order to sink into ambiguity without losing ourselves. We need each other, not just humans, but animals, plants, the earth beneath our feet. The earth we've paved so we can wear shoes. The animals we've captured and enclosed. The plants constrained in landscaping and nature preserves. Layers of separation exist between us and ourselves, for we are animals, and we are nothing without our habitat.