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Problems With Symmetry & Rhyming

ibis the being

18:21 / 06.11.03

inspired by Seldom Killer's statement "I have a lot of trouble looking at symetrical pictures though, I find them disquieting."

Baz Auckland

00:34 / 07.11.03

I love symmetry... it's so... appealing in a strange way. Do you have an example in mind?

Squirmelia

08:10 / 07.11.03

Symmetry is something that occasionally bothers me - every time I try to make something out of Lego, it ends up symmetrical. I'm sure this didn't used to happen, and I'm sure in some way it is limiting my creativity.

I don't feel the same way about rhyming though, but I suppose if everything I wrote ended up rhyming, it might frustrate me also.

ibis the being

12:59 / 07.11.03

Well, the most immediate example is of course the Rorschach drawings. It's regularity & predictability that irritates me, in both symmetry and Seuss-like rhyming (not so with looser rhyme patterns). The feeling of knowing what's coming makes me grit my teeth.
I don't know what that's about, since humans are supposedly attracted to symmetry - it's something I've felt at a gut level since childhood, not an acquired taste. I was hoping it wasn't just me -
Ah, well.

Jack Fear

13:08 / 07.11.03

The feeling of knowing what's coming makes me grit my teeth.

Sounds to me like an aversion less to rhymed poetry than to shit lazy cliched rhymed poetry--to doggerel, in other words. A poet with any game can pull a rhyme out of thin air that will leave you gasping at the audacity of it.

As to the other: symmetry is the way things have to be. Bilateral symmetry is what most of us see when we look in a mirror, after all, and there's a strong evolutionary preference for it...

pomegranate

13:40 / 07.11.03

yeah, ibis, we've evolved to have a preference for symmetrical faces...do you not even like symmetrical faces?

ibis the being

14:19 / 07.11.03

I know exactly what you're talking about wrt symmetrical faces. But I'm not sure about that either. I think it's hard to say, since the bias is more instinctual than conscious. But certainly, I find men with "regular," handsome features (think Pierce Brosnan, George Clooney), not terribly attractive. Okay to look at, but too bland to be enticing IMO. Yes, I'm drawn much more to the offbeat & irregular in facial features.

Baz Auckland

14:32 / 07.11.03

I only hate metric rhyming in horrible pop songs... entire albums by Shania Twain for example, are nothing but these horrible: "got out of bed/ think I'm losing my head/ wish I was dead/ not well read / ooh yeah.. etc. etc."

...makes me want to kill...

pointless and uncalled for

17:13 / 07.11.03

Actually Fear and Praying, we have a bias towards near symmetry. I think you'll find that studies indicate that composites of absolute symmetry favoured significantly less well in studies. I can't remember where the balance point was though.

Jack Fear

17:26 / 07.11.03

I'm aware of the near-symmetry preference for faces--but I wasn't necessarily talking about faces, or even exclusively about humans: I was referring to little things like, oh, even numbers of same-sized limbs, same number of digits on each extremity... Occasionally the base genome throws up minor variations on essential bilateral (or, in some simpler organisms, radial) symmetry, but even in those cases, it tends towards a single exceptional feature--I'm thinking of a lobster: basic bilateral symmetry, but with a variation in the claws.

Symmetry is everywhere.

pointless and uncalled for

17:41 / 07.11.03

I'm an eejit, I should have thought of that before posting, sorry.

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