Crystalpunk Note 3: We Have Come to give You Little Minds! Halfway through writing his (truly spectacular, and truly spectacularly unreadable) Biografia Literaria Samuel Taylor Coleridge finds himself trapped in an asteroid field of metaphysical arguments of his own making while the Kraken of The Deadline is hungrily nibbling away at his toes! Firing at random, hoping to clear a path, he only finds that with every shot the mist of asteroids imprisoning him becomes denser and denser. This is what happens when you search for truth, unity and all-embracing coherence: everything that seemed solid disappears into dust! Complexity herself had outwitted Coleridge in his pursuit to unravel it; each hastily introduced argument designed to give him latitude unfailingly demands another complicated discursive manoeuvre to prevent him from going even further downhill. The universe itself is about to crush him! But, a Great Writer is also an Escape Artist and Coleridge had one last black hole up his sleeve: he applied what in WeiQi is called a Tenuki. It is the art of solving a pressing problem by ignoring it on its current level, but attacking it at another, higher, level: just in time (HA!) a lifesaver arrives in the form of a fake letter saying just what Coleridge needed to hear in order to pull backwards from the boat in order to enter it. The crucial element of a well executed Tenuki is to have such a grasp of the situation that your demeanour suggests surrender while in reality you are doing the opposite. "Truth becomes fiction when the fiction's true. Real becomes not-real when the unreal's real" (Cao Xuegin ). A Tenuki can be a self-fulfilling prophecy: a psychologically shrewd player knowing to have lost a position can disguise retreat by pretending Tenuki, thereby driving the opponent into self-defeating insecurity and thereby making the unreal Tenuki real. If, like Coleridge, you handle them exceptionally cunning, a Tenuki can spoil the game as a legal form of foul play.
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