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Dear John, it is an interesting perspective of yours to see (or focus on) "dynamic" patterns rather than "static" shapes.
Insofar as it is interesting, I can't take any credit for it. I am just trying to convey the ideas behind the Japanese terms. I have harped on this over the years, and if I have it to put all in a single sentence, I usually sum it up as "katachi - static, suji is dynamic; katachi + suji = haengma."
It took a VERY long time before I got traction with the suggestion that thickness wasn't really what most western players though it was (i.e. influence) and I honestly don't think I've made any noticeable headway with suji.
One of my abiding interests has always been "how other people think." I don't study this in any scientific way - partly because I haven't got the scientific background to make sense of the literature. But I do dabble often, as a dilettante, and my bedtime reading at the moment is book on how the combination of neuroscience and big data explains how and why plots and characterisations work in novels. There have been surprises: many old theories have been shot down, whereas Christopher Booker's theory of 7 plot types has been vindicated.
Now, because of my fascination with how others think, I have often puzzled over what I regard as a western go phenomenon, namely why so many people reject what Japanese pros say about studying and improving. Robert is famous for declaring someone was "just a Japanese 9-dan", but actually he's just one of a long line of people who treat the Japanese pros with contumely. I know this because I've heard it from the Japanese side and I've observed it myself. I have run through various possible explanations. One, in the early days when I started go, was possible prejudice because of the war. I came across this a lot as a young journalist when I had to interview British people given medals in connection with their war service in the Far East. I had never before come across such lingering, intense hate and it made a chilling impression on me. It was understandable, mind you. I had to talk to one woman who lost her fiance in a Japanese POW camp when he was injected with worms. Unit 731, no doubt. But a lot of time has passed since then and such strong feelings are now rare.
Another possible explanation at the time was the dearth of go literature in English, but again a lot of water has since passed under the bridge, and I can't see that as the main problem, though the lingering effects of things like yose = endgame do still plague us, in my view.
I pondered much on the possibility that educational systems have changed and I'm adrift. I do actually think that's true to some degree, but one of my daughters works in a school and has convinced me that I'm on the wrong track there.
The latest conclusion I have reached (very tentatively, though) is that very many (I'd be more honest of I said too many
) western players are of a mathematical or scientific background, and they are used to challenging theories. Which is fine if you've got something else to replace them, but we haven't in western go, have we? Allied to that way of thinking, I believe is the old "Sword and Chrysanthemum" theory. This result from highly practical research by the Americans to help them in the Pacific War. They wanted to know if there were differences between Japanese and American thinking. The conclusion was that the Japanese were synthesists and so were good at copying and making things work. Americans were analysts and so were good at producing science PhDs and pulling the legs off spiders. Most things exist on a carousel and after a while this theory was given an early version of the "cancel" treatment ("we are all humans so we are all the same"), but it seems to be making a bit of a comeback at the moment. And I happen to think (again, tentatively) that it explains more than few things in western go. And that includes ignoring advice from Japanese pros.
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I think they are the two sides of the same coin that can ONLY be considered TOGETHER, because "pattern" = "shape" + "moves", isn't it?
(( My "moves" may be the same as your "flow of the stones". ))
I'd say yes so long as you mean "
making moves". To dilate on that, I think it is important to understand that an empty triangle is always bad shape, but it can be good suji. And if you don't understand that, you haven't studied go enough. By that I mean you haven't thought about it, as opposed to just reading about it. If you think about an empty triangle as bad shape, all your really think about are the three stones. But of you think about it as bad suji, you
have to think about all the other stones. Once you do that, you are in the realms of dynamic patterns. Which in turn means it's not about the stones, it's about the connections between them - the flow. So it's not the stone shapes you are trying to get into your brain, it's the flows.
In a sense, therefore, we are talking about muscle memory (misnamed though that is). Take a look at this page:
https://www.scottish-country-dancing-di ... /reel.html for a move which is taught to Scottish country dance beginners and which they pick up in less then ten seconds. There's no fancy footwork. It's just walking in a figure of 8 and all you have to learn is to whether to go left or right (that's actually quite hard: "No, no, the
other left...). I can barely imagine how anyone could ever dream of trying to learn a reel from that page. But, more than that, it is
totally beyond me to imagine why anyone would want to
write a page like that. That's an inadequacy on my part, of course, because there are lots and lots of similar pages and they must appeal to somebody.
But to whom? And I think we have a similar situation in western go, whichis why I feel at a loss.
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In my understanding of the "static" shapes, we can identify (among others, expecially your "bent elbows" aka "potential false eyes") ...
Not really. That's part of it, of course, but bent elbow is a label for a dynamic sequence (very short but still dynamic - two moves). It it is that dynamic element that makes it different from all other "potential false eye" situations. The tombstone tesuji is not a bent elbow.
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Cassandra
John Fairbairn
