An encounter with the surprise letter

I widely opened my eyes with wonder at a message on my phone. The message reads: “An article will be delivered very soon”. Immersed in the hurly-burly of everyday life, my mind was cluttered with various unpredictable ideas and was destined to ignore the message.  But when the message was coming off and on, I was exploring the agent who had sent me this article what is the content of this yet-to-receive article, why it had been sent to me, maybe it was a hoax message to fool me, blah… blah… blah, might be on my special day someone has sent me the gift to add a personal touch. The real magic, it seems, was the slippery speculations.

It was difficult to ignore the meaningful and elusive message since it was tickling my fancy like fireflies in the night. I tried to encounter myself in several ways. Phone calls are wonderful, but once you hang up, that is it, you cannot hold them in your hands or go over them again. But this message was on my message box not less than five times. It was upbeat stuff, no one but Emily can give me hope, “Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul, and sings the tune without the words, and never stops at all”

 

At a tender age, I used to read detective stories, and watch crime shows on TV, because these stories were full of surprises, and over again sometimes such stories encounter "not knowing" and used to have “beyond” significant meaning also. They still evoke emotions and give us goosebumps and a-ha!-moments. Its playfulness lies in transgressing boundaries, allowing seemingly absurd flights of fantasy, expectancy, wonder, creativity, beauty and elegance and helps us make sense of reality.

It is the kind of words that enable the quantum scientist to make sense of that uncertainty is the basic tenet of reality. Instead of seeking solace in the certainty of definitions, proofs and facts, serendipity pattern playing with ideas refers to the fairly common experience of observing an unanticipated, anomalous datum that maintains conflicting and contradictory views. So was the message.

 Let us talk about the surprising moments in our life, when the surprise is “in the wind”, seeking knowledge in forbidden territories in the biblical Adam and Eve and of Dante’s Ulysses.

One explores the surprises to provide dynamics of knowledge of the world through “transcending existing experience.” Here we recall the leading scientist and philosopher Popper to famously locate them in his World Three, … the world of intelligible, where the rules of reality generating events of daily life separate the rule-of-thumb expectations. Surprise represents the gap between our assumptions and expectations about worldly events and the way that those events turn out. It is like a crack in our brain and triggers a search to reveal the mystery of things unknown. Many such mysteries are solved when the scientist or the artist—generates unfamiliar combinations of familiar ideas.

 

In the world of art, the master of the visual punch line is the surrealist painter René Magritte who produced more than 1,500 paintings that evoke surprises by juxtaposing familiar objects in unfamiliar settings that challenge us to think in different ways. One of Magritte’s most widely viewed and critically discussed works is a painting entitled Time Transfixed which juxtaposes two objects—a fireplace and a train—that do not normally belong together. The only thing they have in common is that both burn fuel. The train is situated in the fireplace so that it appears to be emerging from the mouth of a railway tunnel. Above the fireplace is a tall mirror onto which only a clock and a candlestick on the mantel are reflected. The blackness of the mirror suggests an empty bleak room, which suddenly becomes disrupted by a noisy intruder from the outside world—the train racing full steam through the fireplace. Thus, paradoxically, this “surprise” is cognitive and recognized as knowledge of emotion.

There is a positive reason to incorporate several approaches, beyond just a hedging of bets. Each approach to surprise may be useful. There is no need to claim that only one approach captures the “real” surprise or that we can only study one aspect of surprise at a time. It might not be muddled thinking but folk wisdom that lay beliefs about the word “surprise” cover a range of theoretically distinguishable psychological processes. The tools of rhetoric offer some ingredients for recipes for surprise. The repetition-break plot structure appears in many forms. It is a structure that is quite common in music, as illustrated by Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, for example (da da da dum…). Surprise Symphony, by name of Symphony No. 94 in G Major, orchestral work by Austrian composer Joseph Haydn, so named for the “surprise”—a startlingly loud chord—that interrupts the otherwise soft and gentle flow of the second movement. Similarly, the repetitive advertisements on TV or newspaper break the plot structure to promote the experience of surprise that stimulate the reader’s attention.

Just think— one takes the same route to work every day, driving the same car, crossing the same intersection with the same median strip. But this morning an unexpected event, however mundane kicks off: a dog is passing by on the road, the sun is shining, and Kash flower had just pushed up in the median countless times. It takes a couple of honks to remind one that the light has turned green. One will remember this moment in one’s morning commute for a long time—one has driven through this intersection is long forgotten.

A very common and surprisingly dependable example is the case of the underspecified clue: Sherlock Holmes observes the knees of a suspect’s trousers, but ‘reminds’ Watson of the fact that they were dirty and worn only as the solution to the mystery is revealed. Miss Marple is told only that there was a maid in the house where a murder took place but explains later that she knew what happened as soon as she ‘heard there was a pretty young girl in the house’. A good storyteller knows by instinct the longer one waits, and the more one invests in the idea that there is something wonderful and magical and compelling inside the box, the worse it gets.

A story with a twist has to include not just an act of deception, but also the mechanism by which the deception is unmasked. That combination of elements makes a surprising story what you might call a self-exploding confidence game. An ‘aha’ experience, an epiphany about a deeper, truer interpretation of what went before.

Adbhutam rasa in Natyashastra is about the sentiment of wonderment that comes when one recognizes one’s ignorance.

From the dawn of civilization, human beings have tried to understand everything about the birth of life. Where do we come from and where are we going? Anything and everything can become a cause of wonder for the human mind.

So my mystery box turns out to be a pig in a poke when I receive the long-expected article, an existential threat to my sense of self. The one-liner was: “Immediately pay 6 rupees to pay your due tax to avoid any inconvenience”