Greetings,

I must apologize for my elaborate confuscation of essence. I mixed everyone up, and now my siblings are going to fix you all up. First: what I have been calling 'essence' is now called both a 'meta-essence' and an 'essence map.' I got the two confounded into one thing. My bad. We got it all sorted out now, though, betwixt us three. Now forget everything I told you, and listen to Juliet aka Elpis.

Felicitations,

Essence is not a system of attributes, metaphors, classes, and elements. Neither is it a classification for anything. We did not make it up. It is ancient, originating from the beginning of the creation. You see, there is essence, and there is meta-essence. And when one does not understand what essence is, it is hard for one to understand what meta-essence is, especially when they are mixed up. Which is exactly what Jay has been doing. Mixing it up. So.

Patrick says that meta-essence is “The unique impression upon one's emotions by a set of sensations.” To quote Jay it is “... an artistic impression or idea, no matter how nebulous or exact...” And Noah Webster wrote “Mr. Locke makes a distinction between 'nominal' essence and 'real' essence. The 'nominal' essence of gold is that complex idea expressed by God; the 'real' essence is the constitution of its insensible parts, ...” all of these quotes reflect facets of what essence and meta-essence are.

There are many different ways of portraying or articulating essence and meta-essence. Poetry, music, drawing, sculpting are some examples. Making essence pages with Gimp is another (see the avatar gallery). And we (my two brothers and I) made one up ourselves. At first we called it essence, but that was very confusing, so we put our heads together (over the Webster's 1828 dictionary) and came up with Meta-essence and Essence Mapping. So that is what it is called now, and this is how it works.

The point of it is to categorize elements (a color, color pair, color triad, description, percentage, or reference to be used for describing a meta-essence) into certain metaphors (which delineate the descriptions they enclose to a general aspect or facet of the meta-essence. Examples are: body, spirit, mind, soul, Cobha, etc.) and into certain classes inside the metaphors, such as: light, depth, density, scent, image/sight, beauty, size, etc. One may have as many metaphors, classes, and elements as one wants. This is essence mapping, which is a way of articulating the meta-essence of something.

For example, I might wish to make an essence map for the meta-essence of a horse, and one element I have is that it moves like a quivering flag. So, in metaphor 'body,' ad class 'motion,' I would put the element (an allegoric reference) 'quivering flags.'

A metaphor is enclosed by curly brackets, {}, and preceded by its name. A class is enclosed in square brackets, [], and also preceded by its name. So the horse essence map would like like this, as far as it has gone:

Body { motion [ 'quivering flags' ] }

If more attributes are added, it would like like this:

Body {

motion [ 'quivering flags', 'the flirt of butterfly wings', 'an archer slowly drawing his bow back', 'moaning wind', roiling clouds', regal, spetznaz ]

beauty [ 'a gothic arch', 'momentarily arrested power' ]

color [ 'the bark of a redwood tree', mahogany – dull red ] }

Spirit {

depth [ 'a dog's brown eyes' ]

loyalty [ Mt. St. Helens ]

pride [ Reepicheep ]

gentility [ 'the soft, black eyes of a kýkwedim child' ]

density [ 'a translucent black agate', 60% ] }

I'm forming two distinct impressions.
a) Essence and meta-essence are kind of like Classical Logic. A person can sum them up in a few long-winded paragraphs, but the only way to "learn" them is to teach in small chunks, systematically starting with one basic principle, adding basic principle two, etc. until we arrive at the first glimmer of real understanding.

To put it more concisely, you're logical judgment (dividing essence and meta-essence) has just permanently damaged my ability to perform simple apprehension. In other words, I need to consult my dictionaries.

b) That you Lausers (I believe that is the correct spelling?) are realists, trying conceptualize emotional reality. I'm in the camp of the romantics, a firm believer that each person understands such things differently, and that a universal system is impossible, partly due to culture boundaries, and partly due to the nature of such things themselves.

Example: I recently witnessed what I refer to as a "Red Dusk". (Borrowing from Curse of the Spider King.) The sun had just dipped behind a set of high-desert peaks west-by-southwest of me. A combination gave of a thick haze around the horizon, a thin cloud over the mountain range, and the fall weather created made the sky directly over the range dark red, above that the sky was was sea-green, then teal, then the bright red cloud, then blue skies, eventually becoming dark in the east. The mountain range itself was a gray silhouette, and the haze made it appear as if there was a black fog beneath them. Now, this scenery had calming effect on me. "Red sky at night, Sailor delight!" However, such scenery left a sinister impression on other observers. My point: the way "essence" forms itself in one mind is always slightly different from person to person.

Hmm... you, my friend, are hard to articulate with.

I agree.

Exactly.

Not quite.

Close.

Let me explain.

Neglecting your classifications of realists and romantics, I will go on to what we agree on. You are exactly right that every person will see something very differently. One person will see the moon as a witch that turns things into stone, another will see it as a beautiful globe that sheds light to a forsaken land in mercy. Very different. Both valid. And that is why Essence and Meta-essence and Essence Mapping are so crucial for writers to use effectively.

You see something one way, and I see it another. You want to talk about your concept of the essence of something, but you are inhibited by the gap between our understandings of the something. Using an essence map helps bridge the gap. It does not annul or obsolete the diversity of poetic impressions, but gives them a language to express themselves with.

Here is a simple, seed of thought that might germinate into an understanding of essence:

Imagine a rose, a beautiful, red, glowing rose. Now imagine a sea, deep, passionate, powerful. Each has a distinct network of impressions on your emotions: this is their essence. Each one has a distinct Essence.

But there is something that ties them together, something that transcends each and yet is inextricably connected to both. There is a facet of their essences that is tied together: that is held in common. The only way that you can articulate this elusive thing is by saying that it is the thing that is held in common between them. That is their Meta Essence.

Now imagine that you want to convey a distinct emotion to your reader, but you cannot be sure that when you use some figure of speech to articulate it, that he will not misunderstand it and construe it otherwise than you intended. So you think of a vast array of things, all of whom share a common Meta Essence. By displaying them all to him in a systematic manner, you are enabled to pinpoint the emotion you are trying to get across. This is an Essence Map.

See?

It's a little complicated, but I think I get it.

So an essence map is when you take something, like a rose, and write down all of the artistic impressions that you think of when you picture that object?

Yes, I think I might understand now.

Do pardon my articulation, I think I meant to right pragmatic rather the realists.

I think I have the basic concept, but I really don't understand the syntax at all.

Yes, exactly. But you use the special syntax to do it so that others who know the syntax can understand you with the minimum of difficulty.

Okay, I'm starting to get it. Boy, am I slow. Can you restate the purpose? It's mainly a way to share your thoughts on something (and it's ESSENCE) with other writers in a generally used language, right?

So what is the syntax?

Right. Good job!

Syntax is the method for articulating an Essence Map. It is very structured. But it is also very flexible. Hence the confusion.

I am a programmer, so I tend to think like a computer sometimes. Therefore my system of Essence Mapping tends towards the structure of CSS, SQL, and Perl, because I like to think that way. But my siblings do too...

Okay. I'm going to go read about the individual parts of an essence, so I'll be back to try my hand at it...which could be a little rough. Thanks!

I think I'll try it too. Mine will probably be pretty rough too, Liagba!

This is really interesting. *trys to wrap mind around it* Don't worry, I'll get it sooner or later.

Emeth, I actually just figured this essence thing out! I'll go ahead and post about it more later.

Great! Did you figure out the essence mapping syntax too?

Yeah, I think I did. It goes somewhat like this if I'm looking for a metaphor:

Body {
Then I can add "Motion ["
Result:
Body {Motion []}

Is that correct? I haven't looked at the syntax for things other than metaphors yet.

Very good. All you need now to make that a full-fledged essence map is to add Elements: the breath, life, sinews, and muscle of essence maps.

About Elements, in you sister's posts, is she placing reference-Elements inside of single quotation marks instead of parentheses? If so, then I think I've figured Elements out as well!

Yes she is, pretty much. She is actually separating them by commas, and enclosing multiple word sentences in quotes. Looks like you got it then.

I'll have to post an essence soon, I guess!

Yup.

OK, I just thought I had figured most of this stuff out when along comes Neil...of Erk, and totally messes me up! Thanks a lot! What are reference-elements? Are they a reference from another part of the essence into another? How do you write them? Single quotation marks?

eruheran

P.S. If I'm using this system of White Raven's and her mom's:
SUBJECT
ASPECT {Qualifier [Characteristic (metaphor)]}

Where does a reference element come in? I thought metaphors were supposed to be in parentheses? Aaargh!

P.S.S. Colors look really nice on this forum theme, Jay!

A reference element isn't really that important, especially when you are just beginning. Basically it is a type of metaphor.

Wellll.... you got two things there. Reference metaphors are referring to something not described in the essence map, like a location, person, movie, song, picture, etc.

What you want is actually something that we implemented in ECSS++, called keywords.

You can use them now by including them as the content of an element and embedding it into the attribute that you are wanting to specify. Like so:

Breath {

[<CONCRETE> <a harsh desert wind>]
[<ABSTRACT> <black/putrefied red>]
[<ALLEGORICAL> <scraping the foundations from beneath a temple>]

}

Those are the three keywords that do what you are talking about. There is a special place for using them like that in ECSS++ that isn't in ECSSbasic, but that is how you can use them with what you have.

Basically you wrap both in a bare attribute (as in it has no name) so that they are siblings, and then put the two elements next to each other so that the keyword only affects the particular element that it should.

Did that make sense?