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  • In Shakespeare's The Tempest, Prospero, Duke of Milan, is ousted by his brother and exiled to an island. With the help of a friend, Prospero manages to take with him his beloved library.

    Prospero, like his creator, lived in a time when boundaries between disciplines were not as rigid as they are today. Prospero's books would have dealt with the cosmos—spiritual and material, inner and outer—as a whole.

    In this blog, I try to do the same. I'm not Prospero, just a student rummaging through his library and writing in the margins. Prospero's Books is a blog about seeing the world as a whole, by looking at

    • signs, especially the relationships between signifiers and what they signify
    • stories, especially big-picture stories, such as myths and the works of Dante, Shakespeare, and Joyce
    • systems, especially complex, nonlinear systems
    • spirit, especially as understood by the Christian and Western esoteric traditions

    Welcome! Please join the conversation.

    —Kenneth W. Davis

    (Note: Although I admire Peter Greenaway's film Prospero's Books, this blog is not directly about that film. )

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« Mesh and share | Main | A twenty-first-century Shakespeare? »

04 January 2008

Chaos

Baktangwiesenfeld_from_wikipedia At her brilliant blog Changing Places, Donna Woodka has posted a marvelous collection of quotations about chaos, quotations that bridge the traditional and mathematical uses of the word. Here are a few I found especially illuminating, but be sure to read the others as well.

“If we wish to make a new world we have the material ready. The first one, too, was made out of chaos.”—Robert Quillen

"Chaos should be regarded as extremely good news"—Chogyam Trungpa

“Our real discoveries come from chaos, from going to the place that looks wrong and stupid and foolish.” — Chuck Palahniuk

Posted by Kenneth W. Davis in Chaos, Systems |

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The image here of the mandala made me think that I needed to tell you about Sabelli's book "Bios." Bios is a process a step beyond chaos. It's truly creative. And the pattern it makes is a mandala.

Posted by: Troy Camplin | 19 January 2008 at 10:02

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