Prospero's Books

Whither it goes

Chapter One of Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism begins with an epigraph from the Gospel of John:

The wind blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence it comes or whither it goes; so it is with every one who is born of the Spirit (iii,8).

The field of chaos theory began with an almost identical observation by Edward Lorenz, that the nonlinear system we call weather is utterly determined yet utterly unpredictable. For the author of John, the Spirit, too, is a nonlinear system, far from equilibrium, on the very edge of chaos.

Shakespeare behind Bars

Last month, in my "Shakespeare, Systems, and Intertextuality" course, I showed Hank Rogerson and Jilann Spitzmiller's film Shakespeare behind Bars, a 93-minute documentary on a production of The Tempest by inmates in Kentucky's Luther Luckett prison. Four observations:

• A prison, by definition, is a "closed system," increasing in entropy unless it can draw energy from outside. The introduction of The Tempest into the lives of the cast brings such energy, allowing for growth.
• The production process shown in the film is a remarkable example of how living systems grow and evolve by moving from organization through disorganization to reorganization. (The very word tempest suggests the necessary slip into chaos, and "chaos theory" can be said to have been born in Lorenz's study of complex weather systems.)
• With so little to distract them, the cast members--during several months of production--study and "live" their roles at a depth I've never seen before, in students or in actors. Shakespeare's fractal complexity constantly repays this effort.
• As the cast members perform a play that centers on forgiveness and redemption, they collectively and individually struggle with those issues in their own lives.

Shakespeare behind Bars is one of the best half-dozen Shakespeare films I've ever seen. I recommend it highly.

Chaos

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

Intricate beauty born out of chaos

Karmen, at Chaotic Utopia, has posted one of her best-ever "Friday Fractals," an Earth-like planet she has formed by plugging a just-right seed number into a fractal formula. She writes:

As I toyed with the different settings, I couldn’t help notice how such intricate beauty was born out of chaos. Now, I could be speaking of the fractal, or of our planet. I’ll let you decide.

(Please check out the video she has posted, of the fractal Earth being formed.)

Until something sets them off

From Harriet Hawkins's Strange Attractors: Literature, Culture, and Chaos Theory:

The long-term behaviour of nonlinear systems is humanly unpredictable because tiny differences in input can very soon result in enormous differences in output, and systems fraught with a variety of positive feedback will often undergo sudden and revolutionary changes in behaviour. Very like certain characters in mythic literature, nonlinear systems tend to behave in a regular, orderly way until something sets them off, a critical point is passed, and they suddenly become chaotic (x).

What Hawkins is describing in her second sentence is the separation stage of Joseph Campbell's "monomyth." Here are more of my monomyth-tagged posts.

Deep underlying relationships

At TomDispatch.com, Chip Ward has a fascinating, and somewhat alarming, article on the need for resilience in the systems we create. His chief example: the disappearance of large numbers of honeybees. Here's just a taste:

Restoring resilience to manmade systems will require an eye for options, an appreciation for redundancy, and a tolerance for chaos. Messy organizations may also be creative. But, hard as it may be, we will always find it easier to anticipate disturbance and build choices into our manmade systems than to understand how to conserve resilience in the natural systems that support us. To do that, we must grasp the deep underlying relationships between such "slow variables" as weather, soil composition, and plant succession that we often miss. We will have to learn to see how connectivity and feedback loops operate in nature and how futile it is, in the long run, to impose narrow notions of efficiency on natural systems that are profoundly dynamic and inherently unpredictable.

How resilient are we? Crisis is also an opportunity for change. As the bees die, we are getting an unmistakable warning. Without pollination, life as we know it is not possible. Think "tiny canaries in the coal mine." Then think "resilience."

(Thanks to Donna at Changing Places for the tip.)

A falcon, a storm, or a great song

An essay in Slate, by Clive James, on the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) has reminded me to look again at one of my all-time favorite poems, "Ich lebe mein leben," from Rilke's Book of Hours. I love it in part for its evocation of the great spiral, the great chaotic system, that is our lives.

My favorite translation is by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy (see What I've Been Reading), but to avoid seeking permission from them, I'll quote an anonymous translation from the Picture-Poems site:

I live my life in growing rings
which move out over the things around me.
Perhaps I'll never complete the last,
but that's what I mean to try.

I'm circling around God, around the ancient tower,
and I've been circling thousands [of] years;
and I still don't know: am I a falcon, a storm
or a great song.

We are, of course, all three.

(If the translation I've used is copyrighted, please let me know, and I'll remove it.)

These are the waves we ride

I'm spending part of this snowbound Indiana day trying to catch up with the riches of Chaotic Utopia. Back in early January, Karmen posted an extraordinary entry on the waterfall as metaphor. Her thesis:

The flow of being, from order to chaos, is indistinguishable from the flow of falling water.

She elaborates:

Like molecules of H20, clinging together in a drop, cascading from a laminar, ordered beginning, to a chaotic, turbulent end, so is the being of all matter. Everything must break down in the end. But when we look at a waterfall, we don't watch the smooth edges where the cascade begins, nor are we drawn to the turbulence below. Instead, we are drawn to the rhythmic surges and harmonic meanders in between. So is our perception of being—we focus not on the chaotic end, nor the stationary beginning, but the captivating moments in between.

These are the waves we ride, or the sounds of our call to battle. All of nature, all of the cosmos, is pushing towards entropy, and relishing in the beauty of the fall. Each living thing in an ecosystem is clinging to that edge, getting the most out of the basic energy, taken from the sun, before it is used up, broken down, and given over to chaos. The water flows, the ant marches, the feline stalks... all to take advantage of the "in between" ...to survive, and endure.

Karmen concludes:

We lack adequate terms to describe the flow of being. We may call it thermodynamics, harmony, equilibrium, the power of nature, ecological balance, the hand of God, or Eris and Loki at a tea party. Yet, none of these phrases or terms can truly capture the essence of the flow of being the same way as seeing the active form of falling water.

The little pieces of this grand puzzle

Reading Karmen's Chaotic Utopia blog the past few weeks has been like drinking from a geyser. She has posted way too much good writing to even read carefully, let alone blog about. So I have about a dozen of her postings on hold in my feed reader, and I really need to start telling you about them.

To celebrate the one-year anniversary of Chaotic Utopia, Karmen has posted a retrospective. Here's how she prefaces it:

We live in a world rich in complex patterns... where most everything we see is hovering in a harmonic balance, torn between a dull, static order, and a chaotic end. Adaptation to the constant changes requires a certain amount of diversity, uniqueness... risk-taking. Now seems like a good time to learn what it means to adapt. While we humans are facing changes of global size, we're also building information-processing systems of global size. It isn't a coincidence, it is survival. Our survival. Our future. I've spent the past year, looking at the little pieces of this grand puzzle, with this blog. Each post, whether a serious scientific paper, complete with references, or a poem on the fly, is, in some way, an example of what of it means to "Adapt".

Now run, don't walk, to Chaotic Utopia, and look at Karmen's best-of list. You'll thank me.

Irrational season's greetings!

One of my favorite Christmas poems, by Madeleine L'Engle:

This is the irrational season
When love blooms bright and wild,
Had Mary been filled with reason,
There'd have been no room for the child.

Have an irrational season!