April 6 2011
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You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star. - FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

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Chaos reigns, rules and justicates with a swinging spear, a falling arrow, the sinuous savage slink of a morning star. Unlike Justice, Law or Peace, it does not use the sword, as the blade is too direct and too penetrating, too unimaginative and concentrated. Chaos never infects, it does not reveal, like the surgeon’s scalpel, the essential nature of things. By its process and own nature it is an obfuscator, an oscillator, a facilitator, agitator and sometimes a bull alligator. A punky instigator, to borrow a quaint phrase from a mad Englishman. There is no adjustment period to Chaos - either you embrace it or you Fear it. If you fear it, there is still hope for you. If you embrace it then there is no hope for you, but you will not regret it.

Is it any wonder that the progression of science, and physics in particular, would branch out from the search for the infinitesimal building blocks of reality (gravity, muon, quark, neutrino) to the more practical, yet no less easily achievable, explanation of how these things react and interact. Stirring the spoon into the soup of life - that spoon is time, the pot is space, the ingredients are the matter. How the ingredients react, that is the study of Chaos, as it is formally known to physical science.

If we get the ideas right, then in Chaos logic and theory, it is possible for a single, small occurrence to affect a system in any number of ways. It differs from Classical thinking - classical thinking is your proverbial fish tank and the ripples in the pond. Life is a sea, and ocean, and the ripples that occur are much more wide-ranging. A butterfly flapping its wings will cause a tornado across the world - but equally, the catfish flapping its tail will cause the tornado to become a giant fart. Such is the world of Chaos.

In my mind, the peril of the relationship (with anybody) was captured at a young age. Youth is where our ideals, dreams and hopes are shaped, sculpted and honed. For the lucky, it’s lovingly sculpted, cut sharply here and there, but that’s about it. For everyone else, it’s a case of bludgeoning the unresponsive material, mastication and regeneration, hack and slash and regrowth on a colossal scale. But that’s how you get closer to perfection, I think.

The peril is the static idea, the embryonic form cannot consider life beyond the womb and in every stage of living we are still stuck there, except with jobs, money and responsibility to float in instead of amniotic fluid. But we do not stay there all our lives (although it has been said men spend the rest of their lives trying to get back in), we emerge into being. And being with someone else in a Life, the constant should be a moving equilibrium. It’s not even about literal change or wearing a different shirt everyday. If the souls are in flux, then let resonance and harmony take care of the rest - you just have to worry about stagnation, personal stagnation, not interpersonal.

Classical science considers the idea of an experiment. Your control group, to show the basic principles of the ‘normal’ universe. Your experiment, with one variable factor then you change and switch and see which is which. Easy. But life is not an experiment (well it is, but not in this sense), it destroys walls, floors, ceilings, mazes and cheese with ease, but not in the way you think - it just goes under, around and disregards those barriers. Of course if life was an experimental polar bear, that’d be different.

Chaos is more subtle, as chaos relies on the feedback loop. The results alter the factors which affect the results, a closed loop, a singular mathematical ourobouros in this case. And what about life in its infinite variables? You do get what you put in and it forces you on to other things, greater heights and achievements.

Now the two-person monogamous relationship is the same thing - but keeping it alive is the constant feedback between the two, maybe spiking, overloading at times, yet maintaining that bubbling, vital equilibrium. Space and time are the variables again, we can zoom in or out, go quick or slow, the turbulence amongst the rapids may be calm to view from above.  Like the quiet trickle of a dried creek, but always flowing, changing, finding its way through the wilderness. As it grows it might carve out different sections of the riverbank, it might pull into a sandy area and become a marsh, it might flow into peat and become a swamp. It will change, and so will the lives it supports, but it can equally run dry as turn into a massive inland sea. It ends when it reaches the ocean, back to the sea of fertility and eternity.

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In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.
CARL JUNG, “Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious”
                       
Chaos is a friend of mine.
BOB DYLAN, Newsweek, Dec. 9, 1985