Chaos, Fractals & GR

[WildForest at aol.com]

Ok.  Now we get down to it. 

The old Nature (assuming there is an organizing principle at work there,
which is probably so much wishful thinking on the part of the neo-paganists)
vs. Chaos dilemma.  Of course, this discussion is as old as the
Hashish-induced sandstone scribblings along the Euphrates, lately smashed to
bits by Tomahawk missile raining down on these ancient artifacts in GWH
Bush's little alley fight with Saddam. 

And it is a debate, which for my money, reached its zenith with the
pre-Socratics, particularly the bizarre stuff of Heraclitus, which, by the
way, figures prominently in any structuralist interpretation of Gaddis's
JR...where things are always breaking down and being rearranged in the most
amusing and paradoxical fashions.  Naturally, this is just so much
philosophy, which, when paired against neo-mathemical determinism, no one
takes seriously any more.

When I was studying GR in the hothouse of the academy in the late 1970s, we
were frantically underlining passages out of The Dancing Wu Li Masters and
the Tao of Physics--certain that we had found the hidden key to unlock the
secret structure of GR.  Now the New Physics is Old Hat, but GR has survived
to be assailed from so many new critical fronts, like rockets from the
heavens.  Lets hope it remains impervious to them all.

I agree w/ you and Ware about the "magical interface between text and
reader."  But it must be the anarchist-in-exile in me that cringes at any
"systematic" approach to Pynchon.  Systems exclude or extinguish that which
is odd, that which doesn't fit, that which is counter.  I take GR to be a
profoundly moral and political book.  One of the lessons:  don't discriminate
and don't exclude anything.

Despite these reservations, I am quite anxious to navigate your essay on
Vineland.

Cheers,
JSC

"Light one up before you mosey out that door
Once you cuddled 'em and kissed 'em,
But we're bring down Their system
And it isn't a resistance, it's a war."