Chaos, Fractals & GR

[WildForest at aol.com]

This is all very garbled, written on the fly, w/ one eye on the clock, so to
speak.  But it is a topic worthy of a vigorous debate.

Tim Ware sez:
"Systems kill" really sez nothing.  We bring a system called English to
the text (and vice versa) with its rules of grammar, syntax and
spelling.  We depend on our biological system to keep the whole thing
going.  We employ our various categorizing systems in order to organize
our knowledge.

I think what you mean is CLOSED systems kill though, in the entropic
sense, they really only kill themselves.  People kill.

Geeze, this is beginning to sound very much like NRA or Militia
Movement lit. crit:  Systems don't kill, people kill?  Huh? So much of
Pynchon's work (particularly V and GR) explores how systems work not to
exterminate The Other, the Odd, that which is Difference or Diverse--these
systems aim to exterminate entire genotypes, right?  I mean, one way to read
V. is as a history of the 20th Century impulse toward genocide, toward
"concentration camps."  It didn't start w/ the Nazi's.  

Systems always operate beyond the realm of individuals...this why we call
them "systems" and it is why we sympathize w/ Blicero, Pointsman, even the
vile Brock Vond.  This is also why most of us reject the notion of William
Calley being solely responsible for Mai Lai, or Ollie North for Iran/Contra.

GR's, more than any book since Finnegan's Wake, breaks down prevailing
structures of language, of novelistic structure, of narrative expectations,
irony and voice.  It retells history in, yes, perhaps, recursive patterns...

All systems are closed.  That's the point.  Even the Counterforce recognizes
that the Foucault-like We-Systems are doomed to implode.  This is said
explicitly.  I'll find the page later.

Tim goez on to sey:

If we impose a system on GR and it doesn't "take", what of it?  Some sink 
to the bottom, some float to the top, some disappear in the mix.

The what ever gets you through the (sizzling?) night approach is fine for the
individual reader.  But systems that fail, that mislead, that take followers
down false trails, do have consequences, often tragic.

Adios from stumptown.
JSC
"At last he could beam at the paper over a nose hypodermically iced out.
 What interesting reading material.  Ha, ha, ha."