Chaos, Fractals & GR

[Tim Ware]

This actually gets down into that scalar fractal stuff of earlier posts.  
Systems, like people, like insects, like mushrooms, have the primary 
impulse to survive.  Their components are people.  Systems are always 
traceable to humans (well, perhaps not "natural" or at least "nature's" 
systems, though, hey, what IS "natural").  Systems don't lead to 
genocide, people and their fucking need to point the finger, find 
scapegoats, drive genocide.  I knew when I said "people kill" there would 
be a knee-jerk "oh, this guys just like those anti-gun-control assholes, 
etc" reaction, but there is a tendency to blame things on "systems".  
"Systems kill" -- come on!  I'm sure it was pretty hard to find a German 
after WWII who didn't blame it on the Nazis ("I'm not a Nazi, I just live 
here").  I think any talk of "systems" as a class has about the same 
resonance as talking about classes of people.  The tension that exists in 
the Zone between the Force and the Counterforce is a dance that occurs at 
every level of existence (or at least so I assume, having only checked 
out a relatively small number of them).  

You really can't have one without the other.  Thesis/antithesis.  The 
dance.  The interface.  The taming/ordering of charisma.  Systems exist 
between the 0 and 1, not one or the other.  Not good system/bad 
system--just systems.  To tame "the green uprising" into a garden is not 
necessarily a bad thing.  

All systems AREN'T closed systems.  GR, for instance, is not a closed 
system, though it is an ordering with recurring characters 
and pages that go from 3 to 760.

Sorry for the desultory nature of this post.  It's been a long morning.

Tim    

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ timware at crl.com
If you are dealt a lemon ... play lemonade - CD-ROM DOS


On Sun, 21 May 1995 WildForest at aol.com wrote:

> 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."
>