MDMD chaos theory

[Doug Millison]

"The most direct reference to chaos theory in Mason & Dixon is
     the reference to the possibilities of seemingly random change
     residing in a chaotic system; a system that is, like history or
     a continent, "sensitively dependent on initial conditions." In
     an almost direct reference to Edward Lorenz's image of a chaotic
     trajectory, which he illustrates by a ski-slope (another image
     might be a the surface of a pachinko or a pinball machine, both
     of which figure prominently in Vineland), Pynchon shows how "Mr.
     Knockwood, a sort of trans-Elemental Uncle Toby, spends hours
     every day not with Earth Fortifications, but studying rather the
     passage of Water across his land, and constructing elaborate
     works to divert its flow.... 'You don't smoak how it is,' he
     argues, '--all that has to happen is some Beaver, miles upstream
     from here, moves a single Pebble,--suddenly, down here,
     everything's changed! The creek's a mile away, running through
     the Horse Barn! Acres of Forest no longer exist! And that Beaver
     don't even know what he's done!'" (364). Pynchon relates this
     freedom of choice and the possibility of "unaccountable" change
     to the chronology of human life, relating it thus to the
     trajectory from youth to maturity--one might turn Lorenz's image
     upside-down and write death at the bottom! Again, one might
     refer to the tangled lines of history converging onto death as a
     final attractor "on this side": "As if... there was no single
     Destiny... but rather a choice among a great many possible ones,
     their number steadily diminishing each time a Choice be made,
     till at last 'reduc'd,' to the events that do happen to us, as
     we pass among 'em, thro' Time unredeemable" (45). [14]

 14. Against openness and unaccountability, the project of the line
     is to reduce to certainty. As Cherrycoke notes, "Conditions
     hitherto shapeless are swiftly reduc'd to Certainty" (636).
     Ultimately, it is "out There, the Timeless, ev'rything upon the
     Move, no pattern ever to repeat itself" against the order of the
     straight line (209). Maybe even more than Mason and Dixon's
     respective journeys, the utopian counterweight to linear history
     and to control is thus the multiplex, differently "timeless"
     moment in its sheer complexity and potentiality; the moment
     traversed by "the tangle of purposes" (79).

from:
 Serres Reads Pynchon / Pynchon Reads Serres

     Hanjo Berressem
     University of Cologne
     hanjo.berressem at uni-koeln.de

http://www.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.501/11.3berressem_prs.txt

...following links from the article Terrance mentioned, thanks.