In the zone

[Terrance]

> Dave Meury wrote:
> 
> Motivated by Terrance's musings on chaos, I submit the following quote
> from an article I recently read on complex systems with regard to
> economies and market behavior.  The description, of course, is
> applicable to a much wider range of topics.
> 
> "Successful complex adaptive evolutionary systems (CAE systems) are
> dynamic but not chaotic.  The participants learn to achieve a safe
> distance from both rigidity and chaos and how to escape from a chaotic
> mode should they temporarily fall into one.  The 'state space' in
> which a successful CAE system spends most of its time is often called
> 'the edge of chaos' which might just as well be called 'the zone of
> fruitful turbulence' because, in the case of CAE systems, it is not an
> edge at all but resembles a constantly shifting zone of creativity and
> struggle, fuzzily bounded by chaos on one hand and stagnation on the
> other."

In the Tangles of Mr. Poe's Hair (Tangles up in You, Dear Reader)


Henri Bergson spoke of humor being the encrustation of the mechanical
on the living - that is, we laugh when we see a human being behaving in
a
mechanical manner. The premise of most sitcoms is the character's
inappropriate,mechanical responses to a situation. And, it stands to
reason that the
encrustation of the living on the mechanical should be equally funny -
as proven by
Lewis Padgett's insane, but very human robots or nearly anything written
by
Pratchett.

Mr. Poe, fits Mr. Bergson's description of humor like a glove, but with
one finger sticking up out of the gothic pit like poor Peter's in M&D.
Not quite the unpretentious Brothers Marx or the brilliant deep diving
of the ever thoughtful Charlie Chaplin, for whom (thinking of my
favorite film of all Times, Modern Times, I did confuse it with Dickens
the other day, but who was the wiser and who cares anyway, all examples
of the Counterforce, including those in novels Pin * Chon   read and
stole from, including his contemporaries,  end with GR) anarchy, as in
Pynchon, can be political, but can't get organized,  like the strike in
MT, but must always be, again as in Pynchon the Slothrop's Super Heroes,
good natured and fun so as to Counter some paranoid force or social
anxiety. To make fun of the world is a difficult art. To offer some
alternative to the lampooned or some way out for the marooned is not in
the cards. What alternative does Pynchon even suggest? Keep Cool, but
Care? Oh Tish. What alternative does Poe offer to the world decapitated,
out of breath, its heart beating like a dooms day clock? Why both these
Americans assault the reader. We will want cause and effect. Here it is.
A Rasp of reason rubbing our noses bloody. And here comes the ice pick
in the forehead. 
Boing! Irrational, anxious, ah, here it comes, here it come, here comes
your 19th irrational obsession---Death, Sex, and of course
Transcendence. 
Where is the Love? Give me some Love. Where is the Hope? 
Ah, we have to look. We have to search and find that needle in a
hay-stack. But what are we looking for? A needle? No, a ruptured duck
(discharge, BTW, I think a Donald Duck is a discharge for
homosexuality), now a way home, now a heart, a brain, some courage, some
hash, a girl, Oz.....but we've got to have that detective story thing
going because we need the moral half. And we have to have a tall-tale,
cause we need to laugh if we are going to keep searching for this
protean objective--self, home, freedom, america....
The tall-tal comedy dupes us and the detective story keeps us looking
for clues. It's all quite serious and erudite and people who search it
all out don't want to hear about the lie, the comedy that subverts it
all in some postmodern reader trap red herrings flying about in all
directions and down the bowl flushed into a cul-de-sac. No, no, order in
the book, order in the book, but chaos is critical to doubt and doubt is
of the essence as every lawyer in Philadelphia knows. Yet, what a
beautiful marriage, the tall-tale comedy and the detective story. Both
have us wondering about looking for the unknown in the unknown world,
looking for clues in all the wrong places, meeting all the wrong people,
hearing all the wrong tales. We are lied to. And in the process, we are,
to use that unfortunate phrase of Constructing Postmodernism,
deconditioned, or if you prefer, detached from the modern mother ship,
or London or Modern reading and tossed out into the world where our
naive expectations are all trampled and muddled, no conventional plots,
characters, rational, motivation. And like Dixon, we can now tough the
tip of our noses, ouch!And we have sharpened out wits to boot. What lies
beneath? What is the substrate there? Detective reader, read the brow of
the might Shakespeare or the Sperm Wahle. No even SD Truck, a brilliant
linguist and very bad liar,  will succeed. 
But, as Poe will tell us, the disentanglement from is a moral
entanglement. 

 THE mental features discoursed of as the analytical, are, in
themselves, but little susceptible of analysis. We appreciate them only
in their effects. We know of them, among other things, that they are
always to their possessor, when inordinately possessed, a source of the
liveliest enjoyment. As the strong man exults in his physical ability,
delighting in such exercises as call his muscles into action, so glories
the analyst in that moral activity which disentangles. He derives
pleasure from even the
most trivial occupations bringing his talents into play. He is fond of
enigmas, of conundrums, of hieroglyphics; exhibiting in his solutions of
each a degree of acumen which appears to the ordinary apprehension
preternatural. His results, brought about by the very soul and essence
of method, have, in truth, the whole air of intuition. The faculty of
re-solution is possibly much invigorated by mathematical study, and
especially by that highest branch of it which, unjustly, and merely on
account
of its retrograde operations, has been called, as if par excellence,
analysis. Yet to calculate is not in itself to analyze. A
chess-player....

I like that one on the chess-player here....

Review in the Voice, trumpet player.