at least tangentially P-related: Class of all classes

[Mark Kohut]

Here is another closer-to-home notion that I have had based on this concept so finely articulated by you two: 
   
  Do you not in some conversations and attempts to understand another, or certain situations, etc. often think, often argue with others, that "it only looks coherent [what might be called 'smooth'], unified, plottable, after the fact?  One could find patterns in that hydrocarbon can bouncing around Oedipa's bathroom but it would only explain the past, so to speak? And, such pattern-finding is even more impossible when we try to understand the actions of certain others?....Or, I know people like yashmeen, as well as I know certain other people I know-----yet I 'understand' their next actions/reactions not at all (compared to some people
  who are more predicatable)?

Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
    "chaos' as chance, in the largest senses, in AtD?
  yashmeeen: a sort of "chaotic" movement of character, an open-ended character not a character-armored one.....a personality of hope, in your connections....?

Monte Davis <monte.davis at verizon.net> wrote: 
  David Payne sez:

> So Yashmeen (ATD 589) is not so much sinuous and curvy as she 
> is angles, points, and lines--all elbows, knees, and neck? 
> 
> Of course the math reference may be metaphorical, referring 
> to Yashmeen' s turn-on-a-dime life full of disappearing acts -- 
> a lifestyle desired by that Polish undertaker in Gravity's 
> Rainbow (677-678, Penguin).

That works well for me. Well-behaved, calculable (in Pynchon's metaphorical
cheme = amenable to calculus) processes, biographies, timelines, histories
can all be co-opted. Hope always lies in the irruptive, unpredictable "path
of a punctured hairspray can ricochetted off a wall"

-- which sounds like a Newtonian billard ball at first, but only with
idealizing assumptions. When you get down to the crunchy details of the
*exact* shape of the puncture, the *exact* turbulent flow of escaping gas,
the *exact* distribution of force and crumple and rebound each time can
meets tile... oops, chaos crept in somewhere, and by the third or fourth
bounce, no prediction is worth jack.


  


       
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