March 4, 2022
Last week’s newsletter was about the conflict between our desire to create an identity and a life for ourselves and those forces that resist the human will. In traditional mythologies, those forces may take the form of the will of the gods and fate; in modern mythologies, of the will of an economic and political elite and the invisible yet ubiquitous power systems of which even the godlike elite are merely functions. But one thing was left out of the picture: the role of chance. The human will to self-creation and the power systems that limit it are both manifestations order and control, for better or worse. Chance is what escapes order and control. Chance is randomness, disorder: in its fully revealed form, it is chaos.
As such, it is a threat to the human need for security. I have touched in previous newsletters upon how the Western neoliberal order of the last 40 or so years, by abolishing the security of average people in the name of higher efficiency and greater profits for a few has provoked a backlash of would-be authoritarianism that is now a serious threat to democracy itself. The attraction of authoritarianism is the attraction of a strongman who promises security in exchange for blind obedience. But on top of that, for the last two years our security was additionally undermined by Covid—a mutation, in other words a product of chance. And not just one mutation, but successive waves of new, random changes, each more contagious than the last, that have devastated our lives. The lesson of Covid is that evolution by natural selection, the basis of life itself, is driven by pure chance. One does not have to respect Creationism to understand, perhaps even to sympathize, with the impulse to prop up an absurdly outdated theology, if only that theology could guarantee that there is a controlling power behind the random terrors of life, a Providence that has its reasons, if only we could understand them.
In Greek mythology, chance was deified as Tyche, the goddess of luck, whose worship in the Hellenistic age, an age of social upheaval and insecurity with analogies to our own, is said to have rivaled that of the traditional Olympian deities. In Latin, Tyche became Fortuna and acquired her emblematic Wheel, which she has retained down to her present ritual of worship on a TV game show.
The hugely influential representation of blindfolded Fortuna and her Wheel in Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy in the 6th century CE is actually a revisionist interpretation: behind the seemingly arbitrary rise and fall of human fortunes is a Providence in whose divine perspective all is for the best. This is the “consolation” bequeathed by Lady Philosophy to Boethius, who is in sore need of it as he is writing his book in prison under sentence of death by a barbarian Emperor. The rise and fall of princes and kings on the Wheel of Fortune became a defining image of tragedy in the Middle Ages. When dramatic tragedy developed in Shakespeare’s time, however, the didactic emphasis on divine Providence increasingly disappeared, reaching a culmination in the cosmic bleakness of Shakespeare’s King Lear.
In the 18th century, the Enlightenment attempted to replace Christian ideology with a modern ideology based on reason and science. Science provides the modern world with a new vision of order that in effect abolishes not only Providence but also chance. The basis of science is causality. The universe is an infinitely complex webwork of causes and effects, governed by laws. This means that there can be no real human free will: every human act is determined by some cause. In the middle of the 20th century, existentialism strove to deny this, the famous instance being Merseult in Albert Camus’ The Stranger (1942), who claims to have killed an Arab because the sun was in his eyes—in other words, for no real reason at all. André Gide’s Lafcadio’s Adventures (1953) popularized the notion of the acte gratuit, the gratuitous act that has no motive other than to demonstrate the human freedom from motives—which is, however, itself a motive. But many people are willing to accept scientific determinism as a fair price to pay for living in a rational and thus predictable universe obeying universal laws. If there is no free will, there is also no chance, no arbitrary randomness at the heart of things. I think many people find this comforting.
What, however, of chaos theory? Not that I have expertise in this area, to put it mildly, but so-called chaos theory is actually a vindication of deterministic causality rather than its abrogation. Unlike the crudely mechanistic causality sometimes postulated by the 19th century, chaos theory says that certain circumstances are characterized by “a sensitive dependence on initial conditions.” A very slight cause can ripple down a chain of effects far too minute and complex to be measured, let alone predicted, which means that some phenomena are going to remain unpredictable. You may contemplate this while you are stuck in traffic which seems to have no conceivable reason for suddenly coming to a complete bumper-to-bumper stop, in the middle of a sudden snow shower not predicted in the morning’s forecast, on a day when the stock market surprised the analysts by spasming in momentary panic. What you will be contemplating, and experiencing, has been deemed the “butterfly effect” after a famous paper in 1972 by Edward Lorenz, “Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?” But Lorenz and other theorists were only establishing a mathematical basis for a phenomenon that science fiction writers had imagined years before, especially in stories about time travel. I very much wonder whether Lorenz was aware of Ray Bradbury’s famous story “A Sound of Thunder” (1952), in which a time traveler steps on a butterfly in the prehistoric past and returns to a vastly changed future. But the point remains that unpredictable does not mean uncaused, only unmeasurable.
When we get down to the sub-atomic level of quantum mechanics, causality becomes even more complicated, giving rise to the “many worlds interpretation” of quantum effects, a version of what is popularly known today as the multiverse. Once again the science fictional imagination has preceded or at least moved in parallel with scientific theory, producing the “alternate history” subgenre in which history has taken a different turning because of a difference in some initial condition. To choose an example not quite at random (which after all is impossible, right?), in Kim Stanley Robinson’s famous story “The Lucky Strike” (1984), the refusal of the pilot to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima greatly alters subsequent modern history—for the better. When the story was reprinted in the Outspoken Authors volume of the same title in 2009, Robinson appended to it an essay about “alternate history” with the title “A Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions.”
Still, even if it is not in conflict with the law of causality, the emphasis on uncertainty and indeterminacy in modern science befits an era of increasing social uncertainty, insecurity, chaos. Most recently—the term was coined in 1989 by science fiction writer Bruce Sterling—a style known as “slipstream” has become notably popular. I say style rather than genre or sub-genre, because slipstream is, to make a very intentional pun, genre fluid, incorporating elements of science fiction, fantasy, and realistic fiction while not being categorizable as any of them. Driving the style is a mood, a postmodern feeling that, whatever the imagination’s “rage for order” (a phrase of Wallace Stevens) may desire, may in fact urgently need, reality simply doesn’t make much sense. In a slipstream story, things happen that are unexplained and at times impossible, because that’s how it is. I must say that in its more simplistic examples, slipstream makes me a bit impatient because it becomes a clever and all-too-easy way of showing off and looking cool—“jazzing around,” John Gardner called it, having in mind the stories of slipstream precursor Donald Barthelme. A more current term is “mindfuck.” Let’s write a story about how a pencil is elected president of the United States, right.
Deeper examples manage to capture the combination of high-spirited absurdity and underlying anxiety that is the hallmark of the style, while at the same time making clear that postmodernism did not invent that combination. It is there in the Theatre of the Absurd, in such a play as Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, in which everyone in a village turns into a rhinoceros because, well, everybody’s doing it, but which has a dark political subtext about the contagiousness of fascism that is chillingly apt once again for our own time. It is there, earlier, in the Alice books of Lewis Carroll: a little boy turning into a pig is not essentially different from a pencil becoming president—or maybe vice-president, if he is a No. 2. Indeed, as the animal metamorphoses show, the Ur-text of slipstream is apparently Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which Ovid imagines, as one example, in a mood of light-hearted horror, what it is like to be trapped in the body of a cow, like Io. “The Woman Who Did Not Know Fear,” the most recent story I have read by the most eminent slipstream practitioner, Kelly Link, is about a woman who is buttonholed during a long plane trip and has to endure a story about a woman who was incapable of feeling fear until, as a cure, a bucket of eels was thrown into her bed. The woman listening to this story has just escaped from a long sojourn at a motel due to a repeatedly canceled flight, who has controlled her anxiety disorder by swimming endless laps in the pool. Unlike the previous examples, nothing is strictly speaking impossible, but the feeling of being trapped caused by the endlessly canceled flight generates a mood that Freud called “the uncanny,” which translates the German unheimlich, un-homelike. The uncanny is when the impossible, or at least unthinkable, breaks into the safe and familiar. It is like having eels thrown into your bed. One of Freud’s examples is seeing your own double, and on the flight the woman has been mistaken for her wife, who looks very much like her, and consequently learns more than she wants to know about her wife’s previous erotic relationships. The whole narrative is ruled by chance: the accident of a flight cancellation, the chance of being mistaken for your wife by a complete stranger who happens to know her, and so on.
Superstition could be defined as a series of obsessive-compulsive rituals that attempt to control our feeling of anxiety about the unpredictability of reality, the feeling that, out of nowhere, anything could happen. A lot of superstitions are concerned with “luck,” and luck is in turn frequently connected with numbers, which symbolize the hidden order of things. There are lucky numbers, like 7, and unlucky numbers, like 13. Mythology is lurking just under the surface in such superstitions: 7 is the number of creation, as in Genesis, and 13 disrupts the fullness of 12, a number of completeness. I have read that people in the East will sometimes pay substantial sums of money to acquire a phone number, for example, considered to be lucky. Gambling, which usually involves numbers, is a psychological addiction less, I suspect, because of greed and more because it is a way of trying to acquire, and thus control, luck. I have also read that studies have shown how gambling, like other forms of risk-taking, is up to a point a self-fulfilling prophecy: those who feel lucky end up actually being lucky more often than those who are filled with doubt.
Superstition is mythology kidnapped by anxiety. Intensified, it becomes full-blown paranoia and spawns conspiracy theories, which are always about a hidden order, however sinister, behind the apparent workings of chance, another symptom of our chaotic time. But Blake said that if a fool were to persist in his folly, he would become wise, and to persist in the folly we call superstition is to arrive at the concept that C.G. Jung called synchronicity, “meaningful coincidence.” Which is of course an oxymoron, meaningful meaninglessness. But the full title of Jung’s monograph on the subject is “Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle,” which is not quite such an oxymoron, because not all connections are causal. We tend to think of causality as a “horizontal” relation: this leads to that leads to that, along a line that, as the structural linguist Roman Jakobson showed in a famous diagram, is closely related to the line of a sentence on a page, where subjects, verbs, and objects have a logical relationship. But each word in the sentence also has a “vertical” relationship with other words to which it is related not logically but associatively. Likewise, all the elements of the reality outside the text are connected to one another horizontally by relationships of cause and effect, but at the same time have vertical, associative relationships. Jakobson identified the vertical axis with metaphor, the verbal expression of association. My Valentine’s Day epic catalogue of associations for the colors red and white is an example of this kind of vertical association.
The horizontal, causal relationships of fact and logic are those of ordinary consciousness, but, rigorously tested and refined, also of science. The vertical, associative relationships are those of dream and other manifestations of the unconscious, but, rigorously refined and developed, of imagination in mythology and the arts. The latter can be, but are not necessarily, superstitious or “merely emotional.” In short, the vertical, associative connections of things are an aspect of reality equal to and complementary to empirical, causal reality. In astrology, the configuration of our stars does not cause the configuration of our lives. Rather, they are associatively related, so that one may be a key to the significance of the other. May be—or may not be. The relationship is intuitive, and based on interpretation, and is thus anything but scientific. That does not mean, for all the commercial bastardization of astrology, that it is merely hogwash. It merely means that your hog is mythological rather than literal. The same is true of the numbers and images on Tarot cards, and of the trigrams of the I Ching, the Chinese method of divination older than many mythologies. All of these systems are based on chance: the chance that you were born in the moment you were; the chance you drew particular cards in a particular order from a deck of possibilities; the chance that you cast yarrow stalks or coins in a certain pattern, leading to a certain trigram in the I Ching that has a little oracle attached to it.
How can chance, the essence of meaninglessness, be meaningful—except of course out of the hysterical need for meaning, order, and certainty? What makes such divination different from the claims of con artists? My Tarot reading or I Ching oracle discloses secret insight—and horse de-wormer cures Covid. Why should I buy this, in any sense of the term? Yes, the big problem is how to tell the visionary from the venal, and not end up buying a mythological pig in a poke. No guarantees, and the number of artists wedded to crackpot theories is long and depressing. My suggestion is that the difference between occultism and genuine vision is that occultism, using the term loosely, thinks in terms of some kind of secret order or power “out there.” What is important, however, is not the zodiac, the cards, the yarrow stalks, much less some supposed power that stands behind them: that is a projection. What happens is that the imagination within uses the configuration of stars, cards, or yarrow stalks as a catalyst calling forth patterns of significance buried deep within us, patterns brought forth to consciousness by the creative act of interpretation. But the external objects are only a pretext. That is why T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land, Robertson Davies in his novel The Rebel Angels, and Samuel R. Delany in his science fiction novel Nova can employ the Tarot cards in serious literary works. The Bible itself has been used as a method of divination for centuries: you ask it a question, then open it and choose a verse at random, and interpret the verse in the light of your question and your need.
Such methods of divination provide a kind of do-it-yourself mythology kit. It is easy to see that the Tarot cards, with their Major Arcana such as the Hanged Man, the Fool, and Death form the elements of a mythology, some assembly required. The choosing of the cards is by chance—but the interpretation of the chosen cards is analogous to therapy, calling forth the desires and fears and unconscious knowledge of the participant. The trigrams of the I Ching have become more abstract, but still go back to a mythological Inner and Outer Arrangement in which the trigrams are characters in a punning sense, elements in a writing system that are also characters in a total pattern that forms a double cycle: in other words, a mandala, emblem of an order that arises paradoxically out of chance.
Thus, these symbol systems expand into a potential mythology, and the individual myths expand into a total form represented by such a symbol of integration as the mandala. Yet it sometimes comes as a surprise to my students when I mention that a good number of intellectuals and critics are in fact hostile to myth, because they see mythology as a closed belief system, a new determinism. In Samuel R. Delany’s science fiction novel The Einstein Intersection, the main character, Lobey, who has lost his love Friza and is on a quest to kill the mutant Kid Death and rescue her from the underworld in which she seems to be imprisoned, rebels when he is told that he is playing out the ancient myth of Orpheus, because that means he is caught within some kind of tragic pattern that he can’t change. But, he is told, that is not how myth works. In fact, the myth doesn’t “work” at all. We choose, and we create our lives, merely utilizing the myth as an aid to understanding and making choices—so we have come full circle to the self-fashioning of the previous newsletter. And instead of binary oppositions, in The Einstein Intersection everything comes in threes. We may play out the pattern, or rebel against it—but there is a third choice of doing something based on the mythical pattern but “different,” the novel’s key term.
Myth can become too much an appendage of the vision of order. But it also has its own safeguard: the Trickster. Many mythologies have a character who is neither good nor evil but both at once, a paradoxical and morally ambiguous union of opposites. The Trickster is the spirit of chaos that is in fact vital to creativity, whether individual, social, or cosmological. In the symbolism of alchemy he is Mercurius, the elusive quicksilver—and it is no accident that Tyche is sometimes said to be the offspring of Aphrodite and Hermes, the Greek name of the Latin Mercurius. The Trickster is the spirit of chance, of unpredictability, the disrupter of order—and he is absolutely necessary to the health of a society, as the Middle Ages and Renaissance recognized by incorporating figures such as the Fool and the Lord of Misrule into their carnivals and festivities. In Goethe’s Faust, the Trickster is Mephistopheles, not at all the same as Satan the principle of pure evil. His task is to throw Faust, a middle-aged professor who has never really lived, out the door into the world of chance and choice, of love and loss, to force him to do what he should have done when he was the age of his own undergraduates—namely, to dive into the world and see what happens, usually by means of making terrible mistakes.
“Know thyself” is in fact the dictum of the Delphic oracle of Apollo, whose voice emerged from the mouth of his priestess after she went into a trance from breathing fumes arising from a cleft in the earth. It is wisdom from below, as ambiguous as the voice of Macbeth’s witches. For the self that we come to know is paradoxical. We do need order and security, but at the same time we need to escape from them, and the means of that escape is chance. In “Corson’s Inlet,” the poet A.R.Ammons takes a walk in the natural setting of the poem’s title, and says:
the walk liberating, I was released from forms, from the perpendiculars, straight lines, blocks, boxes, binds of thought
He grants that
I allow myself eddies of meaning: yield to a direction of significance
and yet concludes
but Overall is beyond me: is the sum of these events I cannot draw
Trained as a biologist, he walks amidst a Darwinian world teeming with metamorphosis, thinking that
risk is full: every living thing in siege: the demand is life, to keep life
It is a world “rich with entropy” and yet “not chaos.” And the natural world, of forms, but forms in constant process, becomes in the poem’s resonant conclusion the model for his art:
I will try to fasten into order enlarging grasps of disorder, widening scope, but enjoying the freedom that Scope eludes my grasp, that there is no finality of vision, that I have perceived nothing completely, that tomorrow a new walk is a new walk.
Some artists, John Cage in music and Jackson Pollack in painting, have sought to relinquish control of their art as much as possible to chance. I usually feel less radical than that. Still, it can be immensely liberating to follow the technique of one of my favorite painters, Joan Miró, whose procedure was to make a mark on a canvas or piece of paper, and let the work gestate from it. As opposed to following some Grand Plan that will only give you writer’s block, to translate from his art to mine. Yes, I know: what sense does this make coming from a guy who wrote a 450-page encyclopedic book organized by a mandala diagram? But the lesson of John Crowley’s great fantasy novel Little, Big (itself a great-sized tome) is that there is a strange identity between the very little and the very big, symbolized by the fairies who are, with one exception, the novel’s major characters. The epic or anatomy or encyclopedic work that gives the Big Picture, that fastens into order enlarging grasps of disorder, captures something crucial about the imagination.
But in these newsletters I have followed Miró’s method, or lack of method: start anywhere, and see what happens.
What has happened is mixed: occasionally, in what amounts to a form of self-publishing, I have inadvertently let in chance in the bad sense of chaos. In the last newsletter alone, my friend Dennis, who has the kind of copy editor’s sharp eye that I decidedly do not, helpfully and tactfully pointed out that I perpetrated at least two typos and got the title of my own song wrong at its first mention. Ugh. My apologies, dear readers. However, the technique of improvisation has also led me to serendipitous insights I would not otherwise have had.
It also leads to an appreciation of the unique, which is the greatest gift given to us by chance. Yes, there are universal patterns, but this particular rose exemplifies its pattern in a new way, unique, not like any other rose. Whatever science may try to claim, there is no reason for this precious uniqueness. It just is, and is a miracle. The same is true of people, as we perhaps learn when we fall deeply in love with someone. Nothing is generic, no one is generic, which is why Blake said that to generalize is to be an idiot. So, yes, I wrote an all-encompassing book. But the architectonic and the improvisational are not either-or: each captures an aspect of the imagination’s Overall. In his book on romance, the narrative form that he calls The Secular Scripture, Northrop Frye says that there is a line of poetry by Alexander Pope that exists in two versions, original and revised. The original referred to “A mighty maze of walks without a plan,” which Frye links to the human vision of romance. Pope revised this into “A mighty maze, but not without a plan,” which he links to the divine vision of the Bible. Frye concludes that “the maze without a plan and the maze not without a plan are two aspects of the same thing.” Thus “there is no finality of vision.” Which is in fact a good thing, because it means that “tomorrow a new walk is a new walk.” Or at least I hope it does.