Two Inches from Van Gogh
Two Inches from Van Gogh
Joe Plicka
On the Origins and Ends of Chaos
At a distance, chaos is beautiful. Think of a meteor shower. A volcanic eruption. A panoply of towering ocean swells cresting and colliding and shattering on land. The hum and press of urban life, as seen from the highest rooftop, is a divinely romantic scene for the little god peering over the edge.
Even words can appear stable on the surface and from afar, but cut one open and find a seething mass. Meanings curl and overlap and wriggle in the shadows. Language is a net, but even the largest, finest net can’t contain the chaos of thought.
*
“Chaos” is a word with deep, tangled roots. The Greeks used it first to signify a hole or empty space. A related adjective, chaunos, has been defined as “loose, spongy, having holes,” and a related verb, chaino, as “to gape, be wide open.” At some point, the word took on a cosmological / spiritual dimension: Chaos as infinite darkness and expanse, the formless void that surrounds Earth, or the watery, primordial mass of elements that the Demiurge shaped into reality.
Christians stuck it in the Genesis creation account, although some Jewish scholars insist the word doesn’t jive with the original Hebrew. Ovid added a dash of disorder in Metamorphoses. English writers ran with that, and by the 16th century, the word was commonly synonymous with utter confusion and a jumbled, often distressing lack of organization.
Modern physicists used the word to represent a theory about how certain systems are unpredictable and therefore uncontrollable because of their extreme sensitivity to initial conditions (i.e., change one tiny variable at the beginning and get a completely different, unexpected result at the end). See also: chaos theory, the weather, the butterfly effect, gravitational fields, general relativity, the way smoke rises, ocean turbulence, etc. But even among scientists, no one seems to agree on a single, stable definition of the word.
Every morning, I rise from a pool of chaos—bottomless, quicksilver dream logic. Eyes open, I’m again fixed in time and space, retinas flooded with light, the machine of consciousness creaking into gear. Our waking lives, some would say, are spent on a plane of reality that is membrane-thin. We are like water striders, skating across the face of the deep, kept afloat by nothing more than surface tension. But the season is short. We fade, fly apart, sink back down into the shadowed realm from whence we came.
*
My grandfather was a man of enormous intelligence, capability, and compassion. Decidedly atheistic and irreligious. His blind spot, what he refused to consider even when it began to crush him, was his own mortality. He complained bitterly when doctors told him his heart and kidneys were worn out. “I feel fine,” he would counter, 98-year-old eyebrows arched in disbelief. He ran away from the chaos, even as the ground beneath his feet gave way, still firm in his insistence that he wasn’t helpless like his fellow nursing home residents, that he just needed to get out, meet some new people, travel again. He didn’t talk about the end. I think he was afraid (as I often still am). A couple weeks before he died, he told me about a dream he’d had: in it, my mom—his main caretaker those last years—was leading him to a “special place.” “What place?” I asked. “I have no idea,” he said. “How did it feel?” I asked. He thought about it. “Mysterious,” he finally answered, smiling and waggling his fingers. In the end, of course, the mystery found him. The surface melted and he sank into shadow.
*
Death is chaotic. Dying is chaotic. The body fails and the mind flees. Biochemical processes that automatically and regularly sustained us for years begin to scramble and degenerate. We forget where we are. We forget who we are. We peer into the abyss between heaven and earth, the dark empty space. What we really fear is uncertainty. In a chaotic system, there appears to be no underlying pattern or predictable path. The chaos of the battlefield. The chaos of the crowd. The chaos of the storm. The chaos of the internet. The chaos of raising children. The chaos of poverty. We might get hurt, or we might be fine. There are too many variables. Control is a fallacy. We know this, at least we feel it, but we lie to ourselves, jump in anyway. We have to. We roll the dice and the dice rolls us.
My other grandfather walked toward the chaos. I don’t think that makes him a better person or more worthy of redeeming love. Just that he cultivated a different stance. Call it faith. He approached the void with something like hope and a droll curiosity. “Now’s the time to say goodbye,” he would say to my parents as he wasted away, a reference to the Mickey Mouse Club theme song from the ’60s. In a sense, he’d spent the better part of his life preparing (directly and indirectly) for this moment, what it might feel like, where it might lead. After so much time spent in prayer and meditation, wrestling with faith in a chaotic world, I think he was more or less unphased by the inevitable uncertainty of those final days. He expected it. Too weak to talk, his eyes would catch my dad’s from across the room. “Woof,” he’d whisper, an inside joke and shorthand sign of affection. When the final hour came, he looked around one last time, then dove under.
*
Faith is an active wager that order will arise out of disorder. Or a decision to trust that, eventually, we will see the way God sees: that where we see a shapeless mass, he sees a deeper pattern. Where we find a void, a mess, he offers the space and raw materials to create something new and maybe better.
It is well-documented by those who study near-death experiences (NDEs) that the mysterious event dramatically changes people. Even that it “kills the person you used to be,” for better and for worse.
Bruce Greyson is a doctor and Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. He has been gathering stories and data about NDEs for many years. He says many people report that “one of the most therapeutic things about the experience was the complete lack of control you have.” They say that “something else” is in control of what’s happening. It is this stark realization that control is fictitious and, even more importantly, unnecessary, that becomes a definitive aspect of NDEs. The power of the experience might be encapsulated as such: control (or order, or certainty) and the capacity for joy are (mostly) unrelated.
This is vital, because many days we may not see any meaningful design or pattern. We may find no joy in what we see, hear, or feel. We ask, “where is the beauty?” All is chaos. We may despair, uncertain of what our lives mean or where they are leading us. Remember: If beauty is the flower, chaos is the soil.
*
From the Hawaiian creation chant, the Kumulipo (translation: “Beginning-in-deep-darkness”): “At the time of the night of Makali’i [winter] / Then began the slime which established the earth, / The source of deepest darkness, […]”
In Byron’s Heaven and Earth: A Mystery, the poet tackles the flood of Genesis. Rebellious angels have fallen in love with the daughters of earth and are begging them to come fly away as the rain pours down. “Come Anah!” says the angel Azaziel to his beloved mortal. “Quit this chaos-founded prison / To which the elements repair, / To turn it into what it was […]”
We know the rest of the story: Submerged in darkness, the old earth passes away. The watery mass organizes itself again into rivers, seas, and clouds, and terrestrial order is revealed anew.
Ruper Porpora
Chaos-founded. Chaos as foundation. Foundational. The requisite precondition for new life. Birth is chaotic. Infancy is chaotic. Yet Jesus’ invitation is to be born again (and again and again). And to be (like) children. What does this mean? To revert to a place of not always knowing, of living day-to-day, of letting go and learning to trust? His first followers learned this. They were often amazed, even confused, constantly re-assessing what they thought they knew, stepping into the dark before seeing the light. Is this not chaos? Uncertainty? Lack of control? And then of course this Christ, this enigmatic disrupter and reputedly all-powerful messiah, he himself yielded control to larger forces, until even he was destroyed, passing into the void. Yet, we are offered repeatedly this wisdom: be not afraid.
His was not a gospel of despair, but of wholeness, of progress, of completion. I am here to disperse and gather, he says, to confuse and clarify, to liquidate and forge again. Die and resurrect. For Christians who may not believe in a literal cycle of birth and death, we should at least believe in the spiritual one: a million spiritual deaths and rebirths, our old habits and understandings dissolving into chaos from which beauty forms and leaps forth once more.
Many religious and political authorities were (and still are) afraid of chaos, afraid of the void, the uncharted. Jesus, the wanderer, often (but not always) wandered from tradition and convention and into the unknown. He saw that something beautiful had begun to deform, wither, rot. Something new was manifesting. Clear the way, he said. Give up your prejudices, your preconceptions, and your socially constructed virtues. You are witnesses to an ongoing nativity. Here it comes—a new law, a new faith, and most of all, a new kingdom, this one inside yourself. The authorities were understandably anxious. The invitation felt like a threat. The beautiful thing that they loved so much—this elaborately ordered system, the history and legacy of their forefathers, maintained and passed on with great effort—they wanted to protect it from disorder and confusion. Preserve it. Save it from the flood.
*
In Perelandra, book two of his “space trilogy,” C. S. Lewis constructs an Adam-and-Eve mythology for the planet Venus. And just like Earth’s founding parents, Venus’ first inhabitants are given a prohibitive commandment. The planet is covered with what could be described as floating islands, where the world’s new Man and Woman live. The islands are dense mats of plant material that ride the currents of the planet’s vast, warm oceans, providing shelter, nourishment, and transportation. However, there is one immovable location in this world, not at the mercy of the seas: the “Fixed Land,” where Venus’ version of Adam and Eve are forbidden from making their home.
Of course, the emissary of the Evil One arrives to tempt the royal couple to disobedience. As opposed to Adam and Eve in Genesis, they do not transgress. But it is the rationale behind this religious fantasy’s parallel commandment to avoid the Fixed (forbidden) Land that is so striking: It is the very chaos and creative potential of the floating islands—their constant movement and unpredictability—that is valued above the dry stability and potentially stifling order of the Fixed Land. To live on the Fixed Land would be “to cling to the old good instead of taking the good that came.” In the moral calculus of Perelandra, the Devil’s defining characteristic is that he was unable to let go of the “old good,” and “has been clinging since before the worlds were made.”
Says the Green Lady (Venus Eve): “But the old good would cease to be good at all if he did that.” Replies Ransom, her earthly mentor and the book’s protagonist: “Yes. It has ceased. And still he clings.”
*
It is only natural, when we find something beautiful, something good, something praiseworthy, that we want more of it. We want to repeat it. We don’t want to lose it. This thirst for goodness and excellence can tip into a need, and finally an obsession, with control. If only we could control our environment, our circumstances, and even other people, then we would never lose what we love.
Any good mystic will tell you: This is an illusion. As the ancient traditions (and even modern physics) seem to indicate, the underlying fabric of reality is more akin to . . . dare we say it? Chaos. Out of which the ordered beauty of creation rises and then—like a curling wave—crashes, melts, and slides back down to the deep.
More from Perelandra: “This itch to have things over again, as if life were a film that could be unrolled twice or even made to work backwards . . . was it possibly the root of all evil? No: of course the love of money was called that. But money itself—perhaps one valued it chiefly as a defence against chance, a security for being able to have things over again, a means of arresting the unrolling of the film.”
To have things over again (pleasure, comfort, power). To defend against chance. We hold on too tight. We don’t know when to let go. And so we make war, hoard wealth, persecute and turn our backs on each other—not because we are inherently evil and hateful, but because we are afraid. Afraid of losing control. Afraid of the chaos.
*
Up close, beauty is chaotic. Stand two inches from a Van Gogh. Look at a rose petal under a microscope. Spend 24 hours with a person who you think has life all figured out.
Grandfathers, I am headed your way. We are sparks flying off a burning log, rising into the vast spaces above. Soon I won’t be visible, but I am not gone. I’m not in control, but in faith, I’m not forgotten. I’ll be swirling in the dark with you, riding the currents, waiting for holy flames to reignite.
Joe Plicka
Writer & Teacher
Joe is a writer & teacher published in Brevity, Booth and Braided Way Magazine.
Photography by Angela Tozzi
