Jeffrey Thomson -- Position Paper

For most of western history, science and literature shared similar aims, if not methods – the elucidation of universal truths. Both disciplines were at work literally trying to read the mind of God. It is within the rise of modernism, however, through its articulation of a depersonalized, standardized methodology for science and a corresponding personalization of experience and the rise of the secular, literary self, that divisions and distinctions between the two disciplines are most fully articulated. Descartes, with his separation of mind from the material world and his quite brutal rationalism, is often thought of as the originator of this line of demarcation. However, Galileo even earlier, had asserted that only those forces and properties directly subject to mathematics were real; everything else -- taste, color, beauty, presence – are simply illusions. (Abram 32) Lyell and Darwin opened the most serious split between the two by situating humanity in a tiny slice of geologic time and by rejecting special creation and articulating an organic model for the development of species, including homo sapiens.

In particular post modernism, with it emphasis on the mediation of truth through circumstance and language, draws out the particular divergence between these two systems of thought. Today, literary types consider scientists mathematically rarified and ultimately detached from the ambiguous nature of language and experience; while scientists see writers as terminally sloppy and soft-headed, and in some cases even dangerous. In the words of Stephen J. Gould, “Scientists are soulless dial-twirlers; artists are illogical, self-absorbed blowhards” (50).

This is stereotype and simplification, of course, but I don’t think it is completely incorrect. Consider this example. In his attack on post-modern theory, and in particular deconstruction, Gardner writes, “When theories become…strongly confirmed they turn into ‘facts,’ such as the fact that the earth is round and circles the sun” (148). Now let’s take this penultimate statement: the earth is round. Dependant as it is on metaphor for its function, he equates the earth with roundness, without ever defining it. It might be argued that everyone knows what round means – a pool ball is round, so is a softball, so is the sun, so is the earth. But what does Gardner mean by round, really? Does he mean the actual, mathematical definition of a sphere? A set of points in three dimensional space equidistant from a point called the center of the sphere. If so, the earth falls far short of this definition, featuring variations of many miles from the heights of Everest to the basin of Death Valley, or even from Mt. Whitney to Death Valley across a few hundred miles of California. It gets even more convoluted if the smoothing oceans are removed and the abyssal trenches of the deep sea are considered. The fact is that the earth is not a perfect sphere; it cannot be, geographically. The functional (or scientific) measurement that would make it so (defining a set of points equidistant from a hypothetical center) invalidates our experience on the planet, one of plains and valleys, of the Tetons and the depths of the blue hole off the coast of Belize. Clearly, this cannot be what he means.

Does he mean that the earth approximates a geometric sphere, especially when seen from space? It may be (and this definition is the one many people would likely choose). But approximating a sphere is always a slippery gesture. How close is close enough to the Platonic truth? One mile of variation, five, twenty? And who decides? And its shape, flexible and pliable as it is (the earth now wider and flatter than in any time in recorded history and resembles more an “oblate spheroid”) has changed many times as well due mainly to fluctuations in the polar ice sheets. The earth is round only metaphorically, that is only linguistically. We use the term round as a kind of shortcut for general understanding – but in no way can it be said to represent a “fact” or “objective truth.”[1]

In another famous example, Benoit Mandelbrot once tried to reconcile a number of disparate measurements defining the length of the coastline of Britain. Looking closely at the problem, he discovered that the exact length of the coastline of Britain is for all intents and purposes unknowable, is essentially infinite. The final measurement depends of the length of one’s ruler – the smaller the tool the larger the final number.

Mandelbrot found that as the scale of the measurement becomes smaller, the measured length of the coastline rises without limit, bays and peninsulas revealing ever-smaller subbays and subpeninsulas – at least down to atomic scales, where the process does finally come to an end. Perhaps. (Gleick 96)

An inverse paradox is true for the roundness of the earth; the smaller the deviation from the geometric sphere the closer to round it gets, but there’s always another level to go down, always a smaller ruler to use. The earth approximates round the way the circumference of Britain approximates a distinct distance.

There is no final answer, no universal truth, no Platonic form in nature – such things only exist in the rarefied domain of pure math (the language farthest abstracted from reality) – and so we use metaphors to articulate and recapitulate the world in a means both lucid and sane The language of chaos theory to the opposite defines the world as fractal but also as scalable, filled with non-repeating patterns and articulate inconsistencies. It uses powerful computer modeling to approximate (there’s that word again) and articulate natural systems. It evokes and tries to capture the fluid dynamics of cigarette smoke tendriling through still air or water snaking over rock, the boom and bust within a population of rabbits or the equivalent patterns of veins in a leaf and the branching interstices of a river delta. It’s a system that tries to articulate the beautiful, mathematically unfriendly world of non-linearity – the natural world.

And even though chaos theory as a discipline is very recent, there are a number of authors who make use of the images and metaphors of chaos and fractal iteration to represent the natural environment and define a natural presence without reference to an exterior structure – whether that structure is mathematic or spiritual.

Henry David Thoreau, though he is often read as an inheritor of the Emersonian tradition of natural mysticism and oversoul fervor, possesses a mind that is more closely attuned to science than even he would have us believe.[2] The structure of Walden moves from early concerns with the social world and what his neighbors ought to do to a isolated, spiritual meditation on the figure of the pond and its role in articulating a natural transcendence. The gestures that bring him to this epiphany are literary (as he quotes frequently from many different mystical traditions), scientific (he measures the depth of the pond carefully and finds its deepest point at the intersection of its widest tangents, etc.), and observational – and this is where the chaos and phenomenology come in.

Between his cabin on the pond and Concord, Thoreau daily crossed a railroad cut where fine strata of sand were revealed, and in the spring, with water trellising down the cut, the sand flowed and, in his words, took

on the forms of sappy leaves or vines, making heaps of pulpy sprays a foot or more in depth, and resembling as you look down on them, the laciniated lobed and imbricated thalluses of some lichens; or your are reminded of coral, of leopards’ paws or birds feet, of brains or lungs or bowels, and excrement of all kinds. It is a truly grotesque vegetation…a sort of architectural foliage more ancient and typical than acanthus, chicory, ivy, vine, or any vegetable leaves…(203)

In the flowing sands of this roadside cut, one of the gifts of the railroad, Thoreau finds an organic world, a branching, forking pattern, one that finds its echo in many corners of the natural world. From the feet of animals to the veined leaves of wild flora. Far from being a wild, unruly multiplicity of structures, far from being complete disorder, Thoreau suggests that the natural world is composed of scalable versions of a singular model – the leaf or lobe:

No wonder the earth expresses itself outwardly in leaves, it so labors with the idea inwardly. The atoms have already learned this law and are pregnant with it. The overhanging leaf sees here its prototype. Internally, whether in the globe or animal body, it is a moist thick lobe, a word especially applicable to the liver and lungs and the leaves of fat….The feathers and wings of birds are still drier and thinner leaves. Thus, also, you pass from the lumpish grub in the earth to the airy and fluttering butterfly. The very globe continually transcends and translates itself and becomes winged in its orbit. (204)

In the rebirth of Spring, Thoreau sees the rebirth of the world as it “transcends and translates itself” from sand to the myriad of elements that define it as a world of luminous beauty and earthy grubbing. But this transcendence isn’t found in the potency of the human form and vision (unlike Emerson’s transparent eyeball); Thoreau finds his mysticism in shit and mud and lobes and leaves, in the earthy patterns and forms that life shares in common as it fills the world.

Chaos theory will articulate a similar, if not as grandiose, vision for the structure and form of many disparate elements of the natural world. Mandelbrot, our coastline geographer, was similarly essential in defining a new kind of geometry to represent the forms and contours of the natural world – from clouds to lightening to mountains, from the iterations of river deltas to the branching of veins in the human body or leaf. He coined the term fractal (from the Latin verb frangere, to break) to define a world of ordered disorder.

In the end, the word fractal came to stand for a way of describing, calculating, and thinking about shapes that are irregular, fragmented, jagged and broken-up – shapes from crystalline curves of snowflakes to the discontinuous dust of galaxies. A fractal curve implies an organizing structure that lies hidden among the hideous complications of such shapes. (Gleick 114)

Fractal geometry defines natural shapes – but it also suggests, as Thoreau does, a self-similarity or symmetry across scale. The echoes of form and pattern that Thoreau sees in the flowing sandbank are far from accidental; chaos theory argues that such shapes carry meaning. “The pit and tangles are more than blemishes distorting the classic shapes of Euclidean geometry. They are often the keys to the essence of a thing” (Gleick 94).

Wallace Stevens, hardly the scientist’s model, consistently articulates a vision of the natural world that reflects many of the precepts of chaos as well. His vision of nature is similar to Thoreau’s – a system of interlocking and equivalent forms that, when seen clearly, offer a kind of munificent transcendence free from absolutes and timeless truths. Two poems will have to stand in synecdoche. From his first collection, Steven’s “Sea Surface Full of Clouds” articulates a nautical world in full bloom. Clouds bloom in the sky, flowers on shore and the sea itself is a kind of blossom. Each blends into each, and, like a sequence of dreams, each image appears only to fold into the next.

The question is asked again and again, in different forms, because for Stevens, of course, the act of the poet observing the world is the creative moment. The answer is “C’etait mon enfant, mon bijou, mon âme” [ It was my child, my jewel, my soul.] The poet defines the world through the act of creating the correspondences he sees in the sky, the sea, and the shore. Because these forms (like Thoreau’s leaf and lobe) are inexact copies, non-repeating patterns that resemble but do replicate each other, Stevens is right to say that it is the human act of perception and intellectual participation in the natural world that creates the correspondences he sees in the world. But the problem, for Stevens, is the human mind’s inability to recognize the creative and continually refreshing power of the natural world; form becomes fixed in the human mind, becomes truth rather than representation.

In the third section of the poem, the images repeat again and begin to go stale and awkward, and the repeated question is answered gravely – C’etait mon esprit bâtarde, l’ignominie [It was my bastard spirit, the humiliation]. As he writes in the fortuitously titled “Connoisseur of Chaos,”

The world is rich with facts, Stevens argues, overflowing with them, but only in the expressions of the human mind do these facts take on form. The difficulty lies in believing the figures over the particulars, holding on to one version of the world in opposition to the fluid magnificence of the natural world in motion. One of the primary revelations of Stevens’ poetry (from the foolish rabbit to the isolated snowman) is that the creative mind articulates and names the world into being again and again. In these moment, Stevens recognizes one of the basic premises of chaos – “Nonlinearity [read chaos or even the natural world] means the act of playing the game has a way of changing the rules” (Gleick 24).

In a postmodern world where an understanding of the inherent slipperiness of language and definition characterizes our self-awareness and our potential for coming to a lucid understanding of the natural world, chaos theory offers a way of seeing and thinking about the natural world that more accurately reflects our actual contract with that world – one of mutual creation. There exists a physical world, of course, that runs by random chance on a foundation of physical laws – this is the principal truth of evolution. At the same time, we are pattern seeking animals and many of the patterns we find in nature are of our own making. The world that we see is in no small part a world that we create – we are the authors of our own understanding of that elusive physical world. And that understanding is always imperfect. Chaos theory, with its attempts to understand and describe the nonlinear world of nature, offers us a way of articulating more closely and carefully our actual experience in the world – one of a very articulate and attractive randomness. This experience has likewise is on that has been previously articulated by many authors working closely with natural imagery. Because writers like Stevens and Thoreau place their emphasis on nature and, in particular, natural processes (the fluid movements of the features and creatures of the natural world) to define their aesthetic aims, they often sound like chaos’ precursors.

I want to close with this summation from Stephen J. Gould’s last collection of essays, I Have Landed, which says most clearly how I see the juncture between literature and science:

many of us who labor in both domains [science and literature]…strongly feel that an overarching mental unity builds a deeper similarity than disparate subject matter can divide. Human creativity seems to work much as a coordinated and complex piece, whatever the different emphases demanded by disparate subjects – and we will miss the commonality if we only stress the distinctions of external subjects and ignore the unities on internal procedure. If we do not recognize the common concerns and characteristics of all creative human activity, we will fail to grasp several important aspects of intellectual experience – including the necessary interplay of imagination and observation (theory and empirics) as an intellectual theme, and the confluence of beauty and factuality as a psychological theme… (51)

Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-

Numerology, Urine Therapy, and Other Dubious Subjects. New York: W. W. Norton, 2000.

Gould, Stephen J. I Have Landed: The End of a Beginning in Natural History. New

Thoreau, Henry D. Walden and Resistance to Civil Government, ed. William Rossi.

Stevens, Wallace. The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York: Vintage, 1982.

[1] I don’t mean to pick on Gardner, whom I generally respect and read, but his essay on Alan Sokal’s hoax article published in Social Text uses some, admittedly, foolish oversteppings by literary theorists to try and dismiss deconstruction as “the latest French philosophical fad” rather than dealing frankly with its criticisms of language and structure(146). He goes on to say, “The language of science distinguishes sharply between language and science” (150). Science is either a language or it isn’t and if it is a language is it heir to all the knots and tangles that all other languages share.

[2] When asked to join the National Academy of Sciences he refused, calling himself a mystic and a natural sage.