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"So ... Winter is going ... I know because the obtuse redolence of ramps disolves my nose hairs as I lumber briskly along the north bank of the thawing mountain crick. "It's a line from Frank Bubba Ball's latest Appalachian gothic romance titled Breath of Death. Now most folks, when they read the word ramps, might think Ball is alluding to the smell of car fumes and asphalt coming from perhaps a nearby interstate highway, where ramps are employed to get on and off. Error! Ball here means the wild leek that grows in the forest and is called ramp, short for rampion, an onion-like plant of Europe and Asia with edible leaves and roots.
Etymologically, ramp of the common sense derives from the French verb ramper (to climb). Hence a ramp in the sense of a highway artery is something you climb up. Then there is ramp as a verb, which can mean to act menacingly, or to assume a threatening stance like rearing--with forelegs ready to strike--a popular pose of large jungle cats, dragons, and annoyed crabs. The familiar English words rampage and rampant, then, also arise from this sense.
However, rampion (today's veggie) is likely a growth out of the old Latin for turnip, rapum, and an alteration of the Old French raiponce, from Old Italian, raponzo. And some etymologist argue that this is the source of the English rape, "plant."
This brings us to Chicago, home to at least one of America's most obdurately conservative universities. Chicago has always been a smelly place, formerly in a nice sort of way. For chicagou, according to one Webster, is Algonquian for "place of the wild onion." But some scholars dispute this meaning of the Indian name and offer skunk, or powerful, as English equivalents. Baloney. Chicago was so named by Native Americans for the horrendous numbers of wild leeks (Allium tricocum) that once grew there many many moons ago. Ramps we call them today. Ramps are a powerfully pungent perennial with leaves like those of the lily, edible bulbs like wild onions, and an odor reminiscent of the stench of a thousand dead hippies rotting in southern California sunshine, nearly Proustian, like the bouquet of that truffle trove near Dordogne.
In rural West Virginia it is against the rules to eat ramps in school, or to attend spring classes with ramps on your breath or elsewhere. You see, ramps in addition have a giant, penetrating smell that lingers and malingers. Pervading they are. Their chemistry permeates and infests not just your breath but your entire being, so that when you eat ramps, then sweat, their great odor leaks onto your skin via your perspiration. Aah, Gibbonsesque fabrication this is not!
The wild leek is a vegetable rich in folk and mythic tradition. Ramps thrive under the sign of Aries (March 21 to April 21). Conjecture also has it, then, that ramps is a modern shortening of Ram's Son. Usually the first and greenest shoots of the Spring forest floor, they can grow straight through a late snow unbruised, probably thanks to the astronomical acidic content of their stalks and leaves. It is a high-test ascorbic acid, vitamin C, that makes ramps a valuable spring tonic and the object of many fine ramp festivals througout Appalachian communities in April, yes, yet the cruelest month, forsooth.
The exquisite taste of ramps resembles a wonderful mixture of onion, garlic, pepper, and my Uncle Quail's stale beer mustard. And ramps are a very attractive botanical that produce nifty white blooms in late April or early May. However, the smell can render some people comatose. Ramps will ruin a party unless all guests partake, since a fix of ramps is your only defense against the irrefragable presence of a lone leek nosher. To confound and stir ambivalence, ramps are reputed to be aphrodisiacal, which can make for orgies during most phases of the moon. The Marquis de Sade, recent scholarship shows, ate the European bear leek (Allium ursinum) by the bushel. Sigmnud Freud favored this continental cousin of the ramp as a garnish for his ambiguous carrot and cucumber shishkebob. Other notable leek eaters were/are Jack London, D.H. Lawrence, Djuna Barnes, Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, Benito Mussolini, John F. Kennedy, Wilt Chamberlain, Marv Albert, Britney Spears, and William Jefferson Clinton.
The ramp festival has been immortalized by the late Toulouse Mars in his frosty villanelle titled "Acquainted with the Ramps." And if that doesn't do it, you can book a Spring trip to places like Helvetia, or Richwood, WV for their respective ramp celebrations. Or, you can order ramps via the web site of G & N Ramp Farm. Honest.
letters from readers
Talk about stink! Why, I remember when a few years back some editor of some West Virginia magazine put ramp juice in the ink of his Spring issue and sent it all over the country smellin up post offices and homes and news stands and bookstores everywhere. And dontcha know the feds just give him a warning and made him promise not to do it again. Now I ain't gonna make no jokes about how your stuff stinks without ramps ink, cause I do like your columns sometimes and was almost a English major once myself til I realized I could make more money and raise a family better by workin in the mines. -- Orville Clintwood, Salem, WV
Do you mean to say that ramps don't grow by ramps, the entrance and exit ramps to major highways? If they don't then I won't be picking any because I'll be damned if I'll go into the woods near islolated rural communities to seek them out. I might go to one of those fesitivals, but I'd absolutely leave well before dark. I guess what I'm trying to tell you is that I saw Deliverance and it scared me worse than Jaws, or even the first Alien. -- Percy Delmonico, Yonkers, NY
Succumbing to pressure from the Liberal Arts and scientific communities to go online with his influential 1999 paper "The Professor's New Clothes," Dr. Schrapnel hence offers here the first section of this groundbreaking application and explanation of chaos theory to writing and literature. Due to the length and complexity of the piece, it will appear in four or five consecutive installments, unless America goes to war and the internet is shut down. This is the title essay for B.M.W. Schrapnel's latest manuscript The Professor's New Clothes, queries for which have already been rejected by a dozen publishers.
A Dash of Chaos Theory On the next-to-last page of a science fiction bestseller I recently shredded there were a few revelatory, intriguing sentences. The book is titled The Alien Squid of Chaos, by Jude Primodone. The remarkable passage goes:
Cordon sneered, pointed a tentacle at Vallium, and shouted, "What you cretinous earthlings do not understand is the native complexity of the relationship between what you call order and disorder. It is rather a symbiotic relationship, not just symbolic. For instance, I can disassemble and scatter you molecularly in this particle chaosphere, and by your primitive perceptions you will be dead. However, from the resultant chaos of the breakdown, your energy and molecules will actually reorganize independently into something else; perhaps another species, entity, or text. Thus you are never truly going, but becoming. The cosmos thrives on non-equilibrium, jerkette, on the laws of stochastic self-organization. So step in, baby!"
The slimy alien pushed Val into the sparkling, swirling chaosphere and slammed the door. In seconds from the opposite portal of the chamber emerged a small, white butterfly whose light locomotion nevertheless seemed to whip the room into a glorious chaos, as if a door had opened into a typhoon.
Chaos, the condition of the universe before the Creator went to work, consists of jumbles of unformed material in unfathomable disorder, floating in infinite space. Chaos is the primordial void from which the cosmos evolved, perhaps. If you be of the chaotheistic persuasion, or of the conservative politics of Kansas, you may object to the word evolved in the previous clause. Whatever. The point is that somehow something is conceived from an abyss loaded with formless, random matter. Metaphysically or scientifically speaking then, a gigantic mess precedes order, whether that order originates from the consciousness of an Orderer (Oh, Argument from Design) or whether we and it are here thanks to the laws of physics, biology, chemistry, and/or Tiamat, the primeval dragon of Mesopotamian cosmological myth from whose body the heavens and earth are created. Tiamat got screwed by gods and family, the soap-operatics of which are too ponderous to relate here. Be forewarned that on the ensuing conceit a quiz, albeit maybe self-administered, is in the air.
Naturally from the story of Tiamat we come around to chaos theory, not so indirectly be it noted via hints from the ancient art of narrative. By perhaps not so chaotic avenues we will sooner or later penetrate again the fields of composition and literature; but first the atmosphere must be cleared and readied. That is, chaos theory needs (for this Liberal Arts context) an extended definition, a definition that derives paradoxically from declaration, negation, and narration.
Forsooth chaos theory is a buzzword even English teachers have heard. But what does that mean, since so many received their explanation of the term through Dr. Ian Malcom's sixty-second illumination in the cinema wildebeest Jurassic Park? Chaos theory rumbled out of university mathematics and science departments during the 1970s. Formally defined, it is the study of nonlinear dynamic systems, of forever changing and complex systems that may be represented or differentiated mathematically by fractals, or laundry lists, usually. Such systems, because they demonstrate a terribly sensitive dependence on initial conditions, and often exhibit awesomely different end results brought on by the most tiny change or fluctuation early in the process, are rather nonconstant, nonperiodic, and by nature ultimately unpredictable in any consistent, comprehensive sense: the weather, the stock market, Pandoric algorithms, raisin bran, Leslie Fiedler, the periodical [sic] cicada, animal populations.
Meteorologist Edward Lorenz of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a pioneer of chaos theory, is best known outside the weenies lavatory for his butterfly theory, so grandly regurgitated by the dark-clad Dr. Malcolm in that movie. You know, a butterfly flutters its wings somewhere along the Amazon basin, as opposed to same insect NOT flapping its wings. Who is to say that the myriad ramifications stemming from that one tiny physical act could not snowball/domino into an F4 or 5 tornado that touches down in Lawrence, Kansas and kills several members of the university mathematics faculty on their way to happy hour? Or, as some of my students used to say in the 80s, "Shit happens."
Herein rather repeatingly lies the rub/constant in chaos theory: nonlinear dynamic systems may acquire eventually enormous impetus from chronologically earlier events occurring at a mere molecular level, may get jacked out of expected shape by happenings, quirks, whispers, creaks, or motifs that at the time of their barely noticeable outburst are no more detectable or significant than a paramecium's burp. So it's a chaosphere out there, prognosticators. This butterfly factor is worse than the one-bad-apple parable, but much more fascinating. The real hell of it is, though, that according to the Technology Field Marshall at Odin & Hermes University, Gates C. Williams, it could be several hundred years before Microsoft can develop the software and hardware that can predict and plot the diabolical influences of bugs on global weather, unless IBM and/or Orkin get "more ballistic." Or, and this may be more likely and tantalizing, if the closing scenario envisioned by Arthur C. Clarke in Childhood's End—where Homo sapiens evolve to a state of satellite Oversoul and blow Earth to smithereens—is no piece of sci-fi crock. For if we're all dead, or transformed, it's just more fodder for future order. Certainly, then, we should sweat the small stuff, but why worry interminably.
letters from readers
I shall resist passing judgment on your views here until I read all of the article. But I can predict that if your past is any indication, the weeks to come will be cluttered with crap and error. We should worry about chaos theory, as the ongoing National Hockey League playoffs show us with every game/broadcast. What is punishable by a trip to the penalty box one minute, is shamelessly overlooked by referees the next. Blood and chaos rain. The team that is the most sinister and goonerific shall win. Just like life. -- Pierre Peters, Quebec City
Why can't we just get off Kansas's case now? That whole fiasco involving outlawing evolution in the schools is done with. Just because there's a lot of religious fundamentalist here doesn't mean we're all crazy and stupid. I used to be a Catholic. -- Delilah Gravy, Wichita, KA
The second part of Dr. Schrapnel's controversial essay on chaos theory and its influence on writing and criticism offers a parable-like recount of an ancient Native American legend. Also reviewed is the essence of Benoit Mandelbrot's 1967 paper, "How Long is the Coastline of Britain?" At this stage, the piece seems to be going the proverbial nowhere, but the next section from "The Professor's New Clothes" (to be posted 6/15) begins with a visit to D.H. Lawrence's old chapter on pornography. Then our study sprawls into narrative-chaotic expositon and theory in the best contemporary tenor. Afterall, it's chaos.III Many moons ago the indigenous people of the North American continent known as the Asulac, and later the Calusa, grappled with chaos theory in an elementary way. Trickster tales of these extinct Floridian tribes reveal a cultural passion for maps, and especially the charting of the coastal regions of Florida where they early dwelled until European diseases both biological and behavioral wiped them out. One of the prevalent and quintessential questions of Calusa lore is, "How long is the white sand?" In other words, "How long is the coast of Florida?" or at least that part of Florida that they roamed. To entertain and confront the ritual question, the Calusa inherited from their ancestors the Asulac the uncanny Sacred Fish Pedagogy used to survey and map the Atlantic coast of Florida two hundred years before they migrated to the Gulf coast, changing the tribal name to Calusa just before crossing what is now Lake Placid in central Florida. But during this great migration the Calusa shamen misplaced the maps, mileage charts, and sacred fish and temporarily forgot about this ritual of their forefathers, only to rediscover it all in a tattered, stinking quiver several years after the Lake Placid event. To add additional embarrassment to the lapse and oversight, tribesmen mistakenly interpreted the found maps, numbers, and hieroglyphic renderings to be models of their new coastal territory, bestowed upon them by the Great Spirit. It was only after the disappearance of a few hundred scouting expeditions in the coastal waters off what is now Sarasota County that the Calusa realized their error and resolved to embark on new survey and mapping journeys in the tradition of their ancestors. So it was the legendary chieftain Dimwinni who related a prophetic dream to his people wherein the Great Spirit decrees that the land of the Calusa will run from the river of oysters in the north to the river of the fat-looking gray blob fish (manatee) in the south.
Hundreds of Calusa stories collected by scholars of Native American lore revolve around the ritual of the sacred fish flop, where tribal holy men and their recruits gather each spring near the mouth of the Appalachee River (now Appalachicola) to begin a grueling journey around the Big Bend region of peninsular Florida that takes them southward to where the Peace River empties into the Gulf of Mexico (today Port Charlotte). This was the greatest coastal range of the Calusa. In addition to the crude mapping of the sea coast (done on palm frond tablets, and using woodpecker blood for ink) another purpose of the march was to measure the coastline by flipping a dead fish over and over again, head to tail, day and night, on and on non-stop in shifts along the water's edge, thus calculating the dimension and length of the coastline in numbers of fish, as it were. As you can imagine, then, the coast of their Florida was millions of fish long. But the old cartographers were rightly baffled that each yearly survey produced very noticeable discrepancies as to the length and shape of the shore no matter how diligent an expedition was to follow the exact path of the previous.
Fodunc the Fair, a ninth generation seer and fisherman, was the first of the old holy men to point out that the ancient methods of measurement employed fish of various length, which over even a hundred yards—in Calusa math the range of an alligator's sneeze—can produce big differences in comparative calculations and drawings. Therefore the surveys were doomed to variations mucho forever unless one fish, or many fish of identical length, was used. So Fodunc introduced to the ritual as the designated measuring instrument what we would today term a two-foot mullet. It proved a better and more accurate way to map the coast; but even Fodunc the Fair ignored key influences like decomposition, perverse rigor mortis, shrinkage, tides, theft, nihilism, hunger, or divine intervention. And every year end results were bewilderingly different, so unsatisfactory.
Perhaps to gloss over the puzzle, or explain it, many Calusa stories relate how the trickster Jeb (an estuary imp from across the watery green void, with the body of a skunk and the head of a slug) steals the sacred mullet and substitutes a 20-inch snook. Jeb then flys north to give the mullet to his old friends incarcerated in the Jail of the Great Spirit, ignoring on his way a thousand demented, starving Calusa children who would be healed by a taste of the sacred mullet. The meaning of the tale can be explained only by political scientists, contrary to the truism that political science is an oxymoron tantamount to sanitary landfill, peace force, business ethics, and Microsoft Works. More importantly, the substitution of a mere 20-inch snook (no less before the days of size and possession limits on that species) throws off the comparative accuracy of the surveys— to say nothing of the perceived geographical dimensions of the Florida coast—substantially again.
Consequently, European explorers in the 16th century who believed in, revered, stole, and followed the Asulac/Calusa maps (thinking them deadly accurate) on subsequent voyages to the New World often and unwittingly landed their galleons at what is now St. Augustine, even though they set out for Los Angeles. According to Cristobal Garcia Moca, the unauthorized biographer of the Spanish fleet, such a zany oversight turned out to be fortuitous in a way because Los Angeles beaches did not contain that unusual coquina-riddled sand (coquina is a tiny, tough and crunchy shellfish) that the Spanish eventually used in the cement mixed to erect the formidable Castillo de San Marcos at St. Augustine, a fort invincible to cannon balls due to the annoying, mushy nature of that native building material. The walls of the fort seemed not to crack apart, but rather to eat the round iron missiles belched from French and British guns. So the sly western Mediterraneans established dominance on America's lower Atlantic coast at an early stage of development (as they come lately again). But had the Spaniards instead settled California by the late 16th century, Moca observes, they would have waited many generations for the arrival of other adventurers with which to quarrel or to cheat.
This burlesque precipitated by the Asulac/Calusa cartographers, then, echoes a seminal and influential 1967 paper by early chaotician Benoit Mandelbrot, "How Long is the Coastline of Britain?". Mandelbrot shows that the nature of chaos theory is simultaneously determinate and indeterminate. He points out: "Suppose that, in order to measure the length of Great Britain's coastline, you took a measuring stick 1000 meters long and flipped it end-to-end all the way around the coast. As you proceeded, you would inevitably cut across small inlets and peninsulas; consequently your final answer would be somewhat shorter than actual length. To remedy the situation, you might try using a measuring stick 100 meters long, or 10 meters, or 1 meter. Each measurement with a shorter stick would result in a longer coastline, but the measurement would still be less than the actual length because the coastline exhibits an irregular shape at even the smallest scale."
Clearly Mandelbrot's work is at least clued by Asulac/Calusa lore in a manner similar to the methods Washington Irving used to pen some of his most famous short stories. That is, Irving translated much of his text for "The Legend of Rip Van Winkle," and to a lesser extent "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," from German folk tales he knew. To be blunt, he copied many passages word for word. But copyright is a chameleon, and today Irving is said to have merely adapted the stories, just as Shakespeare did for some of his greatest plays. This comparison is bullshit, of course, but early 19th century American literature needs some foo-foo analogy to raise its legitimacy. As for Mandelbrot, he does not confess to knowing those Calusa trickster tales, so the affinity might be blamed on the folklore origins theory known as polygenesis—the coincidental rise of motifs, patterns, or stories whose near simultaneous emergence and/or sometime similarities can be explained only by the Jungian concept of the collective unconscious, and certain archetypes . . . or perhaps mirrors. But let us not downplay the significance, insight, and originality of Benoit Mandelbrot's query/observation, which is seminal to any understanding of chaos theory, sophomoric to brainy. For the sea coast, you see, is an exemplary chaotic entity awash with order out of disorder, and so on.
letters from readers ...
You should write more about the stock market if you're going to delve in chaos theory outside of a math and science context. Now there's (stock market) a true chaotic entity that you can't predict, even with a Ouija board. Had I figured some of it out even a little my son would be at Yale now, and I guarantee you he wouldn't make an ass of himself like some of their graduates now in high places. But he's in his second year at Inflation Community College and getting straight As. I say this because his term paper for Physics was on Chaos Theory and he got a very good 92%, undoubetedly because he hasn't read anything of yours. -- Augustus Adams, Akron, OH
Chaos this! Do you get paid by the word? Because that's the only explanation I can think of to account for this digression on the Calusa cartographers and their dead fish trick. We here in the English Department are waiting for your revelations on chaos theory and the writing/literature curriculum. I don't see it coming, and neither do my colleagues. Get to the point, because summer vacation is upon us soon and we're all getting the hell away from the world wide web for a couple of months. -- Cordelia Smoltz-Blackadder, Ph.D., SUNY--Soho
This the third installment from Dr. Schrapnel's debunking essay on chaos theory begins to slide into the application of CT to literary fields. Some dismay is expressed over naming chaos theory chaos theory, but the discourse charges forward in forgiving fashion. The fourth and final excerpt (to be posted on or before June 28) lands more specifically on literary and rhetorical paradigms, and includes a less than rare interview between Dr. Schrapnel and one of his former graduate students. To be posted too are the original letters that followed the first printed version of "The Professor's New Clothes," also the title of Schrapnel's latest manuscript.
7 In composing his 1930 extended definition of pornography, D.H.Lawrence employs at the outset of his essay a technique rhetoricians call negation, or, telling the reader what something is by first telling her what something is not. The process involves trashing outdated dictionary definitions: "The word [pornography] we are told, means ‘pertaining to harlots' — the graph of the harlot. But nowadays, what is a harlot? If she was a woman who took money from a man in return for going to bed with him — really, most wives sold themselves, in the past, and plenty of harlots gave themselves, when they felt like it, for nothing."
Thus the harlot stuff won't do, for we've come a long way, babies.
Lawrence observes also that some definitions of pornography conclude that it is a thing ". . . calculated to arouse sexual desire, or sexual excitement. And stress is laid on the fact whether the author or artist intended to arouse sexual feeling." As if those once spiffy literary theorists Wimsatt and Beardsley did not do enough to unrobe that fallacy, Lawrence points out that because it is terribly difficult, yay ludicrous, to determine an artist's conscious or unconscious plans, it hardly makes any sense to point the guilty finger of funk based on a hunch, subjective suspicion, or frustration stemming from chronic prostatitis. Pornography indeed, we know, is very bad stuff, unlikeable, and unpopular in most cultured spheres. But is it so reprehensible because it displays sexuality, because it has sex appeal, premeditated or not?
"I think not," writes Lawrence. "No matter how hard we may pretend otherwise, most of us rather like a moderate rousing of our sex. . . . Half the great poems, pictures, music, stories of the whole world are great by virtue of the beauty of their sex appeal."
So much for modern denotation, then. After undressing those definitions of pornography, Lawrence goes on to offer that pornography— since it can't simply be whores, sex appeal, or sex stimulus— is ". . . the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it. This is unpardonable."
Take that.
As with pornography, and rearing up from standard dictionary definitions of chaos, misconceptions about the nature of chaos theory abound. According to one popular lexicographic gem, chaos denotes, "a condition or place of great disorder or confusion . . . disorderly mass; a jumble . . . [from Latin, from Greek khaos.]." Reinforcement comes from The Synonym Finder: "confusion, disorder, upset, disunion, discord, disquiet, unrest, ferment, upheaval, storm . . . hubbub, hullabaloo . . . bedlam, brouhaha, free-for-all, fracas, rumpus . . . imbroglio."
But really, chaos theory is NOT about disorder, claims a world wide web site, a doteedeeyou no less, and thus a rather reliable source of information by cyberspace standards (Are you counting the oxymorons in this piece?). "It [chaos theory] does not disprove determinism or dictate that ordered systems are impossible; it does not invalidate experimental evidence or claim that modeling complex systems is useless. The ‘chaos' in chaos theory is order— not simply order, but the very ESSENCE of order."
So, a primary point of chaos theory is that while precise predictions about a system's behavior[s] are probably impossible, models of the overall tendencies of a dynamic are possible. Chaos theory emphasizes a system's universal behavior— its prevailing order— not the somewhat subatomic disarray of the system, the small stuff (Chaos Introduction,<http://www.students.uiuc.edu/~ag-ho/chaos/chaos.htm>). [but don't go there]
OK. The chaotic appearance of URLs aside, though, one (at least one seasoned by curriculum seeped in standard English usage) cannot ignore the denotative roots of the term chaos theory and what a misnomer has taken place. If chaotics is really about the spontaneous emergence of order out of disorder— about phenomenal self-organizing systems awash in dissipative structures which may and do evolve into more complex models— what can be gained by an appellation that is, on a good day, a damn paradox? For first impressions logically yanked from standard meanings contradict the main focus of chaos in chaos theory, so that calling chaos theory chaos theory is something like calling a poodle a polar bear, an African a Caucasian, a Pepsi a 7-Up, a novel a phone number, a movie a photograph, a flush toilet a black hole, a Hatfield a McCoy, Hamlet a crane, Ginsberg a town, a snifter a universe, a simile an idiot, a bee a B-52. What the hell were the folks in the math department thinking?!
Perfume from a Dress ...
The movement of literature through the ages is a process of complex shapes that by gosh are most often intuitively appreciated, therefore frequently yet imperfectly understood, because literature at levels both collective and singular— genre down to motif— is a nonlinear phenomena that cannot be spatially contained in any absolute sense, will not yield to study in perfect isolation, unless hermetically sealed in a pickle (Cf. Freud) jar, in which sad case it can never be read again unless someone made copies. As a byproduct, or creation, of yet another dynamic system of near unmapable complexity— man/woman, and lately a few lower primates— literature itself resembles [is] an organism whose spatio-temporal flow or general substructure may be plotted vaguely, but whose randomly visible building blocks and tie rods might only be glimpsed ". . . as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen" (If you feel must look up this one, just go back to CNN.).
In addition, since literature as a whole or a unit receives and accumulates order and meaning from models of the very sources of its sources — men/women, etc.— it remains a paramount hullabaloo adrift in the chaosphere. But dead or alive, one and all are moved in every sense at all times by literature because image and story are information, which becomes knowledge of so many sorts, which is the element of being that sustains and renews. In her introduction to Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science, editor N. Katherine Hayles writes that chaos theory, or chaotics, ". . . envisions a world that can renew itself rather than a universe that is running down [entropy] . . . . Disorder in this view does not interfere with self-organizing processes. Instead disorder stimulates self-organization and, in a certain sense, enables it to take place" (12).
Now if that ain't the old every- action-starts-a-reaction trick— or at least acknowledgment of forces that legitimatizes yet poo-poos things like existentialism, deconstruction, and Rush Limbaugh— then what? Also, you see here the revelation that the idea of something born of nothing rings erroneous, and that nothingness (as falsely practiced by say Sartre, Kerouac, Fonda, and Allen) is really that then, something non-mythological and therefore unreal. A sneaky optimism pops about somewhere in the pseudo-void of chaos, and we may not usually see it, or hear it or even sense it. Nevertheless, it's there. But when awareness arrives, process likely follows, flows. But where? The answer is not. But in some moment, or eon, Answer's shadow flickers, appears, dissolves . . . then circles back and kicks you in the knee. Think on it though. And suddenly chaos does not sound like such a dumb name after all; or does it? For a feel, stroll barefoot the nearest beach, glaring as you walk at the ghost crabs as they scuttle from licking wave edge to licking wave edge, then disappear into small holes you missed on your initial scrutiny of the seascape. How does that make you feel?
Letters from readers ...
You're not losing me that easily, shitferbrains. I've read all of the books you mention, and I also recognize the allusions to that closet homosexual, T.S. Eliot. The whole tenor of "The Professor's New Clothes" is becoming more distasteful and sophomoric, but I'm anxious to see you make an even bigger jerk of yourself in the weeks to come. However, and more importantly, because my wife seems to buy into your baloney in a wholesale way (she's a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Chicago), we're probably getting a divorce soon. See you in court. -- B. Walter Sands, Chicago, IL
Yes! Yes! Thank you, good professor! It's all becoming pefectly clear to me now, the whole history of world literature, especially in English. I always found survey courses daunting, but now I see that it's just because they are a complete crock of disorder in spite of the tables of contents of the texts being in chronological "order." What a scam the Norton people are pulling off, along with many other publishers of academic literary mayhem. I must take to studying one author, maybe two or three, and let the rest be. Shall I begin with Blake, or Emily Dickinson, or does it matter? I've got all the time in the world. -- Jeanvivenne deProust-Jones, Charleston, SC
The following three shorts complete Dr. Schrapnel's treatise on chaos theory and its presence in the fields of literary and compositional studies. Included too are the many fine letters in response to the original print version of "The Professor's New Clothes." For a review of what has preceded these installments, visit Archives 3. Replies to this online reprint will be posted in August, if they're any good.
Chapter 42 Grilling the real is a primary activity of literature from ancient lore to recent metafiction, postmodern jargon for writing that explores the very fabric of narrative, then screws with it. One might track the roots of metafiction to Tristram Shandy (1759-67), too often heralded as literature's first psychological, stream of consciousness work, as it revels in Locke's theory of the irrational and associational nature of the human gray matter. Laurence Sterne, say literary historians, is the first English author to bring the chaotic psychological properties of Homo sapiens to focus in a novel, to make the human mind the stage, to probe and celebrate in the raw the often crude and elusive mechanics of human thought. Sterne, then, is precursor to Edouard Dujardin's Les lauriers sont coupés, which James Joyce credits for somewhat suggesting his technique in Ulysses, which has spawned nearly a century of obtuse interior monologues from novelists as good as Virginia Woolf and Thomas Pynchon, to fast scribblers as bad as Wally Foerester Wallace and Kiki France Abalone-Cruz.
But who goosed Sterne? The occasional to sustained narrative turn into the "psychological" is not an 18th, 19th, or 20th century discovery, not a journey invented and undertaken by somewhat modern, English writing man/woman tale tellers. For in the very first pages of The Epic of Gilgamesh (2700 BC), a poem of unparalleled antiquity, the author[s] relates that this hero is wise, sees mysteries, and knows secret things. He is so through the vehicle of his mind (perhaps synonymous the with heart and soul), wherein he sees, envisions, and processes information not readily provided by the land he rules, by awake experiences in his environment. Gilgamesh has prophetic dreams which often prepare him for tests of his prowess. And the writers/tellers of Gilgamesh imagine how and what he thinks by swimming vicariously themselves in his stream of consciousness like so many migrating shad.
But Gilgamesh is not the only principal of this epic whose actions are informed partly by events that arise from the stream of consciousness, or unconsciousness. When Aruru, the goddess of creation, hears through her colleague gods the laments of the people of Uruk— the tales of the bullying and lustful ways of Gilgamesh— she is charged to create his equal, that they may "contend together and leave Uruk in quiet."
"So the goddess conceived an image in her mind . . . ." and it was Enkidu, primeval ecowarrior, with whom Gilgamesh wrestles and becomes bosom friend, and reforms. Note that Aruru constructs Enkidu first mentally; that is, the real to be is informed and precursed by a creation from the psychological realm. A model arising from Aruru's stream of consciousness, then, from the masses of billions of cells and thingies that make up the brain— something seemingly so complex and chaotic that who the hell knows what goes on there most of the time— this wisp of neural energy, this flap of wing by a cerebral butterfly, spawns a character/motif, a narrative convention (he thought/she thought) that is distantly yet directly responsible for sparking a sub genre (the stream of consciousness novel) not fully realized for thousands of years. But it had to start somewhere.
Forsooth there is cause and effect here that properly requires hundreds of pages of argument, evidence, and documentation, a book, or at least a dissertation or PMLA piece. But in light of this theory of chaotics, baloney! Let us not belabor the manifest. Is it not strange too— but not ironical— that Aruru is also the name of a rare species of eastern Mediterranean butterfly whose touch is reputed to induce madness in whales.
An otherworldly model of the Aruru Theory of Literary Evolution (ATLE) is suggested by Hamlet's modest rumination (V, i, 176-85) on how one might ". . . trace the noble dust of Alexander till he find it stopping a bung-hole?" That is, by the conceivable laws of decomposition, and/or barbaric grave robbery, the corpse of Alexander becomes not-so-finally clay, which is manufactured to be the plug for a barrel of liquor. Unbeknown of course to Hamlet, who is to say that in the year 2000 a platoon of Chinese military technicians drink heavily of that very keg, then break into the war room and launch nuclear warheads on Japan, instigating the third, but not final, world war; not final because out of the chaos and rubble of annihilation and nuclear winter shall rise a new if not improved culture? From the jumble/jungle of radioactive waste sprouts another order. Just be patient.
If this is beginning to sound like a fantasy apocalyptic rendition of Nietzsche's myth of the eternal return, then perhaps you begin to snag the drift of chaos theory a little. However, since chaotic systems are nonlinear, dissipative— and therefore no chance closed, elliptical, or circular— humanity or its mutants are not likely destined to repeat the same route. Scenarios unseen and unheard of are still possible, although the second or so time around the English might guard against the likelihood of another Milton, let optimism flourish, but keep out and out romanticism to a minimum. As for Americans, you can never have too many Emersons or Dickinsons.
One for the Road
Make some noise, noise being a seedling ingredient of chaos. Let's hear it for chaotics! Give the scientists and mathematicians a hand! And while you're at it, give it up for the comp and lit profs as well, because the application of chaos theory to literary and compositional studies is something to behold. Hell, anytime an industrial strength theory crosses disciplinary suspension bridges it's occasion for wonder and action, as I once discussed and discovered with a former major during his annual graduate advising consultation:
Q— [student]I wonder, though what this has to do, really, with literature. And I wonder, how does one apply chaos theory in the teaching of writing? I mean, how does this make writing easier?
A— [BMWS] Whoa! One interrogation at a time, budding scholar. But you do ask wisely. So first, literature and chaotics: It seems that some literary works, particularly contemporary novels, are deliberate, or maybe unconscious, examples of chaotic systems, metaphoric mimes maybe. That is, the narratives (plots if you will) of some notables exhibit great turbulence and looney toonity as they bop and weave actually away from and too toward something akin to denouement and beyond. But you wouldn't know it by comparison to, say, the usual canonical books and authors: Tolstoy, Dickens, Austen, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Z. and F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Farewell to Arms, Edith Wharton, Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Surfacing, Mary Shelley, and the rest. Look at books by the likes of John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, John Hawkes, even Borges and Nabokov, and you can see plotting that disdains traditional story patterns and celebrates imbroglios, thus creating a kind of dialogue between order and disorder. Any hierarchical expectations you have of things coming and going together in metafiction, for example, should be left on the book shelf because chaos prevails here. Overall unified meaning is not there, but you can get some jolts from random events in the often sprawling, forever bifurcating, narratives wherein befuddling and mysterious patterns and such may eureka into epiphany, then fragment into further ferment. But as for the whole novel itself, it's hard to say what in the bloody kahoona it all means. [smiles]
Q— Are you kidding? [frowns] You mean most books nowadays don't have a message or a moral? What's the world coming to?
A— Oh, I wouldn't go that far, except to say that most of these chaotical books— you don't need to call them novels, I guess— are just like life. You might call it the New Realism, but I won't. Metafictional texts in particular defy straight philosophical interpretations, scoff at neat closures, and suggest that all things are unresolved dialogues of sorts. Thus what we call mimetic texts, traditional novels, are actually farther from the truth than what seems like the bedlam of metafictional narratives because existence slash life is not a linear plotting from A to B to C to where-ever, but a bubbling fracas of loose and usually unpredictable comedies, tragedies, and shopping sprees. Yo, Kafka! Logical cause and effect is just another lottery ticket, and metaphors, well, you know.
Q— Can I suggest that this application of chaos theory to literature and literary theory is just a lame excuse for sloppy nonsense and showing off? I mean, it seems to me that you're trying to excuse the author and maybe even the critic, like relieve him or her, of obligations to make sense, to tell a good story, or analyze sensibly, right? Isn't this saying that anything goes, that art or criticism is best and truest when it's a complex, confusing pile of crap?
A— Whoa!
Q— And what about teaching students to write? Most of us beginning English teachers will be dumped into crowded comp sections for years, until senior faculty die off. So what do the brainiacs say about composition and chaos? Because I'm thinking about just getting my Ph.D. in Composition and Rhetoric so I can get a job faster.
A— So glad you ask, you cynical sidewinder you. You'll really be getting into a soup gurgling with opportunity if you pursue a comp and rhetoric doctorate. Mostly, chaoticians in writing programs start by observing that writing is a nonlinear dynamic process, complex and chaotic, then, especially when approached in a computer-assisted environment. In other words, all of the factors that contribute to a supposedly finished (turn-in-able) piece of writing (essay maybe) are numerously disquieting. You have your assignment, then there's the many pre-writing options— like brainstorming, clustering, freewriting, and plagiarizing— and the many things environmental or historical (Is there really a difference?) that tend to form the writer's tone and attitude toward his/her topic. If the assignment is largely expository, the writer's knowledge or non-knowledge of rhetorical patterns is influential, if not daunting. Also, writing that occurs within computer-assisted (CAI) instruction often brings to the mix revision software such as spell checkers, grammar checkers, and prose analyzers. Then there's electronic peer review possibilities like networking, chat rooms, and email. And of course there's the final word: the PROF, simultaneously into all of the above like some frothing Tiresias, the great web master. [grins again]
Q— Isn't all that a bit of a no-brainer, that analogy, or observation? I mean, haven't we always known that composition is a very complex process, idiosyncratic, full of variables and individual influences? It seems that chaos theory is merely reinforcing the obvious, telling us maybe with borrowed terms what we already know. [sniffs the air]
A— Oh no, listen to this quote from one of our own graduates of the Composition and Rhetoric Ph.D. program, who now heads the Freshman Writing Program at Montana State Militia College at Poison.
"Indeed CAI fosters the creation of spaces wherein there exists greater potential to create order in the form of orderly texts by decreasing the temporal and spatial boundaries common to chaotic writing processes. Although the CAI environment is nevertheless itself chaotic— it being a complex nonlinear area of inquiry representing ‘orderly disorder,' and therefore copying in some ways its subject of inquiry-composing— the recursive symmetry of CAI additionally enhances our understanding of it as a purely chaotic paradigm which potentiates a merge between, rather than a bifurcation of, the concerns of both expressionist compositionists and social-epistemic rhetoricians in the cultural matrix."
Q— What the hell . . . ? [puts right hand in left arm pit and simulates flatulence by making wing-flapping motion]
A— [points a finger to the sky] That, my good man, is from a recent article in Postmodern English Studies by our once very own Flossy Louie-Zeitgeist, Ph.D. [sticks out tongue]
Q— [stands up]I believe the Registrar's Office is still open. Do I have enough time today to change my major? [smiles]
Chapter 11
The Ferment Cement Company sits along the East River on the southwest side of town, just north of the international airport, which is just off the turnpike southbound. Seven years ago a 747 crashed into the river during take-off. Fortunately only sixteen of the 209 passengers were killed, but one of the victims was the Pulitzer-winning poet, Buford Louie-Zeitgeist. That is, Louie-Zeitgeist was pronounced officially dead in absentia, since his name was on the passenger list and several crash survivors recall seeing him on the plane (one getting his autograph). Yet the poet's remains were never recovered. One creative obituary remarked that the untimely death of Louie-Zeitgeist changed forever the face of American literature, while an editorial in a prominent literary journal derided his contributions to postmodern poetics: ". . . Zeitgeist's poems are hackneyed rants slobbering with a sympathy for the oppressed that makes you want to kill, rather than help, everyone. And the smattering of pornography he contributed to Hustler and Playboy is so generic as to induce deep sleep."
We were bracing for the remnants of a tropical storm that had lately pounded the Virginia coast, circled back down to the Outer Banks of North Carolina to gain steam, it seemed, then took dead aim on the Apple, churning north sporting 60 mph winds and torrents of rain. The daughter of Lorenz, as we called her and she preferred to be called, sat at a table at the back of the laboratory dissecting a rhinoceros beetle, an omen of which we were certain, but an exercise that smacked of sadism due to the fever it apparently induced in the daughter of Lorenz. Outside, on the main arteries of the city, a traffic jam of epic stature etched a fearful symmetry through the inner workings of the metropolis. The distant noises at times strangely reminded me of that day I watched— along the Manatee River of south central Florida— a rare water bird, a limpkin, capture, rupture, and eat freshwater clams. For an entomologist it is an odd recall, I noted, but those erratic background collisions of metal, curses, and gun fire can do that to a scientist.
Meanwhile, the howling wind increased; the rain fell with more abandon; lights flickered, when the daughter of Lorenz exclaimed, "One drop of the calcified powder of the horn of this frigging bug, diluted in a liter of Perrier, will produce an acid nasty enough to dissolve ten square yards of three-inch concrete!"
"If this works," he bellowed, "we'll jettison to the other side of the worm hole almost instantly. If not, at least maybe the noise will stop."
From my seat at the helm of the starship I saw the familiar, sometimes dreaded, Error dialogue box pop up on the console screen of Starbuck's Macintosh Pentium 700XL-DL , but I could not read it.
Then the huge one in blue slapped me on the ass very hard—I thought— and I screamed and cried and the other biggies seemed to approve, even smile and laugh, and ooh and aah.
"She's a healthy little girl!" He had to shout over my stinging horror.
I remembered something I had heard someone say: "Thou knowst, the first time that we smell the air we wawl and cry." But mostly all I could think of were the dark worms.
Cleopatra's Basket ....... letters from readers
So now you're an authority on mathematical theory, are you? And that also helps to make you an expert on difficult postmodern novelists? Which in turn lets you pronounce theoretically about growing pedagogy in the field of composition and rhetoric? I say you are more deluded and full of ____ than the bumpkin who falls down the outhouse hole and thinks he can now court the prom queen. All you've demonstrated in this piece of writing is that you can't explain chaos theory for a humanities or literary context, that you know nothing about Native American culture, that chaos theory is a confusing misnomer (which everyone already knows), that you can't do literary research, that you can't teach writing, that you can't write . . . period. Furthermore, I can't imagine how anyone who even pretends to understand chaotics cannot cite James Gleick's seminal Chaos; Making a New Science (Viking Penguin, 1987) and hope to be trusted. But I realized long ago that you are a babbling charlatan, so I don't expect much more than nothingness from you. You are a loathsome fraud, and I only hope that your chaotic writing doesn't in fact produce on a mass scale the mindless disorder with which it is fraught. --- Elvis Peebles, SUNY Duluth
I wish you would finish that postmodern novel, Chapter 11, you began on the last two or three pages of "The Professor's New Clothes." I'm already curious about the fate of the beautiful daughter of Lorenz and her colleagues, and I wonder what sort of cement coup they have up their sleeves. But it would be terrible if they're beamed up or something like the man and woman at the end of The Smugglers of Lost Shoals Rock, which is actually the novel within the novel October Light, by the late John Gardner. Please have your agent or publisher email me when the work comes out. I'll buy several copies and assign it in my senior English classes, but please send me a desk copy too.--- Charlemagne Russedski, Poison, Montana <chrudd@aol.com>
I believe I speak for the majority of my colleagues in academe everywhere when I say to you, "Go ____ yourself!" You are indeed the enemy within, the Trojan horse (or is it condom) without, the proverbial thorn in the side of a glorious profession under siege by the conservative Philistines that are trying to take over America. Clearly the title of your latest piece ("The Professor's New Clothes"), with its allusion to fairy tale and the implied analogy that college educators and scholars are largely pompous fools, is meant to injure rather than heal the wounds opened by so many enemies of higher education: conservative politicians, religious extremists, Luddites, and journalists. You are not a satirist in any constructive sense, but a mere name caller masquerading as a critic. Neither are you, by any stretch of the concept, an intellectual, since your less-than-pedestrian explanation of chaos theory is erroneous and witless. Furthermore, the shadows or irony wherein you slink about are disappearing. For I have a petition signed by the entire membership of the American Society of Scholars that calls for your blackball by every major scholarly and literary publication on earth. The lights are coming on and now you must run and hide in a dark hole like the lowly unprofessional vampire you truly are. In addition, we have used our influence to get you excluded from the next edition of The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volume II. Try laughing that off, you sneering slob! --- Warren R.P.M. Fountainbergson, Ph.D., Ed.D., President, American Society of Scholars
For a real lesson in literary chaotics, especially a poetical one, I suggest you and your readers become acquainted or re-acquainted with the work of Wallace Stevens and poems like "Connoisseur of Chaos," and "The Idea of Order at Key West." The idea that order comes out of, or exists in, the damnedest small events is fascinating to see in Stevens's poems. One can see this in the soaring of the magnificent frigate bird as well. Chaos isn't hard to appreciate if you have the ability to stare for a long time. But what I like about the idea of things always changing unpredictably is that it means that the city of New York may not be able to buy consistently competitive professional athletic teams forever, and that maybe a small market franchise like my Pirates, or Steelers, or Penguins will be on top again some day. Also, it means that when things have had enough, they've had enough, and so self-organization will always take place at some point and go on. I think you're right about the "sneaky optimism" at the heart of chaos theory as long as the energy therein is good energy that is always moving to better itself. The problem is, though, that the big picture is so big that sometimes we can't predict or gauge what is good or bad in the long run. That for some is depressing, but it still can be interesting, if not time consuming. For the down times of such contemplation, I praise Amstel Light. --- Mildred Bartholomew-Snead, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
So, here's a reprint of "Trickster's Box," placed here so that you can contextualize the letter that follows the piece. Dr. Schrapnel insists that the missive is worth it, whatever "it" is.
from "Trickster's Box," a work in progress
Just when you think it is safe to behave maturely ... after your testosterone levels peak and wane and begin to cut you a break, and you proceed to enjoy and appreciate the usual focus and tranquility of middle age and beyond . . . gaggles of perverts masquerading as doctors and scientists invent and market Viagra, and its ilk. You know, those erection tablets reputed to restore the phallus and testicles to the glories of youthdom, ever ready to take on an equally re- hornied female population invested in lyposuction, breast implants, even both-sexes miracle herbals that mock and rival Viagra.
What is it with this you[th] culture [sic] we are said to inhabit here in "Uhmerika" (with apologies to Earl Pitts)? Whose idea is it that men and/or women ought to go all the way through life with a closet boner, or lots of non-grey hair, or no fat/cellulite (remember that?) bodies, a bubbly vagina, or a killer bosom? Who sets these eternal standards of behavior, appearances, expectations? Why? From where spring the Carpé Diem Fairies who push and peddle those pseudo eternal youth chemicals and rituals that tempt one of our most valuable resources (those who survived with some honor their decades of lust and carousing, and now pursue wisdom) the 45+ generation, to slide back and embrace once more the chaos of emergence and uncontrollable sexual urges? I have an idea.
But you must be more interested in where the name Viagra comes from, or you wouldn't be here. Right? And as usual, etymology harbors more than a few clues and cautions about this evil phenomenon. Viagra is a poorly disguised compound noun with roots in the Bubonic dialect Keeponploogin, a complex language of the Bubon holy men known for their love charms and potions. Viag, the Bubonic god of fertility and fornication in this pre-Sumerian civilization, late in his reign becomes the husband of Ra, the nymphomaniacal goddess of spherical fruits and vegetables. But during the first several centuries of their existence in the polytheistic Over-world of the Bubons, Viag and Ra are ancient ‘swingin' singles' who openly despise each other. It is written in cuneiform texts that the energy from their mutual contempt is what enables them to outlive all of the other gods of their domain. For in Bubonic mythology the gods are not exactly immortal, but manage to live a hell of a lot longer than humans. Thus when Viag and Ra are the only gods left in Bubonic heaven, their loneliness drives them to marriage in order to create another mega-generation of gods to wreak mischief and occasional enlightenment upon the earth- bound Bubons. Unfortunately, their very old age initially curtails, if not prevents, them from copulating and reproducing. Thus the great flood motif so prominent in the later Gilgamesh epic, and much later in Genesis, also occurs in Bubonic myth, the cause being the great tears and saliva spawned by the disappointment and frustration of the god and goddess on their wedding night. In contrast to comparable flood legends, many Bubons survive the deluge because they are by nature prolific boaters and world class swimmers.
But if comparative religion teaches us nothing else, it at least demonstrates that gods will be gods. And after three hundred years of no poontang, Ra remembers a rare bush of the Crazian Woods that produces box-like pods full of berries which can be used to restore youthful sexual potency and desire. She can't recall the name of the plant, but she does find it. She makes a croissant-like pastry that indeed restores the couple to a performance level like that of young ferrets. Unfortunately again, however, and without explanation, the dozen offspring that Viag and Ra produce are all certifiable idiots, even by the loose human standards of the time. Before ever reaching their rites of initiation, the sons and daughters, one and all, perish in freaky, tragic accidents: falling off of a mountain, impaling themselves on a great cedar while chasing shepherds, drowning in a volcano, and even swallowing too much sand during the annual hour glass competition, thus suffocating, and so on.
Finally, Viag and Ra are consumed in a great fire ignited by passionate, clumsy lovemaking during their second honeymoon in the Forest of Exxon. Sadly too, in the last book of Bubonic mythology — The Noisy Morons — Viag and Ra come off as demented, aged sex maniacs, and heavy smokers. They are secretly reviled by the mortals bound to worship them, because rather than bestowing the lessons and wisdom of great experience traditionally acquired by godheads, Viag and Ra just seem to keep everyone awake at night with their orgasmic screams and groans that echo through the land of the Bubons both day and dark. Bubonic oral history also blames the defeat of the Bubon army (by invading tribes of nomadic dwarfs in the 18th century BC) on the development of a cultural insomnia (thanks to Viag and Ra) that makes their soldiers sluggish. For the Bubons by then had come to worship clandestinely Lobotomus, god of slowness and mindless cheer, who had in fact been dead for centuries and was not coming back.
However . . .
letter from a deconstrucing reader
After perusal of your partial text surrounding the etymological, sociological, and hermeneutical dynamics of the popular oral elixir sildenafil citrate, known capitalistically and affectionately by hordes as Viagra, it is surely clear that the primary question posed by the novelette in progress (albeit perhaps an unanswerable query) is whether the subtext of the narrative discourse remains anchored or planted in the postmodern literary template. Secondarily, then, does its existence actually transcend preconfigured norms previously standardized in canonical-oriented circles of critical theory, or is the right/wrong axis of the aesthetic and/or ethical tension of the piece a not- so-simple ploy loitering at the edge of that metaphysical and metaphorical hinterland where the figurative and the faux-factoid deliquesce to form the bombastical?
Clearly the frontal pheme is a raw complaint fused in envy lit by realities where the near- ancient (decrepit if you will) are reborn to embarrass their offspring with near-public and profoundly pubic displays of traditional virility. But the Complaint is flaccid, deriving at it does from the insecurity and malfunction of a male who is at least testosterone-deprived in any normal sense, if not colloquially screwed up. As a given, the literary of any magnitude — if in fact magnitude is discernible or viable — cannot originate from a chemical deficiency alone merely, and must jack its case from multiple (though no less paramount) platforms, the least of which are mental imbalance manifested by the social environment, along with a stable seat on a paradigm unfettered by European or Asian creeds of behavior, except possibly one.
Thus if the author/narrator (Schrapnel, IF that is your name!) decries the erectional at even a post-historical stage of yet undeniable presence, he/she denounces (defaults) the social order and civilizational context from which it comes, and by association the climate of laissez faire that humidifies the cultural milieu of its origin, assuming origin is a thing in and of itself — an entity phenomenological beyond reasonable doubt, maybe. To be lucid, then, if Viagra is indeed and in essence a Scam upon the laws of God (god) and/or Nature, then are we not awash in thousands of such scams perpetrated by pharmaceutical juggernauts in league with the medical doctorate who weekly appear to warn of previously unknown or alien disorders which only their new discoveries (drugs) can abate? Lately comes PMDD, or premenstrual dysphoric disorder, a terribly volcanic type of PMS. The cure is something called Sarafem, which sounds positively biblical. Prozac is trans-hemispherical (not just catholic) in its range of applications, so much like the Formalism of Brooks and Warren. Similarly, Paxil eases all forms of psychological nihilism and melancholy, just as the woman depressed due to compulsive shopping disorder is saved by Celexa. Valium, however, is an anachronism (mostly prescribed now for epileptic feline and canine companions), and not so coincidentally the practice of the explication of poetry is something done only sparsely in the few English classes that exist in dangerous inner-city schools and remote rural institutions. Disorder and/or sickness being a market no less than groceries, clothing, and furniture, Elements within the culture must invent new paradigms (maladies) that require the employment of additional commodities (drugs) dispensed and sold by essentially the same Elements. This is no chicken-or-the-egg parable, but another capitalist effrontery upon the nature of Homo sapiens (most particularly the human female), an arch con that is at once sexist and political, if not so insidiously sociocultural as to disguise itself as a glistening reincarnation of Marxism at a hormonal level. Schooled as they are to recognize and capitalize upon the native foibles and rampant imbecility of Western humankind (especially the hormonally complex chick), the pharmaceutical sprites and their accomplices now strike and titillate at the lowest yet most powerful levels. The result, at every stage, is Chaos and the death of literature by coy hedonistic forces juiced to the end.
But if the literary is certainly dead or dying, even in the forms of tome, limerick, or op ed piece, then we may take cue from the primitive beliefs of ancient agricultural societies: the termination may surely harbinger the birth of something else, even in this space-time continuum declared by the Chaotic; for Death begats Life, may it not? Witness this, here: subtextually this response is seedling from "Trickster's Box" — metaphorical, metaphysical, mechanical, botanical, what all, and not unlike the principle (if principle may be even theoretically verifiable) supposedly blathered by Hamlet as to how the dust of Alexander might some day stop a bung hole. Observe too the Evolution (yet another box of assorted chocolates out of Africa, much to the chagrin of Aryan intellectuals) of refrigerator poetry in the magnetic genre as it moves from door to trash, or perhaps to garage sale, then who knows, but, unequivocally to a landfill where nearby lie the husks of thousands of mostly white, rectangular appliances which once framed verse after verse, now blank and desolate as a library hit by a nuclear warhead. While the literary dies each time a person picks up a writing instrument, or sits down to a word processing keyboard, or opens his/her illread trap at a poetry slam, it should be allowed its demise just as the Phoenix. Let Viagra be! — Dalectareen Phanpantajabasura, Ph.D., University of Illinois at Chicago