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Tidying
up: The Dialectics of Order
The
world is too big. We can’t wrap our little minds around it, so we frame it,
contain it. Stack it. Sort it. Strap it. Pat it. Prune it. Slice and dice it.
We stereotype and generalize, categorize and organize. Because it’s all Too
Much Information. We can’t even.
The eye imports the unintelligible jumble,
and the brain sorts it, color codes it, tries to break it down to recognizable
images and make sense of it. A photographer picks one frame from the torrent of
input in his or her field of vision and simplifies, looking for some intrinsic
logic. In that one selected frame, a picture can capture harmony and meaning. Outside
the frame is—well, all that other stuff. Three hundred and sixty degrees of relentless
reality.
So make
the world smaller. Pull the camera back, a spaceshot away from the chaotic mess
of humankind, and experience the music of the spheres as they whirl in orderly circles.
Get closer and there are our gridlike cities and parking lots, the meticulous
rows of corn and terraces of rice we have imprinted on the landscape. Rivers snake
and mountains erupt according to their own natures, and still we try to groom
and manicure the very earth itself.
Or get
very close to a photographic frame and examine the pixels. The word comes from
“picture elements,” a human construct that makes an image into a pointillist
grid of dots or squares, a Seurat or Chuck Close writ exceeding small. Get
closer still, with an electron microscope, and it’s the natural order again:
tiny solar systems of atoms.
The
world is too dangerous. People need patterns to cope. Is that dappling the effect
of the sun shining through leaves—or the spots of a leopard? You have to decide
quickly, and the more deeply encoded the patterns, the faster your brain can
process. Sometimes it’s good to be on autopilot. Decision-making is exhausting.
Friend or enemy? Here or there? This or that? Stash or trash? What goes with
what? What to put in, what to leave out.
So make
the world safer. Make it more predictable. Standardize. If you can’t find
patterns, construct them. Make big box stores with identical layouts. Stand in
the place where you live and think about directions. Invent numbers to mark
street and highway signs. Create emojis. Make symbols—a picture of a mortar and
pestle for an apothecary’s shop or letters to brand a chain drug store—so you
know what to expect when you walk through the door. People like familiar
packaging. Pattern recognition.
The
world is out of control. Floods, hurricanes, wildfires. Deserts blooming.
Tropical fish straying into northerly waters. The strange migrations of birds. We’ve never been able to control the weather,
but it seems crazier than ever. And then there’s the everyday stuff we can’t
control— delays, malfunctions, our children, appetites, our tempers. No wonder
we have control issues.
So control
your own chaotic world. We get a little OCD. We make our immediate environment more
manageable by cutting it into byte-sized pieces. A two-year-old sorts her shoes
into pairs and places them in a careful circle around her feet. A wage slave squares his laptop and makes a flurry
of decisions about where to file each piece of paper floating around the office.
A housekeeper arranges cushions
symmetrically on the couch. Human beings crave symmetry. In a face, it is
perceived as beauty; in our surroundings, it is perceived as clarity. Clear the
decks. Clear the desk. Clear the mind.
But the
world is too big. Something always
messes with our neatnik framework, an inner Oscar to our inner Felix. Perfect
order is the impossible dream. We can organize into pixels and fractals and pterodactyls,
but the next thing you know—kablam! All bets are off. There is no final cut. Fifty-two
pickup. Toss all the cards in the air, and they fall in a new pattern.
Synchronicity? Maybe.
Chaos
theory posits that new patterns are jumpstarted by tiny initial actions, that a
butterfly’s wing or a swimmer’s flutter kick can cause a concatenation of
events that result in a tornado in Kansas. So, Dorothy, here’s to new beginnings.
Embrace the process. Chaos is creative. This
is the pleasure and the paradox. A tabula rasa. We get to start over, creating
order and serenity from chaos. In that inchoate mess are so many possibilities.
Because the world is so big, and so very beautiful.
3 comments:
Your prose falls mercifully short of mirroring the impression I get from the photos. When I look at them I see Levittown and I hear, "Little boxes, little boxes, little boxes on a hillside, little boxes on a hillside, little boxes all the same.
Thank you. They wouldn't have been my photo choices. Though they are kind of shocking, in a ticky-tacky kind of way.
This is my favorite thing you've ever written (that I've read...I'm sure I haven't read EVERYTHING you've ever written!).
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