Each day perishing: A meditation on chaos,time,the virus

Meditation

Why a meditation? A meditation allows for the flow and flux of consciousness, both the direct and the oblique. A meditation involves movement from a sense of self to the world out there. It can mean attending to carefully. Although social work is infatuated with the positivist and empirical, in contrast, the idea of meditation can been seen as a method – methodos, the way – open to the drift of thought, chance and the unpredictable, a meandering diversity. A framing symbol for mediation and chaos itself is the labyrinth, the nonlinear. Collective meditation is what began to happen I believe, in the last six weeks of the semester, with my graduate MSW Zoom classes (17 students in one; 13 in another). I wondered if what was occurring was an example of Marshall McLuhan’s famous aphorism that the medium is the message. Meditation as method took over as one comment lead to another turning into a magical circle of framing and reframing often coalescing into asymmetrical, nonlinear sequences. Two terms one from literature, Metalepsis and one from music, stretto capture perhaps what was taking place. Metalepsis transpires when a word is used for the second time evoking the first as an almost magical anticipation. A stretto is the bringing together of a concentration of themes that converge as in music in a contrapuntal thematic. Together for two months we learned how to pay attention as our lives wove together to resist the fear, uncertainty and stress of the environment where we had been thrown by life. What follows is a brief meditation on chaos and time, the two concepts that most often occurred in the class, drawing on works of philosophy, visual art, and literature.

Chaos

The artist Paul Cezanne saw life as a “rainbow of chaos.” He viewed chaos as endless impetuous movements where vibrations spread and scatter in all directions (Elgar, 1969: 218). Chaos is a primordial disorder out of which creative germination can occur. Racism is such a chaos. The philosopher Wittgenstein surmised that “when you are philosophizing you have to descend into primeval chaos and feel at home there” (Wittgenstein, 1980: 65). It is likely that for Wittgenstein chaos meant experiences that are not supported by any system of rules. It does seem that we live much of the time with a fear of chaotic disorientation, disintegration and destruction that includes psychic chaos, a chaos that The Virus has intensified. The meteorologist and mathematician and founder of modern chaos theory Edward Lorenz who, in a 1972 lecture, gave us the concept of the “butterfly effect” using the phrase “full chaos” meaning complete random disorder, complete lack of order (Ambika). However, rather than talk about chaos and complexity theory going back to historian of science James Gleick’s Chaos: Making a New Science (Penguin, 1988) some representative art will be discussed instead; the arts generally it could perhaps be said play on the margins of chaos and disorder, what happens when life gets too complicated and we become frayed by the speed of ‘facts’ and perplexed from whips of information that assault us in abundance tangled with the carnage of fragmented opinions.

The philosopher Gilles Deleuze and his collaborator the psychoanalyst Felix Guattari write that “chaos is characterized less by the absence of determinations [arrangements] than by the infinite speed with which they take shape and vanish” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 42). The key word is speed. Here we are moving away from the Western logocentric grid of certainty and are witness to the ruin of representation of a stable world out there. The painter Paul Klee makes reference to a “chaotic gray point” as a point between dimensions as a feature of emergence from chaos in his work. Klee suggest that chaos is a ‘nonconcept’ a “nowhere-existent something” or “somewhere-existent nothing” (Bogue, 2003: 119). In his painting Equals Infinity brown blobs dancing in the margin and crossing the canvas represent the infinite movement of chaos (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 42, 197) (Note: All works of art mentioned can be viewed via google.) In Klee’s work “the gray point starts out as nonlocalizable, nondimensional chaos, the force of chaos a tangled bundle of aberrant lines. Then the point jumps over itself … .The gray point has thus jumped from one state to another, and no longer represents chaos … but home” a milieu. It is out of chaos that Milieus come into existence but are continually under the threat of chaos returning, chaos itself being “the milieu of all milieus” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 312, 313).

With the confluence in the present moment of crises of health, racism, economy, unemployment, inequality, climate, culture, ethics, death we are intensely deep in an assemblage of chaos. Chaos is a continual play of shifting evanescences and dissolutions where there is no consistency, a fugacity, always a surging up of a chaos that dissolves all consistency and stability. For Deleuze and Guattari philosophy, the arts and the sciences are different ways of handling chaos; philosophy does this through the creation of concepts. They do not think about chaos as an undifferentiated and unthinkable blur rather as a generative medium out of which temporary order and creativity may issue.

In chaos without the familiar perceptual coordinates of space and time we feel lost, far off the path, dislocated, where the world ceases to cohere. It has been suggested that no one better describes these lost instants than the painter Paul Cezanne: “at this moment I am one with my canvas [not the painted canvas, but the one to be painted]. We are an iridescent chaos, an abyss, and an opening toward creation” (Bogue, 2003: 119). A good example is Cezanne’s painting Chateau Noir. For Deleuze and Guattari, “art struggles with chaos but it does so in order to render it sensory” and “to bring forth a vision that illuminates it for an instant … even houses, Soutine’s drunken houses come from chaos” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 204–205). Then we have a composed chaos.

The pandemic virus has spawned chaos and with it melancholy. An artwork that brings chaos and melancholy together is Albrecht Durer’s engraving of 1514, Melencolia I. Many art historians note a prevailing sense of chaos, a negation of order in the work. Mitchell Merback sees the engraving as replete with ambiguity and chaos that points to the limitations of Enlightenment reason and optimism (Merback). The bat in the engraving bearing the print’s title is striking since bats are generally viewed in the scientific and medical communities as the origin of the Virus and the ensuing chaos trailing melancholy in its wake. Merback writes about “a chaos of objects” in Durer’s Melencolia I, “a visual disorder that beguiles, perplexes … as it charges and animates the gloom-filled space … .that sense of a controlled chaos” (Merback, 2017: 35). The overall chaos depicted is one of great instability and ambiguity as represented by the wooden ladder rising up past the cornice of the building ascending into the clouds; the bottom of the ladder is also out of sight leaving indeterminate whether the path out of chaos is the way up or the way down. The ladder does seem to point two ways at once bringing to mind the Egyptian-Greek phrase from the third Century CE, “As Above, So Below” suggesting that chaos may be of a cosmic dimension.

Before leaving chaos and its engendering of melancholy Freud’s famous essay, Mourning and Melancholia (1917) can add to our possibilities of knowing and seeing. For Freud “the complex of melancholia behaves like an open wound” (Freud, 2005: 212). Mourning is part of a regular grieving response to loss; melancholia cuts much deeper with no end in sight to the wounds of loss, an endless chaos.

Time

For many, entrapped by the Virus and accompanying isolation often surrounded by a midnight-blue world of electronic technology, time feels as though it has broken open and closed down at the same moment. There are days when time seems frozen, comes to a halt as in many of Edward Hopper’s paintings (for example, Cape Cod Morning, 1950). There are in life instants of stillness, an arresting of time with an example from music being Gustav Mahler’s third symphony in D Minor when in the third movement time is interrupted with a haunting and beautiful four and half minute posthorn solo usually played by the principal trumpet, where time disappears. Once heard it is never forgotten. In the Durer engraving Melancolia I the hourglass is half full/halfempty and as suggested is “an indicator not of time passing, but of time negated” (Barikin, 2019: 111). Time stops.

The VIRUS has disrupted our sense of time and called into question time’s pretense of ordering. When classes switched to Zoom in mid-March with students and faculty sheltered in place we began talking and reflecting about how disorienting, even confusing we found our usual sense of time and the everyday, often sensing the entire day wobbling off its axels. A stable sense of time began to slip away bringing in its wake a cascading sense of uncertainty. An absence of reliable time as a metaphysical foundation for reality dropped on us like a mist. What remains is the present and presence of a Logos neither timeless nor temporal but now and forever. Of being neither in nor out of time. A state of becoming which is not merely liquid time and a state of being which is not merely solid in time.

The novelist E.L. Doctorow observed that “time is a mysterious thing … Physicists don’t know what to do with time. They wonder why it only goes one way. Albert Einstein was so wary of time that all he would say about it was that it is something you measure with a clock” (New York Times, June 14, 2020). Einstein said a lot more about time than that, asserting towards the end of his life that all time past, present and future was simultaneous. The Netflix TV series Dark plays creatively with this theme. Is this a sense of time without becoming?

One of the most iconic Surrealist paintings is Salvador Dali’s 1931 The Persistence of Memory with its unsettling melting of four pocket watches. Dali was inspired to brush into existence encounters that brought us face to face with the undefinable, indescribable, and unknowable. He wanted to create images of disquiet that would shatter our everyday sense of reality. Looking at the painting brings to mind Marx and Engels’ famous line from the Communist Manifesto “all that is solid melts into air” (Marx and Engels, 2012: 77) setting off vibrations in the mind and body of a world that is crumbling into chaos, without familiar and reliable coordinates. The world has become unknowable. In the painting the ants gathered on the back of the coppery-orange face-down watch along with the single fly on an adjacent melting watch can be seen as agents and harbingers of disease and destruction. A VIRUS.

Another painting that dramatically extends and alters our sense of everyday time is the Spanish-Mexican surrealist artist Remedios Varo’s Revelation of the Clockmaker (1955). A clockmaker working at his bench is surrounded by a number of grandfather clocks that each register the same time while containing a figure wearing a costume from different time periods. Then suddenly and unexpectedly a whirling disk spins into the room through a window. As Varo describes the scene, the clockmaker looks up with “an expression of astonishment and illumination” seeing a profoundly new vision of how time works. The clockmaker “represents our ordinary time” with all his clocks operating within a Newtonian construct of a “clockwork universe,” a system of absolutes where the flow of time is uniform and unchanging as represented by the costumed figures who although they are from different historical eras, the time on each of their clocks is the same. Time was considered to be a kind of objective being, independent of the created world. The whirling orb that has so startled the clockmaker causing the clock parts he is working on to crash to the floor is Einstein’s famous revelation that time is relative, not absolute. Hence time is not a fixed moment, the same for everyone confined in a clock (Kaplan, 1988: 174-75). Just as pandemic time for us can feel as though we have gone over to the other side of the looking glass the poet Emily Dickinson read time as not one but many, many kinds of time. Her various representations of time gives us a concept that refuses definite shape but does open us to “times possibility” (Creighton).

In the May 2020 Monthly Newsletter from the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, Massachusetts there is a meditation on what Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) might think of our social distancing and isolation. The poet famously lived most of her life by choice within the confines of her house and garden yet in her solitude was not lonely. Her life is a striking example of how we can remain connected while apart. She communicated to friends and loved ones through letters, and often shared her poetry with them. Dickinson absorbed what was going on in the world through the media of the time and her wide reading, attended to her garden and flowers and the natural word as stays against confusion, fear and uncertainty. So many complain about sheltering in place exhaustion but from Dickinson’s point of view we could redescribe our present as an opportunity to “dwell in possibility.” Her unique poetic voice (she wrote 1,789 poems) is one of kindness, attunement, noticing, attending, acknowledging, understanding and compassion – “hope is the thing with feathers.” She also writes profoundly of pain, madness and doubt (MacKenzie and Dana). Her philosophical outlook was anti-foundational and a number of scholars see her as a postmodernist avant la lettre (Deppman; Davis), bringing diversity, difference and otherness to visibility through an incredibly attuned sensibility.

Dickinson’s poems perhaps more than any other writer are sculpted within the trinity of noticing, attending and acknowledging and this I believe bears a crucial meaning for us as ethical practitioners. In a world where we are daily overwhelmed by a sense of chaos, where time feels crumpled up in our hands could we orbit in a kind of meditative slow circle noticing our communities and society entrapped by fear, racism, loss, separation and tragedy falling on us like a poisoned rain, and then attending to the wounds and suffering while acknowledging that the sand is running out for collective action and the re-creation of a world that is sustainable and livable. Emily Dickinson’s response “to the problems of consolation and reconciliation was to envision each private suffering as a reflection of every other, and to create through that vision a vast connection that runs through the unspoken, subterranean passages” of social human existence (Manheim, 2013: 298). We are either on an epic journey or no journey at all.

Following is one of Dickinson’s poems (p.73) – “After great pain, a formal feeling comes.” It seems to be a series of pronouncements from the past connected to the present and a reproving confirmation of the present now with the intention of shaking us from our “quartz contentment:

After great pain, a formal feeling comes –

The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –

The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,

And Yesterday, or Centuries before?