CANTO 26 Anything richer

 

Anything richer than a book in a tent?
Sometimes
too bright the eye

of glaring middle-order

dims the edges feathering into potential.

Thanks to Gleick: Simple systems give rise

to complex behavior. Complex systems

give rise to simple behavior.

We knock about in well-lit crocks

clanging spotless orisons.

We polish the mirrors of hard surfaces

to reflect retinues

of retinal configurations.

We bathe in porcelain

basins of attraction and justify brand-names.

The satisfactions

of all these certainties didn’t satisfy

Edward Lorenz who put the whether in weather

who cried sensitive dependence on initial conditions

who gave us

fractals of inquietude,

not to mention

THE END OF THE REDUCTIONIST PROGRAM.

Peitgen:

The tree, let’s say—what is important?

Is it the straight line,

or is it the fractal object?

Does the earth’s climate follow a strange attractor?

Holmes:

The complicated, aperiodic, attracting

orbits of certain (usually low-dimensional) dynamical systems.

Trace out the labyrinth within the quotidian.

Bai-Lin:

A kind of order without periodicity...a newly recognized

and ubiquitous class of natural phenomena.

Inch with sticky fingers across the passing lane.

Stewart:

Apparently random recurrent

behavior in a simple deterministic (clockwork-like) system.

We must seek out the feathered edges

of strange repellers.

Ford:

Dynamics freed

at last from the shackles of order and predictability. . . . Systems

Iiberated to randomly explore their every dynamical possibility. . . exciting

variety, richness of choice, a cornucopia of opportunity.

Canoe down random rapids to the isthmus of the oceanic!