My friend suffered a terrible spill, losing consciousness and crashing to the ground only to be found by his university colleagues; he was shaking and trapped in the confusion of violent fits as the shimmering fluorescent office light shone on him and his helpless colleagues looked on – he was stuck inside a moment while powerful shards of chaos were breaking every thought, and he was disjoined from all sense of reality, stuck in a netherworld of blackness, disowned from his senses for a time.
The picture of him wide awake in the hospital made me shudder. There was a discontinuity for me, as he is one of the most reasonable, present people I know and a picture of health who cuts a youthful debonaire, slender figure. He’s the quiet, soft-spoken hipster, the inquisitive one who poses the central question that gets to the heart of an issue. He’s the quick mind and steady, easy-going bassist in the background who bridges the rhythms to his melodies for his band literally and figuratively. He stared into the camera from a hospital bed, sitting up trying to be stoic but his left eye was bulging raw black and blue and wounded shut. He looked like a fighter who’d gone 13. He had that disconcerted gaze that begged the question, “How did I get here?” The doctors called it a “neurological problem,” but later it was clarified that it was an “epileptic seizure.”
I felt a terrible relief knowing he had a diagnosis and it is treatable, but these events make me pause. They force us to examine meaning and the daily electric charges of life we face and the valued treasures in our lives.
In the documentary film “All That Is Sacred,” author Jim Harrison quotes F. Scott Fitzgerald, saying: “We go through life with a diminishing portfolio of enthusiasms, so you try to seek out life moments that give you this immense jolt of electricity. It’s a tranquilizer better than any chemical tranquilizer, so you try to have something that gives you this electricity and freshens up your feeling about being alive.”
Doris Lessing put it another way. She said, “We have a thousand volts of energy.” This “thousand volts” is the thing that animates the body into being. How we use this energy makes all the difference in the world. Some people spend it in youth living hard and dying young, while others manage it through work, conserve a little for summers and holidays and frugally spend it. I guess sometimes the energy gets ahead of us, and sometimes we get ahead of the energy. The trick is in finding the sweet spot of passion’s voltage to prolong our journeys around the sun and maximize our potential.
I’m getting older and middle age has a way of forcing the hand of memory to remind me that everything is fleeting. We are all charged by the passion for life, true. Either we embrace it, soak it in and measure its worth or it flitters away like gold dust in the breeze.
When I was in grad school, I learned about Benoit Mandelbrot’s fractals. Chaos theory in mathematical equations was a fresh area of study in the 80s and artists were incorporating the field into their art with performance pieces and on canvasses. Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai was already doing this with his art in the 19th century and some artists were finally catching up to him.
So what are fractals? Benoit Mandelbrot, a computer engineer for IBM was inputting regular equations into the computer. The computer was overwhelmed with the information and tried to work it out causing a flurry of random numbers to pop all over the screen. When the computer figured out the complex equations it formed patterns that looked like a DNA helix.
The Fractal Foundation defines a fractal as the following: “A fractal is a never-ending pattern. Fractals are infinitely complex patterns that are self-similar across different scales. They are created by repeating a simple process over and over in an ongoing feedback loop. Driven by recursion, fractals are images of dynamic systems – the pictures of Chaos. Geometrically, they exist in between our familiar dimensions.“
Mandelbrot noticed that we are surrounded by fractals. The branches on trees look just like the veins giving blood to our lungs and nourishing us. The mountain ranges, rivers, and coastlines identify as microcosmic designs in nature that can be found elsewhere in the universe. Seashell patterns can be found in microscopic organisms and snowflakes.
Mandelbrot and others looked to philosophy and discovered that the Taoists said it thousands of years ago and have it right. “There is light in darkness,” harmony traveling in every perception of chaos like a suckerfish on a shark. John of the Cross noted during “a dark night of the soul,” something is happening; there is a purging of the will, the intellect and spirit. There is in essence a “holy darkness” working itself out in life.
Suffering can be troublesome and my heart hurts when I think of a friend having to endure such pains, but I know in the depths of my soul this too shall pass. The hardship he’s endured will work itself out and present a new understanding that will guide him on his journey. Strange how our consciousness changes when presented with seemingly insane propositions that don’t make sense to us when “time is out of joint.”
I have a sneaking suspicion that my friend will be all right. Thanks to the wonders of medicine, we still have him and his remarkable presence to enjoy, hopefully, for years to come. When faced with the diabolical nature of chaos we become a little more sentimental about the precious nature of life, a little braver, and a whole hell of a lot wiser. We are resurrected in the realization that we are charged with passion for life.
Old Scott Fitzgerald was right. “It’s never too late to be who you want to be” or remake your image to suit your needs. We are charged with certain passions and nature indicates that the chaos we experience in our lives works itself out. Though we may be thrown into a pool of chaos and experience those moments of earnest darkness, those moments are creating for us a design that will guide our way to the top of where we need to be.
Our intuitions and contemplative insights will form patterns and be a guide for the greater journey and for our greater good.
spirit beat 