Chaos:
common source of all Being . . .
that infinite abyss, the current Nothing of potential Somethings . . .
the bottomless well of Possibility . . .
never spent but unknown to or else feared by a lack of imagination . . .
and obscured by the grotesque overexertion of Will . . .
Before the first note (here words might blossom into song), there is true Chaos, a pure movement as anonymous as an imperceptible stillness, a silence, a question unspoken and unheard but loaded from some unknown future and thrust from that comfy existence toward past’s nonexistence—not Absolutely Nothing—but toward that impossibility of unthinking thoughts, that dense void where those thoughts and unfathomable others dwell, that indestructible Being that somehow makes each expressed thought feel so empty.
The first note exists already in a place where Chaos cannot be unconcealed because the true Chaos could never have been sung aloud. “Chaos” lies to us: it speaks what cannot be spoken, names the nameless. Unconcealment or, if you prefer, useful progress takes place as true Chaos is replaced by . . . what?—an unknowable stillness replaced by a movement—or is imperceptible movement replaced by a useful stillness? Here, the words try to form that ancient song that had no words—and we scramble the words over and over again into various orientations removing some here and adding others there in hopes of finding the Immortal Mimic but the words can’t ever be anything more than a temporary delay in our continued scrambling activities.
The words and the notes arrive from a place that is already that of unconcealment, a place where Chaos has already been partially translated, a place of established, limited conventions of making use.
Mightn’t we admit of Chaos’ continued existence, forever concealed, never wholly translated or replaced? Is Chaos not always face-to-face before us merely unrecognized, unnamed, unspoken? And does it not vanish behind our visible forms the moment we agree upon speaking a name of recognition? Mightn’t we better approach it by forgetting knowing or by ceasing to presume we know?
Isn’t its unconcealing a movement in a particular direction or a calling into being, a new thing named, a new word spoken? Isn’t its ever-present existence in concealment the ever-present availability of new possibilities, new beings that are not yet, new things not yet named, new words not yet spoken?
To clear a way, for instance across a snow-covered field, is … to form a way and, forming it, to keep it ready. Way-making understood in this sense no longer means to move something up or down a path that is already there. It means to bring the way…forth first of all, and thus to be the way.
The word makes the thing into a thing – it “bethings” the thing. We should like to call this rule of the word “bethinging” (die Bedingnis).
But the word does not give reasons for the thing. The word allows the thing to presence as thing. We shall call this allowing bethinging. The poet does not explain what this bethinging is. But the poet commits himself, that is, his Saying to this mystery of the word.
He has allowed himself – that is, such Saying as will still be possible for him in the future – to be brought face to face with the word’s mystery, the be-thinging of the thing in the word.
This nondenial of self can speak in this way only, that it says: ‘may there be.’ From now on may the word be: the bethinging of the thing. This ‘may there be’ lets be the relation of word and thing, what and how it really is. Without the word, no thing is.
A song begins and with it so begins time in a new world. A new unconcealing, a new possibility.
But this one begins with the hope of reconcealing, of forgetting knowing, of placing us face-to-face with something unrecognized, a strangeness, a mystery, a nothing—a nothing which through sheer repetition shall become a something—confusing harmonies playing off of ones already known to us and well-worn—Something’s best attempt to mimic Nothing, to bring us face-to-face with Possibility—Chaos’ visible other—untouched by word, song yet unsung.
Chaos is what we say we find when what we are looking for is absent; Possibility is the potential to turn what seems concealed or disordered into something we might look for in the future. Chaos is an absence, Possibility is the conversion of absence into Something—but Chaos is the very fullness of all of those potential somethings, many of which will never come to be. Chaos is concealed in the same thereness that offers Possibility, the same thereness with which we are ever face-to-face.
Chaos was not a moment in history in which the universe was in an objectively unorganized and illogical state that thankfully resolved itself into the invariable laws that we gradually “discover”.
Chaos can be nothing other than whatever happens to fall outside of our present conventional conceptualizations and ideologies.
Chaos is what we say we find when we cannot get the logic and organization we have been relying upon to work for us in the manner we would like.
Chaos is the mute presence of the world whose movements we perceive and parse and label as events that we then place into causal relations.
Our making use of these causal events transforms chaos into ideas and an organizational logic.
This movement is nothing more than a matter of determining which of our actions prove to be most useful to us in getting what we want and labelling them so that we may better remember them.
Memory converts mere events (chaos) into causal events (possibility), and one of the functions of our systems of language is to aid our memories.
Words concretize our memories forming a way that is itself remembered.
The world is as it was before—mutely present, available to us—but we learn to see it in terms of the conceptualizations that help us to remember which of our actions provide successful results.
The mistake is in thinking that the conceptualizations were there in the world all along and will be there forevermore.
Rather, the conceptualizations will be utilized by us for as long as they continue to be useful.
And when they are not useful, when our actions do not give us the results that our conventional conceptualizations tell us they should, we will see chaos, and we will need to create some new way of making use of this chaos that gives us some sort of results that we like.
For all of our activities of unconcealment, we also require those of reconcealment—a sense of wonder that we don’t recapture so much as grant its revealing to us—an attempt to glimpse what may not be seen—a movement that is a stillness—a word that unspeaks—the recognition that the way-making of our words is, in the end, optional and alterable allowing us to feel the open possibility of endless reinvention.
Chaos, disorder, depends upon the existence of (no)things—nothingness is not non-existence but an existence that we are not presently seeking and might never seek. The elements are not something separate or different from the chaos. They are the chaos and disorder itself reimagined. You and I and all of civilization are but a variant of our own dreams of Chaos—
Players waiting for our turn to begin in a game that never began and will never end, only our own rules for it will change—
Michelangelo’s Captives are with us in this inexorable predicament—forever in transition between formlessness and form, absence and presence, possibility and being—constantly oscillating between chaos and creation or between possibility and monotonous stagnation—a movement that is not only necessary for our continuing to find meaning in the world and, therefore, providing us with endless reasons to go on living but a movement that is itself the endless reinvention responsible for the very existence of the world. Just as the figures in the statues might be establishing a unique identity separate from an amorphous nothingness as much as they might be breaking free of limiting and arbitrary conventions into a hazy unknown newness, so too does life and existence necessarily oscillate between a need for sameness, solidarity, oneness, oblivion and a need for difference, diversity, uniqueness, way-making—and any particular event may be interpreted as one just as well as the other.
Here, an absence may be reinvented as a presence and oh how many absences, how many presences! Their missing, absent owner might again be visible, not so far away nor so long ago, right here. All of their former owners collectively here with ghostly input—or every songwriter, musician, producer, critic, writer, reader, dentist, lawyer, and soothsayer here in this overcrowded room! No, no. There is only me and some simple, primordial hum, a disturbance and yet in a very different game with different rules where I can already see myself becoming so small and slight, here no more.
. . . But where Possibility is the visible face of Chaos and where Civilization is our present reinvention of Nothing.
The trouble begins when we start to be so impressed by the strategies of our systematized thought that we forget that it does relate to an obverse, that it is hewn from negation, that it is but very small security against the void of negation which surrounds it. And when that happens, when we forget these things, all sorts of mechanical failures begin to disrupt the functions of the human personality. When people who practice an art like music become captives of those positive assumptions of system, when they forget to credit that happening against negation which system is, and when they become disrespectful of the immensity of negation compared to system — then they put themselves out of reach of that replenishment of invention upon which creative ideas depend, because invention is, in fact, a cautious dipping into the negation that lies outside system from a position firmly ensconced in system.
Sometimes I want to give myself what I want and sometimes I want to give myself something I don’t want. Sometimes I want to give other people what they want and sometimes I want to confront them with something they don’t want so they might discover something they didn’t know they wanted. Sometimes none of us knows what we want or what we should ever want or why we should ever have wanted anything to begin with. Yet doesn’t our wanting—whether acted upon or not—allow another day to appear before us?
Another day . . . what did we do to deserve each of these days endlessly flowing one into the other, each one an empty container to be filled up with activity? Which activities? What am I to do with this day before me now?
If you should awake in the night as I often do, look before you and ask, “What is this?”
Not to the room nor to the items in the room nor to a Being over above the room nor to Fate nor to Nature nor to a fictitious wise sage nor to the proper expert in some discipline deemed appropriate but rather to no other—only to the manner in which the room and the items and the question is available to you at all. I want you to unhear the words of the song. I want you to remember when the words for things seemed to open out into a world and its possibilities rather than narrowing it down to whatever we presently wish to control.
It is possible that here is just such a way-making. Here we are long after the first note has rung and blossomed and withered and faded and long since been replaced by notes newly rung. Yet there are attempts to form a new path back toward this first note. But which way? And how shall we recognize success?
Mightn’t a world be conjured, a world of unhearing so that you might hear the possibilities again, so that you may not discern whether you hear a new song or the same song anew, so that you may find again in your dreams not the vital piece of information that is the key to your survival or understanding but the delightful refreshment and possibility inherent in the forever of Chaos?
Delirium of disorder
Life is the sieve through which my anarchy strains
Resolving itself into works
Chaos is the score upon which reality is written
The timeless, swirling, gyroscopic horde
Delirium of disorder
I am just an atom in an ectoplasmic sea
Without direction or a reason to exist
The anechoic nebula rotating in my brain
Is persuading me contritely to persist
Delirium of disorder
(Brett Gurewitz)
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