Chaos as North

Chaos as North

Uncertainty excites me
-Björk

I love chaos. I will not pretend that I’m all above it. I’m not. Chaos produces chills on my bones like any other neighbor, especially when things are out of my control. Don’t we all (hate THAT!)? Anyone who knows me personally knows that I tend to overreact and that I didn’t deal that well with my recent chaotic year. Still I wasn’t that bad. Still, I like-ehem!-LOVE chaos! And why, you may wonder? Simple. Chaos and disorder brings you the opportunity of new possibilities, and above all, gives you tools to create (them).

Each and every one of us needs a little bit of chaos, if just only a little, that is, if he can take the heat of the kitchen. We could use a lot of examples of how this is so, but it’s the figure of the artist the first one to pop into my mind. The artist owes everything to chaos. Chaos is his ever lasting leech; he needs it in order to have the tools to reorganize how he understands the universe under his eyes. Re-create, re-present, take all the crap and build something out of it to use that creative window.

We can go even further and think of the beginning of it all (holy shit!) as chaos. In that sense, chaos should be understood as metaphysical. Therefore, if we think in a divinity that created it all, that god needed the chaos of nothingness to create and to create us. Chaos is nothing more that a lack of sense from out understanding. It is impossible to think that a nothingness in the beginning implies a divinity making sense or it without thinking of the need of chaos. Therefore, explaining the “creation”, with capital letters, means that, in the beginning, there was only chaos. In the beginning, all was chaos, and then it was God, or the human trying to understand order and naming it as a deity. Anyhow…in order for the big creation to happen, there was chaos.

But here is the thing, once there is an “order”, its all over baby. No more possibilities of creating anything. No more possibilities of reinventing or reinterpreting things. No more possibilities of finding new meanings….it is all said and done. Period. Be it a painting, a tasty new dish, a book, whatever, it’s all over man! That’s why I hate order and, even when I look for some sense of, well, sense, in every little thing I do, even the trivial ones as the little messes of my apartment (they do make sense for me…but just for me, that’s why I can’t stand another’s person mess), I always look for an escape vault in front of the commodities that ‘order’ gives me. Because if everything is neat, if there is an established order, if all the rules are spoken, if everything is said and done, then, what the fuck can I do?! Order robs me of any possible sense of agency (action). Period.

In fact, that’s the whole “end of History” premise of the post-capitalist nihilism: Everything is done. These theories just mean for us to kneel for the established order, this is the best of all words possible, not that far away of some Church teachings in the past (forget about this world, if you are fuck, you will have all the goodies later). This is the best we can do, nothing is going to change the world, every attempt of something else is futile, and in a more metaphysical way, corruption is in “our human nature” and that’s why we can’t do better than this (as if in the failing of every new attempt-political or not- there was no chance for a new effort).

However, the little secret beneath any sense of order is that it is finite. Go ahead; make your room neat as hell, and in time, you will new ways to destroy that order and begin again. In terms of those political theories that said this was it, we are already learning that it wasn’t, and we start to think of new possibilities and new ways of achieving a better place, to balance the check if you will. United States, Argentine, Greece, and many other countries were people thought they achieved their best of their capacities are staring to see the renewal of old ideas flourished with new colors, new proposals and new attempts that, even when they could be doomed to fail, stress-out that every sense of order have an expiration date. In that sense, if we think of every little thing supposed to be finished, we see the same result over and over: deterioration, change, and then, new beginnings. That’s why we have so many movements within artistic creations; in painting, in music, in literature, each of them grasping the ideals of the different periods they were part of and, at the same time, opening doors for new attempts after their deterioration.

Leaving aside this idea of deterioration, let us just think in change by itself. Better yet, let’s think in deterioration, but of “order”, which opens the possibility of new (incomplete) forms of chaos. The fact of the matter is that order is finite, like everything, which is why I have problems with such concepts as “eternity”. Nothing lasts forever. So, if we think of an infinite order as something “eternal”, we will find the impossibility of new forms of creation, the end of a “devenir”. If everything is neat and in order, if everything is already established and already written, then there’s nothing more to do: everything is done. That is precisely the idea that scares the shit out of me, especially when we live in the world that we live, in the days that we live. A world where everything is done nullifies my “agency”, my capacity of action. A world where there’s nothing to be done is a place where I cannot feel alive.

That’s the reason why I love chaos. That doesn’t mean that I suggest an anarchy of the “survival of the strongest”, which will mean a different kind of chaos where destruction is the only possibility, the annihilation of creativity. I do suggest the disorder of an order which renounces to be fixed, to be eternal, an order full of cycles that echoes every living thing. I search for that chaos every day. I live that chaos.

Now, let’s embrace it!