Secret Revealed

So it's about time I told y'all about where the title of this blog comes from.

March 10, 2011 - the second-last day of a unit on "Cosmos and Chaos." Chaos: disorder, destruction. Something broken. Cosmos: Order, restoration, beauty. The way things should be. How can we find cosmos in the midst of chaos? Can we turn chaos into cosmos, bring cosmos out of chaos, find the cosmos in the chaos, or create cosmos to replace chaos? Can one intend to bring cosmos but instead just increase chaos? Questions such as these were the focus of our readings, writings, and discussions for several months.

On this day, I was to give a presentation relating to this overall theme of cosmos and chaos. And what struck me at some point was that though most of us could identify cosmos or chaos when we saw it, it was extremely difficult to actually define what either of the two were. Well, chaos is perhaps fairly straightforward. But is it enough to say cosmos is a "lack of chaos?" I didn't think so.

So I began my presentation with a picture of a smiling group of friends, and asked the class "do you see cosmos or chaos?" It was fairly obvious - cosmos. I showed a picture of a war zone - definitely chaos. I went on like that, showing flowers, abandoned and run-down buildings, sunsets, and so on... but at one point I showed a mathematical pattern (a Julia Set, for those who are interested) - and some people (like me) thought it was a great example of cosmos, others thought for sure it was chaos. Then I showed a checkerboard pattern, and finally, a blank gray screen. Cosmos or chaos?

We had often compared cosmos to a completed jigsaw puzzle (every piece where it's supposed to be), and chaos being the unsolved puzzle (pieces everywhere, no order). But if order is cosmos... then is a totalitarian military regime, where everything goes according to the dictator's wishes, an example of cosmos? If chaos is when the pieces don't fit together... what if there are no pieces? Or if the pieces are all identical squares?

Through the rest of my presentation I developed the idea of cosmos being "purposeful randomness." There must be purpose (and it goes almost without saying that the purpose must also be good), or else it is just chaos; but there must also be randomness, or else it's just empty. It's boring, mundane, apathetic... unless you have purposeful randomness. It's the unexpected little things that brighten your day; the random conversations, the unforeseen opportunities. That's what makes life interesting; if your whole life strictly follows a pattern, nothing unexpected, you can hardly say that's cosmos. In fact, I argued, it's worse than chaos, because chaos, first, can help you grow or make you stronger, and second, gives you a strong desire to bring change, to strive for cosmos. But when you have just emptiness, you get neither.

There was a lot more detail, drawing out conclusions, providing examples, and so on, but I ended with a good example of purposeful randomness (the purpose being mainly to entertain, which, I would argue, brings cosmos): "So in conclusion, here’s a picture of Bruce Lee and a blue chicken, and do you have any questions?"

So yeah, that's where it came from. I guess in some ways my hope for this blog is that it yields this purposeful randomness. So far I don't think it's doing it too well, because recently most of the blog posts have just been long rants. But that's fine, as I mentioned in my introductions to the blog I don't really have a specific direction or goal in mind.

As an interesting footnote, the last day of the unit was March 11, 2011; little did we know at the time that within ten minutes of our English class ending, we would undergo the most chaos any of us had probably ever experienced.