Richard,
You raise some interesting points. I'm still absorbing the complete essay; indeed, I've been absorbing the book in which it appears for over a year now--in which different writers' methods are analyzed via chaos/order theories, and not always in apparently related ways. (Another particularly striking essay from the book is
Modeling the Chaosphere: Stanislaw Lem's Alien Communications, by Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., in which C-R analyzes Lem's use of alien contact/language to express the possibility/impossibility of understanding cognitive systems which are mostly or completely foreign to our own--lol, I'm sure many poet/critic communications might fall within this 'sphere!)
I've a few thoughts about Morris' ideas which I can express from my own understanding of this essay, in my own words.
First, I agree that laws of science are general in some respects, but only as they apply to specific phenomena or systems which they are designed to address: Newton's laws were insufficient for describing every physical phenomenon, from Einstein's point of view; Einstein's were insufficient from the quantum physicist's point of view; etc. The idea of "attractors" is central, of course, to this essay; since I'm no physicist, I'll have to hedge my bets by postulating from personal experience the meanings I've found in the essay's discussion of attractors, along with my own grasping-mind's attempts to understand this concept as it is used in this essay.
In the case of the pendulum mentioned above, I'd call the "fixed-point attractor" the
set of influences which draws the pendulum toward rest at the midpoint of its arc. (Velocity/momentum in conjuntion with gravity/friction in conjunction with the actual object of the pendulum.) The "limit cycles attractor" would be the set of influences which cause the mechanical pendulum to continuously move between the two points at the top of its arc, on either side of the midpoint, without stopping. (I suppose this type would add to the set of the fixed-point attractor, the machine.) To re-image these two types of attractors, I'm going to leap into uncharted waters knowing that there be ravenous monsters lurking there, and use the examples of one poem's operation and the operation it might have had, had it been edited slightly from its final form before being published. I would like to note beforehand, however, that I agree with you that any complex system such as a poem might exhibit "strange attractors" as well as fixed-point and/or limit-cycle attractors (indeed, they must certainly do so, but I'll get more to that later); but I'll also posit the notion that most poems heavily use one of the three types of attractors over the other two types in the manner in which they are constructed by the poet; and, as in Morris' description of the working of
Trilogy's "narrative, argumentative, and imagistic structures through the smallest details of its rhythm and phrasing," any type of attractor might be used for the creation of each of these structures--possibly using one type of attractor for imagistic structure, another type for argumentative structure, etc.
<u>Fixed-Point</u>
Acquainted with the Night
I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.
I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,
But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.
I think that it's not too surprising that Frost said, "Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting."--This is another fixed-point system, where the parts of the system are circling the frozen nature of the ice and the melting influence of the stove until the system comes to the final resting point of the ice's complete dissolution. (Yes, now there's steam, but "ice" has ceased to exist.)
I chose this specific poem because it clearly exhibits a pendulum-type of swing. Phrasing:
out in rain—and back in rain;
call me back or say good-bye;
neither wrong nor right. Imagery: there's the looking down the saddest city lane vs. the dropping of eyes (i.e., dropping is "not looking"); there's that lane and the [an]other street; there's the city light and the moon; there's the walking and the stopping still; etc. Argument: there's the declaration of L1 and the following examples of this acquaintanceship; it's the nature of these examples to provide a pendulum movement between the truth of the opening statement and its possible falsehood. Sonics: There's the meter and rhyme, of course.
What makes this system's attractor overwhelmingly a fixed-point attractor is its argument: All these oscillations within the body of the poem circle the fixed point of the idea of L1. Most bluntly, this is done by opening up the poem with the thesis statement of L1 and closing with its repetition:
I have been one acquainted with the night is the pendulum at rest, the ice melted, around which everything else revolves. (One could say that the opening statement revolves around the rest of the poem, literally by beginning and ending the poem or argumentatively perhaps; but this is still a self-enclosed system at rest: perfect balance.)
<u>Limit-Cycle</u>
Poem X
I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.
I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,
But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
Suppose the poem had been written this way originally. Suppose you'd never known the original thesis statement because it was never made in L's 1 & 14 nor in the title. What would this poem be about? The other oscillations would still be present (albeit with a slant rhyme on light/beat...lol, give me a break, here), but the fixed argument would be missing. Certainly, we know the actual version, and that relation of acquaintanceship with night still exists in this version, but we don't know in this version that
that is the speaker's primary interpretation of his/her own situation described in the poem; perhaps this speaker is an outcast of some sort, a criminal or member of a lower caste, a boy out on a forbidden late-night excursion...any of these, who discovers a kind of mournful nihilism at the end of the poem.--E.g.,
I have passed by the watchman on his beat / And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain might be a young homeless boy's unwillingness to explain why he--someone so young--should be out so late unaccompanied; in the ending, the boy's perhaps saying that the trek has been fruitless, nihilistically. Interestingly, without the original opening line's
I have been one, this version could be taking place in the present: e.g., that boy (or criminal, or wife) has done all these things, but
[now] one luminary clock against the sky // Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
This version is still as closed as the original, but its structural devices oscillate continuously around a tropography: the thing being drawn is far more general than in the original, which was closed around one fixed-point because of L1 & L14 & the title. One could argue that the original contained all the possibilities of the revision as past occasions of the speaker's acquaintanceship (i.e., is the original speaker an ex-homeless child?), but even if this is so, the original as a whole would still be focusing on the relationship to night as expressed in the title, with these specific images/occurrences being incidental. The
revision's tropes never reach a fixed state, but point to an order (or, structure) which, being indefinitely defined, is one of constant motion: The limit-cycle attractors of the revised version are these tropes in collusion with the poem as a whole rather than a thesis statement such as the original's fixed-point attractor; the continuous oscillation exhibited by the tropes and the poem is limited-cycle. (I.e., the poem surely isn't about doggy doo, but is instead about the relationships between these tropes.)
Aside: if taken individually, the line
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right would be a limit-cycle structure, one which oscillated between/around "wrong" and "right." In the original poem, the motion of this line is constrained by the thesis.
* * *
When you say, "...these laws are the laws of complexity, not of reductionism...," I would say,
yes. In a system which is shaped by a "strange attractor," there is no fixed-point around which the poem revolves, nor is there a limit-cycle through which the poem oscillates. I'm reminded of Emerson's statement in
Goethe; or The Writer: "It is the last lesson of modern science, that the highest simplicity of structure is produced, not by a few elements, but by the highest complexity." But rather than being random, as in the case of many (but not all, I would guess) attempted L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poems or various other "experimental poems," strange-attractors actually create structures, I think, by plotting chaos in minute details which are not
apparently related. In the two examples above of Frost's words, each trope, image, etc., is quite obviously meant to play off the others and this is apparent in both versions. H.D.'s poem does not appear to be chaos as we normally understand it, nor as randomness; however, its variant tropes are separated from one another by not necessarily being used with one another...or, are not meant to signify a specific relationship with one another. For instance, in the first line of the lines cited in my original posting,
Invisible, indivisible Spirit, there is subtle wordplay in the first two words, but: 1)their primary roots are not etymologically related, 2) syntactially, they can only be loosely related if we assume the association that we are not able to divide things we cannot see 3) their syllables mislead us into assuming a greater association even so, and 4) they are not nudged by the poet into any greater association; in fact, the punning relationship would not even need to be seen in order for the words to give those lines meaning enough to justify the lines' existence. As a reader, I am thrilled by the possibility that "indivisible" might be parsed into a combination of "individual" and "visible," and it's possible that the poet intended this, but it's not necessary to the meanings of those lines.
Here's a little more of that essay (it is much longer than this, even...)--
H.D.'s mythopoeic writings pull seemingly random or disorganized phenomena into dynamic relation by discovering patterns which repeat across scales or recur one inside the next. Chaologists call these patterns "scaling" and "recursion," locate them in price charts and gene development, and give them mathematical formulation (Gleick, 115-16, 179) H.D. locates them in the events of autobiography, history, and mythology and gives them mythopoetic expression...Things "come true" for H.D. not when they can be empirically verified or logically deduced but when they display symmetries between scales or within interlocking levels of a system. Examples of scaling in H.D.'s writing range from the repetition of universal mythologies in local events to the reiterated structures in a seashell's whorl, the swirl of sparks from a bonfire, and the whirling of stars in a galaxy; examples of recursion include the many symmetries that link a poem's sounds, rhythms, images, and poetic or narrative structures to the "laws" toward which they drive. For H.D., such patterns are not metaphors substituting for something similar, nor are they metonymies associated with something analogous: they are templates for particular shapes of matter or forms of behavior, the mythopoeic equivalents of the laws of chaos theory.
* * *
One final note: I mentioned above the idea that all poems will have "strange attractors" of one sort or another. One specific sort I meant: because poets can't predict the reactions of so many individually complex readers who have diverse linguistic skills/histories/cultures, the things which poems communicate cannot be predicted. This complexity is akin to the complexities mentioned above of stock market prices, etc., and so I must assume that the added variable of
audience will involve "strange attractors" in the poet-poem-audience system...hmmmm.
Curtis.