Belonging to different cultures and living these different cultures, inevitably suggests comparaison. Well at least in my case, a cosntant ping-pong movement of reflexions between what my mothers' homeland and what my fathers' country - the one that saw me grow and made me grow - are, ponctuates my daily experiece. I go around convinced that by knowing what doesn't define things you can more easily understand them, thats to say somekind of negative knowledge based on alterity.
Well you might wonder, where all of this is going, and must of all why the post titles, Order and Chaos. Even though a strict distinction between this antinomical pair of words is maybe what we could call a theological or cosmological fantasy, I do see differences in the amount of one and another, depending on where you stand. I remember, that time I was driving in Switzerland. How difficult it was ! The presence of so many lines, so many anticipations, as for where to turn, how fast to go, who's priority... in Mexico city its a whole other story, it is ordered by one chaotic unwritten rule : the bigger the car, the older the car, the higher the risk, the more you conquer priority. Its all about throwing the car ahead. (Below: the heavy-weight champion).
The thought sprouts out like evidence : order is closely linked to progres, so as societies advance (from a mainstream point of view of what progress means, being mainly economically) chaos melts into the uniform lines with which order is mapped out.
It is not too meaningless to exploit this common idea: latin-america bathing in chaos, when western europe walks steadily (or not) towards order, as long as we don't make certainty out of it . Seen from these insights (economical as societal progress) we could be tempted to make order a kind of finality, a finish-line in which chaos loudly -in descrescendo- steeps into the harmonical silence of perfect order.
Though this hierarchy can find counter examples : de universes expansions, goes from absolute order (contained in an atomical point) and finishes in a chaotic dilatation and expansion of matter.
Or on the other hand, sometime chaos and order are indistinguishable, what seems chaotic from some point of view, can from another perspective imply somekind of order. This makes me think of when my mom ordered me to order (words are intentionnal) my room when I thought to my self "but it is orderd", by somekind of personnal order, I reckon, an order which doesn't imply absolute limpidity (here again I admit it) but responds to other logical organisations.
I have no photographic record of "my order", but an art piece can be as significative. There is a composition, Kandinsky's order, which lets admit, is quite chaotic in some sens. And here is where we find a interesting thought, its not so that a place is order or chaotic in an absolute way, but it all depends of the logical reasons that order your chaos.
Some say chaos is fertile, in the sens it allows multiple orders with in it, and departs from the blankness of uniformity. Aren't the first greek titans off-springs of dark and silent Chaos ?
To close up this orderly chaotic entry -which awaits stimulus for its further reflection- I would say the impression that seized me with gray astonishement in Switzerland and sometimes does in western or northern countries of Europe (I insist on the word impression) is that of an homogenious order
(Logical homogenity ?)
Remains the question : is Order more deseirable than Chaos, are they not in their extrêmes silence and absence: an over-concentrated point or an everlasting fugue ?
Alejandro
Comments