free reverie

One fine day in 1975 Benoit Mandelbrot awoke screaming. He was dreaming about the night sky. He had been jerked straight out of his sheets and in flannel pyjamas hurtled toward the moon, shirking it narrowly and flying onwards towards and through the planets, through the stars and towards new ones, on and on and on until eventually he reached the end of the universe. He was screaming because of what he found there.

After composing himself with coffee and cigarettes (breakfast of champions!) Benoit took it upon himself to ensure that the nightmare scenario of his nocturnal revelation would stay in its own reality, thankyouverymuch. He then did an extraordinary thing. He gave birth to a shape that made it physically, logically, mathematically, Kantfuckingly rationally impossible for the universe to end.

It was brilliantly simple. He extraed the most ordinary thing he could.

He soothed his mind by projecting this shape onto the dark night sky, thereby eternalizing it. Tossed the stars the Socerer’s Stone. Benoit preferred endlessness to the end. It was easier to stomach. Self-induced nausea. An existential bulemic.

He told them (who? the world, the press, his colleagues, his wife, the dog, the men in the white coats) all about his newborn shape, fresh outta the cerebral womb (with all due credit to the cosmic pumpkin). It was a rough, fragmented geometric shape that could be subdivided in parts, each of which was a reduced-size copy of the whole. So it didn’t matter how close or how far you were away from it – it always looked the same. Infinitely complex.

The question of whether or not this shape had any business being married to the stars was heavily scrutinized by the scientific community. It remains unresolved, as does Benoit’s neuroses.

Lately it has come to my attention (and maybe yours, too, if you’re lucky – read on!) that the fractal does not merely exist as a figment of a half-deluded cosmologist’s imagination or an unimaginably abstract figure on a supercrazy supercomputer. Quite the contrary; they’re all over the place, here there and everywhere. Mountain ranges, coastlines, and snowflakes all approximate fractals. So do clouds and lightning bolts. That makes thunderstorms steaming hot fractal orgies.

You’re asking why orgies? fractals? all this? Who taught you how to ask questions anyways?

You see, the kingdom of blogdom is a confusing place; the circular questioning that the deconstruction of modern society primarily entails, the plethora of egotistical ejaculations – results of the rhetorical self-flagellation made possible by modern technology (one hand on the keyboard and the other…), the topsy-turvy replacement of reading with misreading, the infinity of linguistic activity and its boundless flow of possible meanings are altogether enough to incline one to mutter, like Alice, “curiouser and curiouser.”

How to stain the looking glass? I aim to fashion my writing in the image of that Shape of All Shapes, the fractal. That is, with a fine structure at very small scales, an irregularity that cannot be described by traditional language, and, above all, beauty. After all, these are but words, words about shapes, and words are shapes, shapes about shapes, self-similar, meaning this… actually… is… a…. fractal…. ! !!? ?! put that in your pipe and smoke it.