Chaos Imagined: Literature, Art, Science by Martin Meisel (review)
- Chaos Imagined: Literature, Art, Science by Martin Meisel
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 608pp.
“One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star,” Nietzsche wrote, and Jung added, “In all disorder there is a secret order.” What of the dance of opposites, then: is it a fiction or a muse? Perhaps both, and we are its epitome. For whether there is something from nothing, or nothing in something, it is the search for pattern that both edifies and allows us to imagine the chaos alongside the form. Many have wondered: could one exist without the other? But the answer, it seems, resides in the question, for the true mystery is whether our minds can ever grasp reality, if reality is there to grasp in the first place. Here Meisel, the erudite professor of dramatic literature, delineates the quest to give form to formlessness, which is not merely a paradox but the greatest, most generative paradox of all. In the final reckoning, the pretense to know the unknowable is both mistake and deliverance, and, in any event, it seems to be our lot. A good thing, then, that it produces so much meaning. “We live in a rainbow of chaos,” Cézanne said, and — damn it — he was right.
Oren Harman, who chairs the graduate program in science, technology, and society at Bar-Ilan University, is the author of The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness, which received the Los Angeles Times book award and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction. Other publications include The Man Who Invented the Chromosome and (with Michael Dietrich) Outsider Scientists: Rebels, Mavericks, and Heretics in Biology. A frequent writer for the New Republic and Haaretz, his latest book, Evolutions, is forthcoming with Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
