Intermittency

This urge to cling to strips and sheets and bound bundles of text is surely old, but in this age the urge has become self-conscious. Cite the zeitgeist: The text can seem more real or sincere or interesting than any world it might refer to. The text can be definitive -- just those characters with that syntax, coming together some one way -- even in this era of promiscuous mixing, when the definitive text is only the easy childhood before the mad scramble. The stacks of blocks before the waves of ambiguity come toppling.

Cellular automata may be worn thin these days, with Rucker and Wolfram and company fashioning them as The Answer, but they illustrate the point. Take the few ordered characters of a text as the few simple computational rules of a cellular program. Then the structures that come tumbling out of the program -- periodic, chaotic, or intermittent -- are analogous to the meanings that come tumbling out of a text. (Although, one text may have many meanings, some continuous and some subject to gestalt-jumps, whereas a program-generated structure sits instantiated, utterly itself. So perhaps we should draw the analogy not between meanings and structures, but between meanings and patterns we locate in the structures.) In either domain, sustained intermittency is the prize; the harmonies and counterpoints; the Hegelian synthesis after synthesis.

I'm trying to get past all this. To build a post-postmodern room in my mind's MOMA, and one that isn't merely modern again. Actually, the room is up and the lights installed, but the commissions are in the works. The artists keep sending letters, progress reports of sorts, saying things like, "The strongest notes are earth tones. More Zen than granola, but beyond both..." and "Images of God keep coming up. A hesitant, heartbroken God, undergoing a conversion from Architect to Concerned Citizen. Lots of milky orange and sub-luminous light...”