ON THE MACHINATIONS OF CHAOS AS A CREATOR — OR, HOW THE VESSEL EXISTS IN A FLUX OF GENERATION, DEGENERATION, & REGENERATION.
“Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself.”
— Mary Shelley, from the introduction to Frankenstein
“It turns out that an eerie type of chaos can lurk just behind a facade of order — and yet, deep inside the chaos lurks an even eerier type of order.”
— Douglas Hofstadter, Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern
"Chaos mixes the orbits in state space in precisely the same way as a baker mixes bread dough by kneading it. One can imagine what happens to nearby trajectories on a chaotic attractor by placing a drop of blue food coloring in the dough. The kneading is a combination of [...] rolling out the dough [...] and folding the dough over. At first the blob of food coloring simply gets longer, but eventually it is folded, and after considerable time the blob is stretched and refolded many times. On close inspection the dough consists of many layers of alternating blue and white. After only twenty steps the [thickness of the initial blog] has shrunk to the molecular level. The blue dye is thoroughly mixed with the dough. Chaos works the same way..."
— James Crutchfield et al., "Chaos," ( Scientific American, vol. 255, Dec 1986 )
"Here the principle of alterity finds its most awe-inspiring application. This so - called evil observed in chaos, however, possesses no independent existence; it subsists only in proportion as it participates of good. For matter and an infinite variety of forms, how ever poorly or well commingled, are necessary for the creation of the mutable world. This chaos, therefore, while it is sharply distinguished from the organized beauties of the cosmos, is in no sense preternatural to nature. It is a necessary material in Nature's workshop. And the accidental evil of chaos, according with the eternal processes of Nature as a whole, may be called good."
— Walter Clyde Curry, "Milton's Chaos and Old Night," ( The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, vol. 46, Jan 1947 )
"The graves [...] mimed the most ancient religious symbol of all: diminishing circles indicating a spiral leading down, not to a point, but to infinity; order from chaos or chaos from order, depending on which way your mind worked."
— Stephen King, Pet Sematary