does anyone have the extension code for Laplace's demon

chaos, christmas, ch...love

I know I said “when in doubt, do nothing”. But sometimes, you need to move. This is lesson two, write it down. When in doubt, do nothing. Should this fail - move.

Going outside works. Kids these days call it “touching grass”. Truly, the youth of today has no idea what to do once they step outdoors, I shake my old head. Sometimes I giggle and actually touch the grass, how wacky and absurdist of me, /s.

Then I take one deep breath, silence my busy mind, and it becomes clear that the world is always where I’ve left it. I was walking the other night, thinking about nothing in particular. It’s rare I have my whole brain to myself, so I tried to establish a line of communication with my remaining two brain cells. They were, at the time, in a blowout fight with each other, making the exercise almost not worth it.

***

I was walking and something made me go back to an old memory I haven’t revisited for a while.

In the broad sense of the word, I was mugged. I was ten years old, but it was all quite benign. More like non consensual indefinite borrowing of my phone, rather than a mugging. It was my first ever phone, a little blue Siemens, something I’ve been begging for for so long, and now it was gone.

I realised then that sometimes you don’t need to wait forever to be certain you will never get something back.

Until then I’d only lost things, and with losing something, there’s still hope. Once it’s been taken, there’s hope against hope.

I was waiting by the elevator inside our big apartment block, when this man (who was probably around 16-18, a ten year old’s version of an adult) ran in, quite flustered. He asked me: “Hey, do you have the time by any chance?” I looked at my watch:

“4:15,” I said.

I remember it all so clearly. This watch was round and simple, and had a brown leather strap. The guy had a very 90’s sweater on, you’ve seen them a million times. That unidentifiable pattern of brown, beige, and black shapes, chunkily knit; my uncle had one like that. Dark blue jeans. I remember vaguely his face, his hair. Worn sneakers.

“Could I borrow your phone? Please, I need to call my aunt, she’s in the hospital!” I handed him my phone, and he ran outside, instantly. I just stood there, dumbfounded. I guess I did let him borrow it, I just should have specified, for how long.

The permanence of what just happened was setting in. Soon enough I was full on sobbing, clutching my violin, sheet music filled backpack sliding off of one shoulder. Joke’s on him: my violin was probably way more valuable than the phone, but few people aware of this become petty thieves.

I went outside and circled our building many times before I was brave enough to go back in and tell my family what happened. I felt like such an idiot, so I told them I was typing a message, and the guy ran in and took my phone. Anything seemed better than admitting I just handed it over.

When you spend most of your childhood getting in trouble for things that are your fault, it’s hard to tell when it starts being someone else’s.

***

Now I’m thirty and have a phone again. But never give me your number, because then things like this happen:

Jules was a paid actor. He already knows all of this but I needed an excuse to explain.

For those like me, who skipped the duolingo lesson on the interdisciplinary scientific studies dealing with complex systems highly sensitive to slight changes in conditions, here are six main principles of chaos:

1. Butterfly effect (we know this one. small changes in conditions can lead to really dramatic changes in results)

2. Unpredictability (there is no way to predict the future because precise initial conditions are unknowable, and, as per my last email the first principle, even the tiniest variation can throw the whole thing off and then you end up with hotdog hands)

3. Order/disorder (any orderly system can be thrown into chaos. which isn’t synonymous with disorder: it explores the relationship between order and disorder)

4. Mixing (two molecules starting at the same point might end up in wildly different places later on. prince and pauper style.)

5. Feedback (external feedback can throw a system into chaos. they keep saying this is how the stock market works, which is just their opportunity to be apologetics for a system that’s simply too imperfect to be— sorry ill save it for my next zine or something)

6. Fractals (infinite self similar pattern repeated on different scales. like broccoli. fractals can go down into infinity because you can divide a line forever and ever, and never stop dividing it if you should so please.)

Bonus tidbit: Here’s a Koch snowflake made out of fractals. It has an infinite surface yet it’s volume is finite. Neat, right?

***.

What is it like, hoping against hope? Maybe it’s like when you lose something, then it could always turn up.

Or maybe it’s like when someone yoinks something out of your hands and runs off. And you know it’s gone but you think they might come back, or get caught somehow.

Until now I’ve only ever really believed something near impossible to be inevitable about bad things, like nuclear war. Dreading against dread, maybe? Am I really as optimistic as I thought? I’m scared of highly improbable things in the same world where people are clinging to impossible odds and hypotheticals, instead of giving in to their base anxieties.

I thought about the hopeful hopelessness of the poor scientists getting their head stuck inside chaos theory. All these scientists will tell you: trying to predict anything far enough in advance is almost worse than just guessing. Like meteorologists say that in some cases it’s way more accurate to simply infer what the weather will be like from looking at what it was like on the same day in previous years.

It’s more accurate to assume that history will repeat itself, on a different scale.

Since we can neither truly know all of the initial conditions, nor satisfy any of the other requirements, then maybe truly in this mad, chaotic world anything could happen. So we might as well hope.

If there’s no way you could ever know enough, you can hope.

***

Does everything get smaller with time?

I remember so clearly coming back to my grandparents’ apartment, where I grew up, after the first long absence. It felt like the rooms have folded onto themselves, a bigger version existing forever in my mind, replaced by a replica, a smaller version of itself.

My grandparents seemed smaller, too. The Christmas tree, factually speaking, was as big as any before it have been, but it seemed tiny to me. The expandable table, once huge, was just a table now. Bringing Jules there for the first time I was telling him to prepare for how miniature everything was.

Afterwards, incredulous, he described it all as being normal sized. I said, he must be having a giraffe, it was a dollhouse. But he was probably telling the truth: it was part of his present, not something he could remember ever seeing on a smaller scale, a long time ago.

***

I was eighteen and walking home really late after catching the last train back to Southampton, where I was in my first year of university. I had been in the city for less than a month. I didn’t own a smartphone, so I immediately got lost. I didn’t have friends either, yet. Not ones I could call at 1 am.

I was wandering towards what my heart told me the general direction of my apartment was, when I saw a guy in his mid to late twenties, carrying a small plastic bag like the ones they have in off-license shops. I asked him for directions, he said he was walking the same way and I could join.

He didn’t seem threatening in any way, the way nobody really does when you’re 18.

We chatted about something as we walked. Suddenly, we stopped. “This is my house,” he said. “I just need to drop this off. You can come in, it’ll take five minutes. Then I can walk you a little further.”

I said (I shit you not) “Sure, why not.”

When we were inside, I was placed on a worn out armchair with faded beige, brown, and black shapes on it. There were two other men there. I was beginning to feel some type of way about the situation and how it was unfolding.

Suddenly, there was a cup of tea in my hands. I don’t want to stress you out, everything was fine, but back then I didn’t even know better than to not drink tea given me by a stranger that lured me into his house at one am.

The TV was muted, showing a cricket, maybe a baseball, game. People spoke to each other in a language I didn’t understand. The place and furniture smelled like food that I’d normally enjoy. But not then and there. I suddenly felt dizzy.

“Aren’t we going?” I asked.

“Relax,” was the response, as he started rubbing my shoulders. “Just rest a few minutes.”

I considered, without comprehending fully, the big picture of what was happening. As the realisation was (too slowly) dawning on me, I discovered that even my naïveté has limits. I stood up sharply, and declared that it was late and I needed to go. I started towards the door, but my way was blocked. “You don’t even know where to go,” he said, starting to sound annoyed.

“I’ll find it,” I pushed through forcefully, and was outside. I was only lost, and when something is lost, there’s hope. Not like when something has been taken from you.

When so much trouble in your life is your fault, it’s easy to forget it can come from other people, too.

***

Nothing gets smaller, of course. You only step back and see things from a different scale.

Maybe it’s all true. Maybe my reality is an endless fractal snowflake and not cyclical at all. I keep walking myself backwards and seeing more and more of it. I start somewhere infinitesimal, and all I hope for is to some day see enough.

I entered my grandparents’ apartment and realised, with a wider field of view, how many times that line has been divided. It was once my whole world and now is a very small part of a whole; as it should be.

I guess that’s the whole point, and if where you started feels small, then you have empirical evidence of how far you’ve come.

I don’t have to live long enough to prove the infinity of dividing that line. We watch events of our lives unfold and repeat like they do in a never ending fractal system. And sometimes the pattern is just me asking Zoe to put her jacket on a thousand times, today like I did yesterday, just like every day, for eternity, or something that can feel an awful lot like eternity.

All these physicists that went mad trying to grasp infinity should’ve just spent a week with a toddler.

And yet, within that infinite surface of my eternal mornings, and seemingly, infinitely repeatable experiences, my time remains hopelessly finite.

***

Our Christmas tree arrived, smaller than the one we had last year, though it would still dwarf the one we had in Latvia.

I took out the box of ornaments, each individually wrapped in tissue paper, same way my grandparents always had done. I arrange them on the tree, the kids instantly take them off again. Something ends up broken. I never really mind.

I think some more about the box of tissue wrapped Soviet-made ornaments from my childhood. I wonder to myself, whether Zoe and Mila will warmly remember this box I pack and unpack every year, reusing the same old tissue paper.

***

I keep walking and consider that if everything is just a fractal repetition of itself, then the heat of a universe being born now lives in our Earth’s core. And if we’re lucky then we get to feel the echo of this same heat.

And I see suddenly that one day, a long time ago now, I saw a guy, and a butterfly flapped its wings inside my stomach somewhere. And the emptiness exploded all over again, on our tiny, arbitrary, infinitely negligent scale.

Everything happened again, a new universe, a new world full of chaos. We made new, smaller people. Millions of years of evolution, repeated inside of me over a mere few months. Now these small people are running around, destroying our home, refusing to wear their jackets in December.

***

Whenever I go outside Jules tells me: “Keep your phone in your pocket, you know what this area is like.” This time I had it out of my pocket long enough to take all these notes, anyway. If predicting scientifically is almost as good as guessing, should we be more careful, or is there no point in being careful at all?

(Btw, outside of my metaphysical ramblings, “be more careful” is always the right answer. Such is the danger of a thought experiment… gotcha!)