The Fractal Edge

As high school kids, we sold magazine subscriptions to help out the band and athletic teams. My mother loved all the glossy magazines full of photographs coming to the house as well as I did. The national culture came to our remote corner of Iowa through these magazines, as well as through television. 

We lived in a huge white frame Victorian parsonage near the edge of a small town. The steep staircase at the back, which was how the maid once went down to the big, airy kitchen, had been boarded up. This left space for a small closet, and, wonder of wonders, a desk for me. I shared the maid’s room with my two-year-old brother when I was 13. A door off this room opened on the stairs to the attic which always held a bushel of tangy-smelling apples in the fall. The oldest rocking chair had been placed in our room so I could read to my brother at nap time. And I looked forward to the arrival of The Ladies’ Home Journal, which was serializing the story of Kathryn Parr, the last wife of Henry VIII. It was by Jan Westcott, entitled The Queen’s Grace.

Today I note that I was not the only one! Reviews on Amazon and Goodreads indicate other young girls were mesmerized by this story. Kathryn had buried her first two husbands and had no children. At 30, she fell in love with Thomas Seymour and they wished to marry. But she had caught the eye of Henry VIII and it seemed her duty to marry him. This she did, but not before spending the night with Seymour, who “thoroughly compromised” her in the hope that, if she was pregnant, she could not marry the king.

This was all understandable, but I did not know what being “thoroughly compromised” meant! I thought about this for a couple of years before finally figuring it out with the help, of course, of another book. In those days I would never have talked about such things with my girlfriends. When I did finally understand, I was shocked. Did people actually do that? The thought of it made me a little ill.

Needless to say, I got over it. In the back seat of a car at a drive-in movie I found out why one might want to do those things. What interests me now is that edge of knowing, that unfolding, fractal edge where anything can happen, but we trust the emergent stability. And new knowledge illuminates many other things all of a sudden.

People use the word “fractal” in many ways now, as its simple math has been shown to describe much about reality. Essentially a fractal is an object containing patterns repeating over and over at many different scales with every part resembling the whole. They are pictures of chaos and complexity, the math that describes nature. People even wonder if the universe is a fractal (though probably not quite all, as shown here).

I use the word somewhat like a metaphor. Watching the patterns as we drill down into the boundary of a Mandelbrot set is like watching someone’s face as illumination spreads over it with new-found knowledge. As E.O. Wilson says in his great treatise On Human Nature [published 1978], “pure knowledge is the ultimate emancipator. It equalizes people and sovereign states, erodes the archaic barriers of superstition and promises to lift the trajectory of cultural evolution.”

That fractal boundary is also like the present unspooling in front of us, a present which we cannot predict but which we trust will bear at least some relation to a known past. It is astonishing, when you think of it, that people move confidently forward in time, Monday following Sunday, January following December. Perhaps we have no choice (!), though there are tragic examples of people who cannot bear time and choose to end their lives. Responding to the attractors which make each of us unique, we move forward into what feels like expanding time and space. In the very same passage quoted above, E. O. Wilson states, “But I do not believe it [knowledge] can change the ground rules of human behavior or alter the main course of history’s predictable trajectory.”

I have evidence of this from a recent phone conversation: a friend insists that politically he is an “individualist,” very conservative, though he served two years in the peace corps and taught fifteen years in difficult schools in south central Los Angeles. I stated that I was a socialist, in the Norwegian manner, mirroring my heritage. When we hung up the phone I remembered that my friend had a Swiss background. Of course he is an individualist! Neither of us strays far from the predictable positions of our ancestors!

Yet we are individuals, each uniquely pursuing the emergent attractors that call to us. The fractal edge between our inner and outer selves is a potent growing point, repeating patterns, ever-unfolding in time. This is the interesting place to be. How much detail can we see? How much life can we press into a moment? The boundary between what moves through our minds and what we actually express shows us who we are. The mind plugs into many levels of chaos, but we are who we say we are, and we are what we do.

In the Chinese yin-yang symbol, a curved line runs down the center, separating the dark from the light. I see that too as a fractal boundary, ever-renewing the edge between stable order and creative chaos. Taoist philosophy is based on everything being subject to change from moment to moment. “Nevertheless, the changes proceed in orderly cycles, the outline of each pattern being endlessly repeated. Whereas fallen autumn leaves never produce identical patterns on the earth, the comings and goings of autumn itself vary only within narrow limits,” writes John Blofeld in Taoism [published 1978].

I am no scientist or mathematician, but I want to know the truth about the world in its reality. Biological evolution has by now stood the tests of more than 150 years of study. Physics and chemistry have gotten a pretty good handle on matter. But only when we add in the new insights of chaos theory and fractal math can we begin to understand what is predictable and determined and what is not. It allows us to understand the convergence, to see the spirit in matter. 

Seeing the spirit through science infuses reality with life and breath. Carl Sagan said that science is informed worship. But we do not need to worry that science will harden into an ideology! The essence of science is always a provisional story. “As near as we can figure out, this seems to be true,” it says. 

Sexuality remains mysterious to science and also to me. Nothing happened in the back seat of the car I mentioned above, except an arm around my shoulder and a hand at my waist as my boyfriend and I nestled together in our prom clothes. But it was enough to show me that coming together, one whole person with one other whole person is a wondrous thing.