#ronaldwallace

1. Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions

For want of a nail the shoe was lost, for want of a shoe the horse was lost, and so on to the ultimate loss––a battle, a world. In other words, the breeze from this butterfly's golden wings could fan a tsunami in Indonesia or send a small chill across the neck of an old love about to collapse in Kansas in an alcoholic stupor––her last. Everything is connected. Blame it on the butterfly, if you will. Or the gesture thirty years ago, the glance across the ninth-grade auditorium floor, to the girl who would one day be your lover, then ex-lover, then the wind that lifts the memory's tsunami, the mare of the imagination, bolting, the shoe that claps the nail down on your always already unending dream.

2. Love's Discrete Nonlinearity

No heart's desire is repeatable, or, therefore, predictable. If a few hungry foxes gorge on a large population of rabbits, the population of foxes increases while that of the rabbits declines, until some point of equilibrium is passed and the foxes begin to vanish with the depleted supply of rabbits, and then the rabbits multiply, like rabbits. And so on. The ebb and flow of desire and fulfillment is a story as old as the world. So, if I loved you, finally, too much, until you began to disappear, and I followed, would you theoretically return to love repeatedly again? There are forces so small in our story of foxes and rabbits no Malthus could ever account for them. Whole species daily disappear, intractable as weather. Or think of a continent's coastlines, their unmeasurable eddies and whorls: infinite longings inscribed by finite space and time, the heart's intricate branchings.

3. Strange Attractors