
"The Layers"
The poet Stanley Kunitz admonishes our beleaguered spirits to "live in the layers, not on the litter" of life; to focus on the arc of becoming that transcends chaos.
When we see mess, we impute a lack of good order, easily mistaken for random noise. Yet of course the disorder we observe may not be random at all, merely ordered in ways and on paths we do not recognize. Scientists are always looking for sources of what's called "deterministic chaos," meaning activity that appears haphazard and unpredictable but that has originated from initial conditions and "strange attractors" known to produce such unexpected outcomes.
In this sense, even chaos is supposed to operate within a vaster reality of ironclad cause and effect, whose drivers may be veiled from us but are presumed to exist. This framework suggests, above all, that to perceive chaos at play amounts, more than anything else, to our mind's humble acknowledgement that, in this arena of reality, we remain wholly ignorant, unable to fit any known theory of causality to what we're seeing.