Imagining Chaos

The stories we tell to give meaning to the world – mythology and religion, literature and philosophy, science and art – are our means of conveying our ideas to others. However, beneath our search for order lies a fundamental fear of disorder. It is difficult to imagine true chaos, and even harder to describe it.

In "The Imagined Chaos", Martin Meisel, with great passion and enthusiasm, makes a tremendous effort to demonstrate, reveal, and rationalize absolute chaos. For this purpose, he tells the story of the social, psychological, and cosmological turning points of the image of chaos. With examples from literature, philosophy, painting, graphic arts, science, linguistics, music, and films, he recounts the extraordinary story of the transformation of chaos from destructiveness to an image with the potential to provide freedom and energy in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Meisel, who melds readings of Sophocles, Plato, Lucretius, Calderón, Milton, Haydn, Blake, Faraday, Chekhov, Faulkner, Wells, and Beckett with paintings by Brueghel, Rubens, Goya, Turner, Dix, Dada, and Futurist artists, draws attention to the revolution in the treatment of energy and entropy in thermodynamics. The author ultimately uses this chaotic framework to explain concepts such as meaning, purpose, mortality, and the mind.