Pain, Chaos, and the Evolutionary Blues

I continue to make my way through Professor Arnold Weinstein's book on how literature and art reveal to us a fundamental, if hidden, human unity. A Scream Goes Through the House has it that "the generosity of art" is that it "tells our collective story" as it "brings at last out into language and life the buried history of our hurt" (pp. 29-30).

Weinstein makes this point in the context of his discussion of James Baldwin's short story about two brothers born in Harlem, "Sonny's Blues" (pp. 25-31). One of the brothers, the narrator, "escapes" and "goes straight," while the younger brother, Sonny, stays and is busted for drugs. The elder brother comes to Sonny's rescue and, in so doing, learns about the blues.

Specifically, he learns "that the blues are pain and suffering set to music, transformed into music." They are, in words Baldwin places in the mouth of his character Creole, "the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph. . . . There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness." (p. 28)

Weinstein says it's too facile to think of art, as we often do, as "little more than opening up one's mouth and unloading . . . as narrowly confessional." In fact, he goes on, "Baldwin blows this concept right out of the water. Making music is a cosmic event, on the order of a reverse hurricane where you tame nature's chaos. You don't just emote or emit; there is indeed an explosion, but you shape it's very elements into song: [here Weinstein quotes Baldwin] 'the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air'."

There is accordingly a congruence between private pain and everyone's pain — and, furthermore, between pain and chaos. By imposing musical or artful order on "the roar rising from the void," we perform "an act of domestication, of yoking suffering into personal style" (p. 28).

But since the "narrowly confessional" is not what art is all about, the blues — and in Weinstein's view, all art is blues — restore our solidarity, our sense of connectedness and community, too. Art/music/blues "resurrects the ghost's of the family's and community's past [as] one fuses with one's loved ones, feels their pain, feels the calvary some suffered . . . recovers one's own walled-off, living deaths . . . repossesses the emotional plenitude of one's existence, extended long back into time and space, preceding even one's birth." (p. 30)


I find the twin idea of taking shared pain (or, more generally, shared feeling) as being congruent with "nature's chaos" and as being the taproot of human solidarity appealing for several reasons. One is fairly personal: over the course of several years, in the not too distant past, I spent a good deal of time pondering, in writing, what might be the religious or spiritual significance of recent investigations into the scientific field of "complexity." Some of these inquiries have turned up an unsuspected domain of dynamical systems' behavior: in addition to order (two types of it) and chaos, there is also the "edge of chaos."

Dynamical systems are, admittedly, mathematical abstractions, but life on Earth apparently bears many of such systems' characteristics. There seem to be reasons to believe — subject to further empirical confirmation — that life evolves at the edge of chaos. When systems have too much order, they cannot evolve at all. When they are in chaos, nothing new can survive for long.

It seemed to me that there was something profound to be apprehended here, something that ought to inform our religion. But I spent a lot of time and energy worrying that our traditional religious insistence on commandment following and pious rectitude was at odds with an edge-of-chaos theology.

Put simply, it looked to me as if evolution, which I, a Christian, do believe in, tells us that divine creation in our world — "ongoing genesis" in an evolving world — takes place by virtue of laws a lot less rigid than some Christians would accept. Many Christians, it seems, are wedded to the idea that God is entirely for order and wholly against chaos. But if that's so, how could an edge of chaos figure so prominently in the process that brought humankind into being?

At some point, my cogitations bogged down, being unable to cut through that Gordian knot. Now, Professor Weinstein provides me with the sword I've been searching for. Just as "the man who creates music . . . is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air," so too does nature do just that, as it evolves.

Testifying to the notion that this is the right sword is the above-mentioned congruence of the chaotic void with the commonality of pain and suffering embodied in art/music/blues. I have suggested in other recent posts that Jesus's teachings of universal brotherhood and societal solidarity were primarily a response to the pain, suffering, and oppression felt by the vast majority of his fellow Jews in 1st-century Palestine (see Albert Nolan's Jesus before Christianity). His blues — the original Calvary — were thus the definitive blues, if you will.

The blues as a metaphor for life emerging at the edge of chaos amid considerable labor pains patterns strongly with a view of Christ as preeminently a teacher of universal compassion and communal solidarity. We all, in such a world, share in the anguish of the ongoing birth of the new and different, and in the ubiquitous death of the old and outdated. We ought not to add to the misery by despising, marginalizing, and mistreating one another.


Put another way, the "evolutionary blues" are our common heritage, in a world in which we all can hear "the roar rising from the void" — that roar is chaos — and we all are tasked to do our part in "imposing order on it as it hits the air." We each thereby make our own kind of music, an alchemy that can turn our personal hurt into some semblance of societal health.

It has been suggested by such proponents of edge-of-chaos dynamics as theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman — see Roger Lewin's Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos — that all complex adaptive systems, living and otherwise, experience occasional catastrophes. Something untoward happens, and they are plunged into the dynamical domain labeled "chaos." If they don't perish, they modify their behavior, thus to make their dynamical way back out to the fecund edge of chaos. As they do, they learn tricks that will help them survive future catastrophes. They get stronger in the broken places.

I'm sugesting that woe is the way we humans experience such a process, when it happens to us.

When our lives are bumped over into the chaotic regime, as is apt to happen from time to time, we are traumatized. Though we may survive to get back on an even keel again, the trauma continues to reverberate in the depths of our soul.


This is the point Professor Weinstein makes in his discussion of Eugene O'Neill's play Long Day's Journey into Night. All of the play's major characters, a father and mother and two grown sons, have trauma locked in their past. Try as they might to dodge the repercussions, thoughm the echoes of those earlier individual traumas roil their present familial relations:

All of the Tyrones are scarred and formed by their pasts, and in the course of the play the occulted material moves from echo and refrain, a foghorn in the distance, to overt utterance, reaching its operatic crescendo in the final scene where each Tyrone confronts his or her ghosts and demons, and shares this confrontation with the others. ... Such a scheme announces that the individual actor is always/already permeated with the life of the others, not merely their contemporary existence, but the whold dreadful sweep of their transactions over time. Long Day's Journey into Night reveals the sticky glue that joins me to you, as if life in the family were a form of flypaper, a morass of sorts in which each figure is stuck, where your skin is attached to me, so that all the desired hegemony I claim for myself turns out to be a mirage. (pp. 38-39)

In computer models of complex dynamical systems poised at the edge of chaos, one of the key features is always the interconnectedness and interdependence of the various (shall we say) "actors" that make up the system. It is as if the system were a family, in Weinstein's/O'Neill's sense of the word. The actors' "transactions over time" include past traumas to themselves and to the system as a whole. The learning done by the system as it recovers from chaos translates into ongoing reverberations of pain and woe for the individual (but not truly separate) actors.

Along similar lines, Jesus's essential message, per Albert Nolan's reading of the Gospels, could also be put as "the individual actor is always/already permeated with the life of the others." We have no business isolating some of us from the rest of us by stigmatizing the "others" as "sinners."