Having a bi-weekly column can truly be a burden in the whippet-quick news cycle of Tuscaloosa and UA. This realization came down on me this week as hard as an avalanche of dogs – dogs much larger than the aforementioned whippet. You see, the illustrious rag you are currently reading published two columns since my last column that had me frothing at the bit like one of Pavlov’s dogs.
The columns, Katherine McClellan’s “The Internet Dimishes Deep Thought” and Will Edwards’ “Guitars Killed Christian Music, No Resurrection in Sight,” dangled in front of me like a meaty steak in front of a slobbering junkyard dog. But I was faced with a conundrum: how could I possibly respond to both articles when their subject matter seem to be as broad as the back of a St. Bernard?
Then I had an “aha” moment. I remembered that a colleague of mine, a brilliant thinker by the name of Abbas Abidi, had recently written an essay entitled “Leon Lett and the Poetics of Chaos” that could possibly help me buttress the tenuous connections I’d been trying to make between these two columns.
Abidi, a poet by trade, secured undergraduate degrees in history, philosophy, and English at LSU before enrolling in the University’s Master of Fine Arts in creative writing program. He is an eccentric and dynamic thinker who often smells of lilac and can be found on the steps of Morgan Hall reciting metaphysical poetry to the cicadas. I asked Abbas how the concepts laid forth in his essay could help with my problem.
“Often we think that order results from chaos or that order and chaos are binary opposites by necessity,” he said, shoveling Doritos into his mouth. “I’d argue that order and disorder actually don’t exist at all.” I asked Abidi how these notions related to my problem in particular.
“Modern society has made us experts at measuring only our own perceptions,” he said, draining Dorito detritus from the bag into his cavernous mouth. “To quote footballer Joey Barton, who paraphrased Einstein when he said, ‘Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.’ Obviously Barton, and by extension Einstein, are being as coy as Andrew Marvell.”
Abidi went on to talk about a scooter he’d been designing for some years before I could direct him back to the issue at hand: how does a columnist tackle two issues that seem like a Chihuahua and Doberman when stacked side by side.
“Personism,” he said.
I asked him to clarify.
“I have this idea that I stole from the ‘Scientific American’ about how at the atomic level, what we’re dealing with are mirages. Even [Werner] Heisenberg said that at the atomic level we are dealing with things closer to platonic forms, rather than concrete objects. It’s important in the post-human world to be able to make abstractions with ease since life is mostly meaningless and boring.”
I reminded Abidi that I was looking for a way to relate Facebook to Christian Nu-metal and was confused as to how his high minded language could help with my problem. He snapped me on the nose with a rolled up Crimson White and said, “That which is being split apart in a centrifuge doesn’t ask the centrifuge the methods of its own destruction.”
That brought the issue into a keen focus. I felt like a bloodhound on the trail of an escaped convict. We were getting at something and I knew I was a within striking distance of the heart of the matter. Abidi said he had one last thing to tell me that would surely solve my problem.
“As Michael Martone says, quoting James Maynard who is paraphrasing Stephen Sondheim, ‘Art is an attempt to bring order out of chaos. As for me, all art is exorcism.’”
Greg Houser is a graduate student in creative writing. His column runs biweekly on Tuesdays.
