Director's Blog
Chaos Theory
by Lyall Bush
Sep. 18, 2007
Two men meet at a crossroads. An altercation ensues and the younger man ends up killing the older one. Many years pass and one day the younger man learns, to his horror, and in the middle of another crisis, that the man he killed so long ago was his father. The story was this: at his birth his father heard from prophets that his new child would one day kill him. Seeking to avoid the calamity he exposed the child on a hillside, where shepherds found him and raised him. Then one day, fully grown, the young man left home, traveling until he came to the place where two roads met.
Fate has been a subject for writers at least since Sophocles. There is a reason: the heavy iron of its law is compelling, the economy of its stories, which pull back to reveal vast, unraveling design, is admirable. The stories lay a latticework of understanding over chaos, randomness and mystery, and by these terms fate is incomprehensible yet simple: a beautiful, terrible container.
But what if events are open, undetermined, governed by chance? What if fate is just an interesting way for us to thrill ourselves with design, with what the gods are up to? In the caves of Altimira, images that date to 19,000 years before Sophocles seem to contemplate this: the overlapping images of bison (some larger, some smaller), so much about casting spells on the hunt, so much about food and magic, are possible expressions of the idea that we might sometimes govern chance, might have a hand in the hand stirring it.
Chance is kind of the gypsy alternative to fate. It's itinerant and mobile, it's California. It's a story about multiple beginnings, multiple middles. For example: What if you have a breakdown driving on a coastal highway just at the point that you realize you probably passed the exit a few miles back, the one that was going to lead to the best fishing on the Carolina coast. You get out to hitchhike and a transport pulls over. You get in and, talking to the driver, you discover to your amazement that you grew up in the same town, on adjacent streets. The driver entered your elementary school a year after your family moved away. He knows where the best fishing really is, and it's there, in the fishing town he sends you to, where you will meet the right woman for you—she's there for you to meet, anyway—but before you get there and before you meet her you tow your car with the broken axle to a garage where the mechanic's dog nips you and you have to go to the emergency room where the doctor turns out to be someone you went to high school with.
Based on what's happening you begin to think of this as a magical journey. You talk to the doctor and find that there's a lot of history, a lot of back-story there, and on a whim you ask her to go fishing with you, to the town the driver told you about. But then a few weeks later, back home in the world, the long-distance romance ends, as you both knew it would. And the woman who ran the one shop near the beach, the one who talked to you and the doctor for a few minutes one morning with her smoky eyes and hazel voice: she was the one you were supposed to meet. You met but you didn't meet. You were this close to something big entering your life. Well, maybe.
When I add things up in my life the main thread is chance, the crooked path of tickling thoughts, small and mixed opportunities, the light and beautiful mockeries of love. Chance led me to Seattle the first time—in a large, silver Mercedes given to me by an overweight man at the driveaway company. He dangled and dropped the keys into my hand, not even setting down the juicy sandwich he was holding with the pickle toothpicked on its top. My pimply rock'n'roll-obsessed friends hung back behind me. (I was the front man, shaven and short-haired and wearing a shirt.) We were going to deliver the car to a banker 3,000 miles away in a city we couldn't imagine. The idea had been mine but it was a whim more than a solid idea. It was a scarf, as Kurt Vonnegut wrote, floating past my mind's eye. It was May and I'd just completed my second year of graduate school and the prickling heat of the New Jersey summer had already begun. We were all looking for a way out of work—I was just the one who heard the rumor.
On that trip, Seattle was a brief stay under uncolored skies, a translucent bowl of drip and glare that seemed exopthalmic and internal. The city as a whole seemed two beats back of responding to anything in time. (The expression on everyone's face seemed to be, “What?”) I didn't understand it, but I was only there two days, during which time nothing happened. Six years later it would. But that two-week journey remains, 20 years after, my reference point for Route 66, for the dense, dreamy greens of Virginia, punk music in a barn in Lawrence, Kansas, the mathematical flatness of the Midwest, the cowboy blues and browns of Arizona, the two-dimensionality of the Grand Canyon. I saw a lot because work seemed already stale and because I wanted out of the bonfire of June in Middlesex County, New Jersey.
