Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Ellen, I'm really interested to hear how the complexity ideas
resonated for you, precisely because of your self-professed ignorance
of the topic.  Can you say more about that?
  

    
Meryl Streep as Judith Greenwood.  From your mouth to God's ear,
Maxine!

And yes, Ellen, I'd love to hear more about the new way you see
things.
  

    
the cave/art installation place where Molloy and Nola have thta memorable
scene near the end of the book--is that a real place? I loved that space you
described.
  

    
Aside from disappointment about Benito being fictional, how are friends and
acquaintances in Santa Fe reacting?  Do they recognize people, or
themselves, as the basis for characters?
  

    
I wondered that too.  
  

    
The cave is real.  I described it very literally.  It's on private
land, not too far from Georgia O'Keeffe's Abiquiu, and the owners ask
you for $5 to visit it, mainly to make sure the key comes back to them
(it's locked up as a rule).  It's an extraordinary installation, real
outsider art. I think the guy who did it is a construction worker.  

As Nola remarks, he did another such cave on public land, then worried
that without guards, people would trash it, or he'd be sued or
something.  So the owners of this land, which is part of the grounds of
Rancho de San Juan, a Relais et Chateau hotel, invited him to do one
in a remote part of their grounds. 

Do people recognize themselves?  No one has accused me of illicitly
capturing his soul--yet.  

The main characters are my own creation (though it felt more like
discovery) so that's not surprising.  For example, Ron is based on a
man I knew (just as the character Judith did) in high school.  He had
the horrible misfortune of growing up gay in the most white-bread
straitlaced 1950s suburban milieu.  He gave every indication of being
extremely unhappy.  I've never heard from him since high school, but I
decided to give him a happy life.  Very God-like!

Some real people are mentioned by name, and they've just been tickled
to find themselves in a work of fiction (in any case, very polite about
it).  Murray Gell-Mann still gives me a big kiss every time he sees
me; Doyne Farmer has a great sense of humor and he and his wife have
been our friends for a long time.  David Shaw, who is also mentioned
briefly as a financier in the mold of Farmer, which Molloy envies and
knows he cannot be, is coming to a NYC book party.  
  

    

I'm still thinking of how to answer your questions in 26-27, but have to
leave for work....
  

    
Is there any interaction (either in your book or in the real Santa Fe)
between the Santa Fe Institute folks and St. John's College?
  

    
Yes, in real life, they sometimes co-sponsor lectures, and the Santa
Fe Institute Summer School has been held at St. John's for a number of
years.  I don't know if that's the case just now, but it was so for a
decade or more.  

In my book, St. John's figured a bit.  I'd sent the manuscript to an
early reader, and he said: Well, this is a spiritual quest, and you
ought to make that more explicit.  And I thought, WHAT?  

Yet at some level I knew he was right.  Still, I couldn't figure out
how to get that across without hitting the reader crudely over the head
with it.  

Then, two summers ago, I took a summer course at St. John's called
"Encounters with Divine Lovers," which explored the erotic as an
earthly counterpart, if you will, for the experience of the divine. 
That theme appears in most of the world's major religions, notably in
Hinduism, but there's a strong tradition in Judaism and Christianity
too.   With a sentence and a half, I was able to focus on that, and
bring it to the fore.  I owe thanks to the splendid tutors at St.
John's for that one.
  

    

if you find the real Benito....

ok, the "edge" phenomenon... there are lots of edges in our everyday life,
but the recurrence of the borders of old (and newer) lava flows kept
grabbing my attention in Hawaii. what happens at the edge? there are places
where hot lava hit living wet trees and congealed before the tree burned
up, so there are tubes with bark imprints in them. there are lush islands
of vegetation surrounded by miles of lunar devastation, perhaps because of
a glitch in the landscape that caused the lava to cool just enough to flow
around rather than over. and there are places where the vegetation is
crawling through the cracks in the lava to take back the land, in tiny
increments. I found myself seeking out examples.

about the social/cultural/historical/economic mixing and mingling... Hawaii
has been a rich petri dish for looking at these things for hundreds of
years, so most of my observations aren't much more sophisticated than the
ones I picked up in anthro 101. but some of the things that resonated for
me this trip were, I think, enhanced by the Edge of Chaos experience. for
example, "kama'aina." it's usually interpreted as "child of the land," or
longtime local, but not necessarily of Hawaiian ancestry. to some it means
born in Hawaii, or of an "old" Hawaiian family, but it can also mean just
having a local address. (there are lots of kama'aina discounts available.)
the term "local," as used to us as mainland tourists, was quite different,
and usually meant someone of Hawaiian ancestry. there were veiled (and not
so veiled) warnings about avoiding certain beaches/parks on weekends
because the "locals" didn't like tourists there. still, there was some
clear resentment expressed by would be kama'ainas that there are some
definite perks that only "locals" had access to, like very good schools and
land rights established in the late 19th century.

in an interesting (to me, anyway) twist, we learned that the several
scientific outposts on the Mauna Kea summit overlay an area of immense
sacred and cultural importance. it seems that, to counter resentment of the
growth of the various observatory projects, the University of Hawaii has
established a quite fabulous astronomy education center in Hilo in which
all of the "didactic" information (display labels and such) is in both
English and Hawaiian. (see http://imiloahawaii.org/ for more.)

anyway, I loved the book, and appreciate how it guided my subsequent
perceptions.
  

    
Ellen, that's really interesting.  That sense of
insider/outsider/local/nonlocal is very strong in Santa Fe too, though
the excluding and including is a bit odd by any rational standard.

Judith often mentions being on the borders of things, the edge: for
her it means not only frontier science, but also how marginalized she
always feels in the world.  Molloy, who'd seem to have everything, is
at home neither in the U.S. or in Germany, though he's been apparently
successful in each place.  Benito, Nola, Ernie, Ron and Gabe: each of
them is on the edge of something.
  

    
Edges are interesting, and have many rich associations for people, as
ellen amply illustrates.  The concept "edge of chaos," though, has a
special meaning, and one that I would have liked to see brought out
even more.  In a very rough paraphrase, It's one of those "Goldilocks"
ideas:  when the environment is too ordered, nothing ever changes so
there's nothing interesting going on.  When it's too chaotic, there
aren't any patterns, there's no discernible order.  The edge of chaos
is the "just right" spot, where all the interesting action is: There's
enough randomness to enable things to evolve (and create order!), but
not so much chaos that they get ripped apart as soon as they organize
themselves.  

Judith could have included that idea in her email complexity seminar
for Molloy, but maybe you think that would have been too heavy-handed.
  

    
I hadn't thought of it as a "Goldilocks" idea, but you're altogether
right.  

Judith does say something like that in her email tutorial of Molloy,
but it's true, I didn't make a big deal of it.  She says (p. 70) "life
exists on the edge of chaos, the compromise between order and
surprise."  Again, on p. 83: "The key area is what we like to call the
edge of chaos.  At the edge of chaos, a system is open to new input, to
learning.  It can't learn anything at all if it's in frozen order, or
at the other extreme, in chaos."
  

    

Pamela, though this isn't your first novel, it's been a long time since you
wrote one. Your non-fiction work is what you've been known for for many
years.

What made you want to return to novel-writing?
  

    
Cynthia, I wish I had a nice, tidy answer to that one.

In a nutshell, the impulse just came on me to tell a story, and this
was the story that emerged.  

Of course non-fiction is story-telling too--that is, you need a strong
narrative--but why fictional characters?  Why make-believe?  I'm not
hiding anything roman a clef style.  

I know I was eager to channel the effects that Santa Fe and its
landscape had on me, so that was part of it.  I was strongly influenced
by the Institute.  

But none of these really answers your question, so I guess my answer
is, damned if I know!
  

    
I went away and thought about it for a while.

In fiction, you can address topics that at the least, don't lend
themselves to nonfiction--deep passions of every kind, the inexplicable
irrationalities of people, the way they play off on each other.  Much
of this book is about those things--irrationality, missed connections,
deep passions.

But why did I feel the urge to write about such things now?  I'll need
more mulling time for that, but the boxtop answer is, they're eternal
for humans.
  

    
Have you any idea where your writing will go next?
  

    
> <5> The sciences of complexity are devoted to finding out general rules 
> about systems that hold across disciplines and systems, whether they're 
> natural or artificial (e.g., whether ecosystems or economics; biological 
> evolution or the evolution of technology).

This sounds very much like what I began calling "General Systems Theory"  
(or, in application, "the systems approach")  twenty-some years ago,
mostly thanks to Fritjof Capra's book The Turning Point, which I read a
few years after completing a bachelor's degree in biology.  Shortly after
reading that book I became fascinated with the potential of computing, and
have been on that ride ever since.

Biology was good preparation for understanding the principles of systems
theory (higher math not included), but it was my encounter with systems
theory that made what I'd learned about biology coherent, and which was
responsible for getting my feet on the ground, intellectually (to the 
extent that they are ;-).
  

    
Does Gregory Bateson figure in this pursuit? Do I recall his name
correctly?
  

    
I suspect some of the people involved in complexity will have heard of
and even feel affinity with Gregory Bateson.  I also suspect the idea
of finding universals that hold across different fields is a very old
idea.  What's different now is that the people associated with the
Santa Fe Institute and their colleagues around the world have begun to
make science out of that very seductive idea.

Where my own writing will go next?  Looking back over the strange zigs
and zags my career has taken, it would be folly to predict.
  

    
I suspected as much :-).

>make a science out of that very seductive idea

If you've become intrigued by Judith's little introductory seminar on
complexity, there are getting to be better and more detailed
descriptions of some of that work that are quite approachable by the
general public.  One of the best ones I've seen is _Sync: The Emerging
Science of Spontaneous Order_ by Steven Strogatz.  Another is
_Emergence_ by Steven Johnson.  IIRC there's not a single equation in
either one, which is remarkable given that mathematical models are at
the center of the efforts that both books describe.
  

    
I think you can enjoy this novel whether you're interested in the
sciences of complexity or not.  If it leads you to explore them more,
great; if not, no problem.

For me, it was a book about character--in particular the main
characters.  I've run across men something like Molloy: self-made men
who, with the right breaks, could've been terrific at anything, being
blessed as he is with great native intelligence and great energy.  But
born in a given time and place, his path took him a certain way.   

Molloy is an extremely successful financier; ruthless at times.  He's
hauled himself up from a pretty blighted childhood; had a bad time with
his first wife; as a single father, tried to bring his kids up the
best way he could.  He's self-educated, and has spent much of his life
trading off between his own needs and those of others.  He's earned his
wisdom (and at times he's very wise) the hard way.  His battle in this
novel is to get himself someplace he'd rather be.
  

    
You beat me to it, Pamela.  I was just coming back to steer the
conversation in that direction (with perhaps a slight apology for the
diversion away from what your book is about in my last post.)

Absolutely this is a novel and it's about the characters.  You might
think of the complexity ideas as a light that you shine on the
interplay between the characters.  But the characters stand on their
own by virtue of what they actually do and think in the book.

Judith's email seminar on complexity, for example, is far from just an
excuse to bring those ideas into the book explicitly.  It's part of
the dance between Judith and Molloy and that's really its function in
the book.
  

    
It felt like intellectual foreplay, for sure.

So, Pamela, will you ever eat lunch in that town again?
  

    
Har!  So far so good, Reva, but then I'm safely in New York City right
now.

Yes, the email, the tutorial, is a flirtation.  The unsaid is more
important than the said.  It's much more so for him than for her at
that point--he's patently unhappy that it's by email and not face to
face.  Judith, on the other hand, has persuaded herself that this guy
could have some leverage over her institutional home, so she'd better
make nice no matter how much of a drag it might seem.  But she's not
nice enough to do it face to face.