It’s a great word, isn’t it? Ineluctable. I believe I first encountered it as a teenager, reading James Joyce. It’s one of those arcane words one rarely uses in daily conversation, but rather when one is waxing poetic. And as an aspiring poet in my youth, fascinated by words and the way they seem to transcend the reality of everyday existence, I was drawn to using words like ineluctable to enter those ‘other’ worlds, to bask in imagination.
Not that I had any great need to escape from my relatively normal lower middle class upbringing in Brooklyn. I was fairly well adjusted as a youth, with good friends, caring parents, and a pretty stable life. But the call to imagination was fostered, mostly by my mother, at a very young age. She herself was a lively, histrionic figure, prone to singing and acting in an amateur milieu. She exposed me as a baby to music and the arts, while my father did what he could to encourage critical thinking and a love for language. Hence, my forays into music and writing.
Writing, however, took a back seat after my initial studies at college, where I started to explore more musical outlets. After dropping out of college as an English Lit major, I eventually wound up studying music at San Francisco State University, and eventually carving out a special major in electronic music composition. This takes me, on a very winding arc, to today.
On to the subject of this post: Chaos. Another interesting, albeit more commonly recognized word, redolent with interpretation, negative, positive and neutral. By assigning it with the very subjective term of beauty, I am undoubtedly showing my hand as to the value I place upon it, since, for the purpose of this explanation, I am using the term in the contexts of music, sound, art, science and mathematics, where theories about the apparent randomness of natural phenomena can sometimes yield extremely interesting results.
Since much of my work in sound art has a basis in improvisation and organic growth, meditating on the concepts of chaos have proven to be a fertile ground for my creative process.