RIGOUR AND WHIMSY - EDGE OF CHAOS

750 ml | Alcohol/Vol: 12.5%

‘‘At the edge of chaos, unexpected outcomes occur. The risk to survival is severe.’’ – Michael Crichton

‘‘For a long time, I fought with the spectre of meaning — that grand, psychosocial narrative that things mean something, or at least they ought to. The movements of our lives, the movement of those lives through history, our pain, our joy, our private victories, our quiet defeats. Those moments that seem to come out of nowhere and shake us out of our endless thinking. What does it mean? We ask ourselves, and each other. But I’ve come to view this as a trap.

Meaning implies an absolute state. Something has a meaning. It possesses that meaning, and perhaps is possessed by it. That relationship is unshakeable. But of course, this can’t be so. Nothing is absolute.

Maybe you’ve encountered the phrase, change is the only constant. It’s a statement that hides a truth so huge, it might be impossible for us to really, truly wrap our heads around it. Not one thing you can point to is anything more than a temporary emergence. A transitory formal conjunction. Here for a moment and no more. Very likely less.

In the face of such totalizing logic, the idea of ‘meaning’ begins to look pretty inadequate. Something else is going on, and approaching an understanding of what requires a whole lot of letting go.

Partly, this is why I love art-making, whether that means music or theatre or painting, drawing, poetry. These are spaces we go to leap before we look. These are spaces where we can create the conditions for connections to emerge that might not make sense at first, or ever. Spending time with the work of people who dwell in these spaces — a drawing by Nasreen Mohamedi, a painting by Julie Mehretu, a piece of music by McCoy Tyner, a story by Jorge Luis Borges, a poem by Mary Oliver — can help us make friends with the idea of not-knowing. Of not-meaning.

We can get windows into worlds we will never know in the first person. We can feel and see into the lives of others. And we can allow this experience to shake our most fundamental assumptions and beliefs. What a privilege, to have access to such a path — one that points the way beyond ourselves, and is paved with the joy of discovery and humility.

It’s my conviction that such exercises are critical to human health. Which is to say, we live in a world we too often describe in absolutes. But such descriptions have virtually nothing to do with reality. To insist otherwise is to invite a lifetime of psychic pain, and worse.

We inhabit a boundary region, where anything is possible. For me, art is one way to reflect on this destabilizing truth — to think about what that means for our conduct, our identity, our values. To de-centre myself and start to work through what’s truly important. Art, in other words, can be a tool for navigating the (mostly metaphorical, but perhaps also literal) edge of chaos.

I like to think there is some of that in the art you are looking at and perhaps preparing to imbibe. An example of several people's hopeful attempts to glimpse something larger than themselves."