Chaos and Disorder

Several thousand moons ago, way before internet and kale became our uncontested oracles of truth, mother laziness took it upon herself to hand me a rather strange but powerful key.

One so overwhelmingly large that it took me years stomping around its contours to understand it as one… let alone wrap my head around which lock this key was meant for.

As most young men starting college, studying became a necessary obstacle -or better said- a reasonable excuse to leave the house and hit the streets, my opportunity to draw the dice.

And between us, back then I didn’t’ want just to let the dice roll; I was set to tear down every possible window with them, torch the moon and the horizon and with some luck, maybe even upset the sun.

So I asked around school looking to find the “paths of least resistance”; colloquially known as the easiest courses or credits, those with the highest ROI (Return On Indifference).

And so, I happily signed up for Sculpture 101 -an optional class on my Architecture studies- with a bunch of psychos who cared as little as I did for Academia or any type of formal education. Our intent was then, to celebrate chaos in every possible permutation.

I remember that during the first few Sculpture classes I was more concerned about concealing vodka somewhere inside the shop than understanding the absolute beauty of the Platonic solids.

But to my surprise -as weeks passed by- I found myself more and more enthralled with the peaceful romance of shaping volumes with my bare hands. While at it, my thirst for Chaos would recede for a few hours. I slowly found myself sneaking at night into the shop, in total secrecy, not to quench the Epicurean demon inside me, but instead, to put some background music on, and work on my very first sculpture. I called it The Chaos.

I found in sculpting a different type of poetry; one without words, one meant to wash away the noise, a deep and natural trance into the beauty of solitude, which by any means felt lonely.

And then the effect started spilling outside the shop and into my writing; my words become less anarchic, my temperament either diluted or enlarged, my awareness grew quiet, I felt a peace I never looked for, a place of possibility.

Bending words and meaning into spectacular displays of rhythm and conceptual innovation lost its appeal to me. I begun to simplify words. These abstractions, as stimulating as they were, couldn’t match the genuine honesty of dealing with my ideas through tangible means.

Years had to pass before I understood that this natural state came from the crossroads of the Hand, the Mind and the Heart, Light2matter’s eventual golden trifecta.

And all started with my first work, The Chaos. Bear in mind that at the shop, there was no need to conceptualize our sculptures. If anything, I found out I was the only one doing that… and to what extent. As an Architecture-driven class, its purpose was exclusively to play with volumes and find any reasonable Newtonian balance. I never agreed with that premise. Any object’s purpose carries between lines a symbolic one.

The Chaos had a simple but ambitious premise; the idea was to construct a bridge between Chaos and Disorder. The moment in time and space where both meet. Chaos as an incalculable equation and disorder as the consequence of removing the “movement” variable from the equation.

What followed was the formal understanding of disorder as a quantifiable and replicable new order. Disorder became then naturally a conceptual fallacy, merely a negative perception of a different order when objectively any different order is a new one, an actual genuine creation. Disorder became then a golden Phoenix.

But the true epiphany hiding behind and along this line of thought, is that Chaos lost its destructive stereotype and became some type of overarching creator, the actual source of all new orders, a necessary state to produce the “original”. And all these orders, old and new, once tainted again with movement, would sublimate back into the chaotic clouds of possibility.

Movement itself was the key. Vectors, entropies, centripetal forces… movement underlying everything.

And soon after I moved to Canada, and haven’t stopped moving since.

I had back then inadvertently planted the seed of what became, sculpture after sculpture, concept after concept, my very own empirical system of knowledge. Roots and branches, synthesis and reductions that after decades matured into my tree, one constantly moving to die only to grow back stronger.

A tree, like many others, always subject to a new -and delicious- ravaging wave of Chaos.

So my dearest Chaos, I understand you, I’m here waiting for you, every morning and every night.

Come to me and hit me with all you’ve got.

After all, I owe you everything.

I don’t know what happened to The Chaos sculpture.

I don’t recall ever finishing it.

That makes perfect sense to me now… I'm still moving, I’m myself just another sculpture.

Circa 2000, Chaos days.