Here Comes the Chaotic

We’re planning a chaotic interview … more precisely, an interview about chaos … which should be on the air sometime in late summer. Yes, I do know about the new Get Smart movie, but that involves KAOS, not chaos. I won’t be seeing the movie, by the way; I’m a purist about remakes, which are so often opportunistic. There is, however, a synchronicity between the chapter of my life when I was glued to the original Get Smart sitcom on TV, with its endless rivalry between CONTROL and KAOS, and the youthful season of my fascination with Greek mythology. Here’s the tale.

Sometime in junior high I bought a Scholastic Paperback edition of Bernard Evslin’s Gods, Demigods, and Demons: An Encyclopedia of Greek Mythology. I pored over that little handbook as though it contained the holy grail. From Medusa to the Minotaur, from Olympus to Hades, the book contained just the right bait for a kid in junior high: gore and guts, shades and monsters. The most perplexing entry of all (… I seem to remember…) was an entry for Chaos. Chaos eluded my comprehension for the most part, and yet somehow seemed more true, more real than any of the more colorful mythological entities endowed with more tangible characteristics, human or animal. Zeus could become a swan, and Cerberus had three heads. You could imagine these. Chaos, on the other hand, was too remote, too mysterious. No feathers or fur, no feet or flesh. Even though Chaos may have been a womb, or the well from which sprang the Urgötter (whoops, wrong pantheon), Chaos was not material. It was closer to infinity, or nothingness, or all the eternity in between. Chaos seemed an anti-matter twin to life. Not a person, but a raw, gruesome concept … to be feared as some disembodiment lying in blood at the root of all abstraction. (Yes, I was a weird kid.)

At this early date I have no idea where our Thinking Aloud discussion about Chaos or chaos will go, other than to say we’ll be talking not with a philosopher, nor a physicist, nor astronomer, but with a classicist. A classicist is that rare breed of scholar who knows in astonishing detail what everyone else has forgotten, or (more usually) what we’ve never learned in the first place. To be a classicist is to retrieve and then organize the chaotic flotsam and jetsam of past civilizations’ intellectual sojourns upon the seas of time. A classicist must have a formidable mind. To be a classicist is to be a god, demigod, or demon. You can bet I’m shaking in my boots about this interview. My plea to you: Pour out some libation in my behalf, consult the oracles, read the auspices … if any ill omens present themselves, please, please, please let me know … so I can back out of this interview! (Or maybe just send me a few questions you might ask during the interview.) That’s my urgent plea to you before approaching this topic with a real live classicist. [An extraneous aside: One of my favorite book titles is A Gentle Plea for Chaos, but that’s a book all about one eccentric British gardener’s aesthetic views … a good read by the way.]

-Marcus Smith