[Wondergirl]

On a citadel overlooking the Spanish city of Granada, there stands a magnificent Moorish palace called the Alhambra. A few years ago during a sailing voyage to southern Spain I was able to spend a day visiting this place, strolling through its ornate chambers, gazing at its fountain courts. The Alhambra is an artistic tour de force that the guidebooks describe as one of the great architectural wonders of the world.

Visitors here are awed by the intricate geometry of the place, the counterpoint of line and form, the symmetry of every wall and arch and promenade that makes this building what it is: a monument to arithmetic predictability. I was also awed—but not in the way the guidebooks suggested. The longer I lingered, the more uneasy I felt.. I found myself wondering what it would be like to actually live in a setting like this, surrounded by room after room of neurotic filigree. I began to feel as if I were a prisoner in some sort of compulsive Arabian nightmare. The walls seemed to close in around me, and I felt I was about to suffocate…

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For me—and I’m certain for many others—the Alhambra is too predictable, too symmetrical, too carefully organized. The day I visited there I found myself longing for a glimpse of white towering clouds, a craggy mountaintop, a twisted and gnarled old tree—anything random and disorderly. I didn’t feel right again until I had left the ornate confines of that building and walked through the stand of elms on the hillside below. The November sunlight slanted through the leaves and flickered in odd patterns at my feet. For the first time in many hours, I felt I could relax again.

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What was it that was so unsettling to me that day on the hilltop in Grenada? What was it about that Moorish conceptualization of paradise-on-Earth that felt so confining? And what was it about the sunlight dancing on the forest floor that seemed to provide the spiritual antidote? The answers to these questions, I suspect, may point the way toward some important thing that I am seeking in this world and may help to explain the way I want to live.

Think for a minute about the experience of randomness: the dance of flames in an open fireplace, the endless progression of clouds moving across a summer sky, the sound of surf breaking along a beach, the crisscrossing of seas on the surface of the ocean, the flight of birds on a windy autumn afternoon.

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Like the patterns of sunlight flickering on the forest floor, each of these experiences is chaotic and open-ended. Their attraction lies in their unpredictability. They are as unlike the close and predictable geometries of the Alhambra as it is possible to be.

And they surround us everywhere. They are the splay of veins in a leaf, the tracing of a heartbeat on an oscilloscope, the silhouette of branches against a gray winter sky, the turbulence of the wind during a tempest at sea, the lines of grain in a beautifully polished piece of wood. They are, in short, what the natural world seems to be about in thousands of its moods and faces.

One of the questions that I find myself asking about all such experiences is the obvious one: if they are so chaotic and unpredictable, why aren’t they also terrifying? Why do so many people gaze into the fire, stare at the clouds, listen to the wind, watch the flight of birds? Why do these experiences often seem restful and comforting? Why don’t we flee from them? Why aren’t we confounded by their apparent complexity?

Some are. Some want to live in Alhambras of the mind—with everything orderly and predictable. Some seek the truth primarily in closed systems, in questions with simple answers, in perfect geometric shapes. These are the ones Henry James must have been referring to when he observed that “the rule of nature is chaos—the dream of man is order.” But there are others—many others—who find in their dreams the siren song of chaos. These are the fire gazers, the ocean voyagers, the forest walkers.

I want to live among the forest walkers. I want to celebrate the chaos of nature, the randomness, the endless permutations of an inscrutable universe. I want to experience the tempest and feel the edges of my abilities to comprehend.

Why? Not because I think the tempest is really incomprehensible. But because I have an enduring suspicion that the tempest is utterly simple and—on some deep, subverbal level—thoroughly comprehensible. Call it an intuition. Call it a strange and compelling trust in what is.

The fingers of the fire, the rage of the tempest, the mottled dance of forest light: each is an expression of an orderliness far beyond the ability of our rational minds to comprehend. We do not understand their endless permutations—yet the intuition remains. They are simple. They are “orderly” on some barely accessible level. We can’t explain them—but many can feel their truth.

At any time there might come (and some day there will come) the conflagration, the bolt of lightning,

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the rogue sea that will neither know nor care about one’s own ego, one’s precious little-self. And then the irregular pulse in the stream of time that each conceives as his own individual being will be swirled back into the cauldron of experience, consumed by the fire, overwhelmed by the forest, drowned in the storm.

These things are and will be. They are not rational. They are not predictable or orderly. But they are true—and because they are true, they are worthy of our attention, our contemplation, our wonder.

I do not want to live in a convenient geometry. I do not want to force experience into a systematized catechism of simple questions and simple answers. I do not want to travel across time according to an incomplete map that fails to confront the frontiers.

I want to live among the fire gazers and the ocean voyagers and the forest walkers and learn the secret that they know (or suspect) about the order beyond the chaos. I want to celebrate a deity that encompasses all there is—not one that insulates us from the terror—and magnificence!—of predictability. I want to believe beyond the rationality of our times, to trust the night-feeling of the spirit, to sense—with the fire and the waves and the dance of forest light—the exquisite geometry of an inscrutable universe infinitely chaotic, infinitely simple.

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