September 9 2010 - STARBUCKS And the Battle Between Chaos Theory and the Deterministic System

Without ritual, life cannot progress and stay static at the same time.  Here is the coffee shop where I regularly go to hide my mind.  I know there are people looking for it and I know that I am close to losing it.

 

Every day a man comes in here.  He is wearing running shorts, his hair is a mess and he has a ritual.  He orders a sandwich, a prefab concoction which requires that some heat be applied by a microwave device.  While this is accomplished, the man chooses a particular overstuffed armchair which for some reason is always vacant when he arrives.  From a nearby table he slides a standard wooden kitchen chair across the floor – noisily.  


Today the noise is drowned out, however, by skull shattering, high pitched wails from some child armed with a prodigious lung capacity, and also some crayons.  I often wonder, what is the goal behind loading a child with crayons and then watching (or even helping) him explode willy-nilly across some cartoony page of black and white line art?  Is it to establish that the natural state of Man is one of chaos?  Is it an attempt to override this natural state, to corral the imaginations of this child within the predetermined boundaries of our society?  He will no doubt grow up to do more diligent and acceptable work in his cubicle if he learns to stay within the lines.

I decide that today I despise children, in all their forms and identities.

Meanwhile the man with the ritual has positioned his wooden chair in front of his overstuffed armchair.  He selects a section of the daily newspaper and places it on the wooden chair.  By now his sandwich is sufficiently irradiated; he retrieves it and seats himself in the armchair.  Leaning forward he peruses the newspaper while jamming the article of food into his mouth by way of jagged, irregular bites.  This task, this seemingly impromptu exercise in random chaos theory, takes only a very few moments to complete.

There is nothing in all of this that is really noteworthy.  Up until this point in the ritual, that is.  But now the dichotomy of simultaneous chaos and order is gloriously manifested.  There are multiple layers to this daily ritual; it has been honed and perfected by this gym-shorts guy and almost certainly without him giving it a second thought (which underscores the symbolic significance, in my mind).

Every day, at this point, with the sandwich consumed and some small random bit of news presumably absorbed – the man stands up and promptly leaves the premises.  He tosses his sandwich wrapper in the trash bin by the door.  But he does not restore the order which he has intentionally disrupted.  He does not replace the newspaper on its rack.  And he most assuredly DOES NOT put the wooden chair back where he found it!  He simply leaves as if it was perfectly natural, completely acceptable, to just take something from its rightful place, use it for a purpose other than the one for which it was conceived and built, and then just leave - just leave it there, out of place, askew, tilted away from its natural place in the world, and with no thought of what comes next.  Once the door has closed behind him, this intrepid, shorts-wearing, messy-haired guy has removed the chair from the world of his conscious or unconscious thought.  He has effected a small chaos and then he has left it there, in this unnatural (or perhaps natural?) state of disorder.

A few minutes later, Katie comes out from behind the counter to pursue her own ritual – at about this time each day an employee will move through the store with a broom and dustpan, and sweep up whatever disorder is visibly strewn about the commercially tiled floor.  In the course of this, she returns the newspaper to its proper location, and she moves the wooden chair back to the little table where it – we have no choice but to conclude this – where it BELONGS.

The drama and the wonder involved in predictably repeating the exact same act of chaos, day after day, is the strictest demonstration of ritualistic activity that can be imagined or performed.  A ritual would not be termed as such, if it were merely a repetitive act that everyone performs.  Breathing is not a ritual.   The element of eccentricity is a necessary component.  Ritual requires a recognizable act of chaos as a part of the recipe.