One could begin to dream of a world in which nature was seen as alive, in which the imagination permeated all reality, in which animals and plants are seen as part of the living texture, the living components, the cells, and the life of Gaia, and Gaia in the life of the cosmos as a whole.
Let’s look at the world we are living in, which is full of 106 elements, tremendous gradients of energy ranging from what’s going on inside pulsars and quasars to what is going on inside viruses and cells. Tremendous organizational capacity at the atomic level, at the molecular level, at the level of molecular polymerization, at the level of membranes and gels, at the level of cells and organelles, organisms, societies, so forth and so on. In other words, the universe—at this moment—is a tremendously complicated, integrated, multi-leveled, dynamic thing. And every passing moment it becomes more so. This is what evolution, history, compression of time—what all these things are attempting to indicate is the increase in complexity of reality.
The planets are the cooled remnants of exploding stars. The elements in us and in our planets are stardust formed from supernovae.
The meaning of “chaos,” the first time the word appeared in literature, has got nothing whatsoever—apparently, superficially—to do with what we mean by “chaos” in the English language and in ordinary life. It meant only to Hesiad, according to the lexicon, “the gaping void between heaven and Earth out of which the creation came.” So creation out of chaos, yes. But the chaos did not mean disorder or anything negative, it only meant this “gaping void.”
The imagination is chaos. New forms are fetched out of this chaos. For me, the creative act is the letting-down of the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended, and the attempt to bring out of it ideas.
Chaos is capable of being the tremendous repository of ordered beauty.
You must’ve noticed this: that the world is very heavily designed in a way that it never was before.
