Chaos &: An Interview with Dr. JP Briggs
August 2008

Dr. JP Briggs is a distinguished professor at Western Connecticut State University in the Department of Writing, Linguistics, and Creative Process, and he is the senior editor for the Connecticut Review. His scholarly, photographic, literary, and scientific work explores the vast spectrum of human experience from the perspective of Chaos Theory, so much so that the title of this interview hesitates to encapsulate the whole of it: Chaos &...the Trickster, nature, literature, plot, image, dreams, poetry, math, science, spirituality, reality and perceptions of it, painting, photography, (sub)consciousness, aesthetics, metaphysics, the paradox of the part and the whole.... Though the second half of the title is wide-ranging, the first half, "Chaos", provides the nomenclature and context to trace the unifying continuity therein.

Aaron: On a rainy day eight years ago in Bellingham, Washington, I found shelter in a book store. Rummaging around the shelves, I noticed the cover of JP Briggs' Fractals: The Patterns of Chaos. When I thumbed through the pages, I felt the edge of a vortex of ideas. Soon, I was seated on the floor, with my back against the shelf, reading and looking and whirling. I purchased the book, and when I left the store, I smiled. Already I had new eyes to see the leaves awash in the turbulent streams coursing along the sides of the street.

Looking back, that day shifted my life. Chaos has become integral not only in my scholarly pursuits, but also in how I understand the earth and existence. As Dr. Briggs' work was the catalyst for my exploration, and as his work continues to open up new vistas of thought, it is with great excitement that this interview begins.

Dr. Briggs, your most current literary work, Trickster Tales, was published in 2005, and both of your recent exhibits of photography, Objects, Sprites & Spirits (2005) and Cloud and Stone (2008), explore the Trickster in nature. However, Seven Life Lessons of Chaos (1999) contains several references to and applications of "the Trickster" (9, 10, 46, 48, 49, 119, 157, 172). Even within Fractals: The Patterns of Chaos (1992) you define the Trickster: "Many tribal peoples around the world include a Trickster character among their pantheons, a figure who undercuts order by representing reality's perpetual ironies and deceptions" (17). When did you first glimpse that the Trickster perpetuates chaos?--and how did that insight develop into the aesthetics of your photographic and literary art?

JPB: This is actually a tricky question (sorry) because the insight, like many insights--like perhaps most insights--didn't come as a single aha! moment. Over time I came to see the connection of the Trickster figure to a number of ideas that are very important to my thinking: irony, metaphor, the deceptions of thought, the proclivity of the mind to operate in routines and stereotypes but also its ability to shatter stereotypes with creative acts, the relationship of the particular to the whole, ambivalence, creative process, the ancient idea that the world is a dream. All these ideas are closely related in my mind.

In writing about scientific chaos with David Peat, we had both immediately seen that Chaos Theory provided a wonderfully explicit and nuanced way to talk about creative process. The Trickster emerged and reemerged in that effort. In Turbulent Mirror, which was an early attempt to bring the scientific theory to public attention, we organized the book by looking at the two faces of chaos. We used the "Alice in Wonderland" mirror (and I'd say Alice is a Trickster figure par excellence) to express the two faces. On one side of the mirror "regular" systems break down into chaos, meaning that they become unpredictable. For example, Poincaré showed how the most regular natural system imaginable, the clockwork of the solar system, had an unexpected unpredictability about it. This showed up at certain friction points, such as the gaps in the rings of Saturn and in the asteroid belt, where material has been ejected because of the chaotic harmonics that occur when three or more bodies start to push and pull on each other. In fact, because there are so many interacting "parts" to the solar system, Poincaré showed that the whole thing has a hidden instability and would break down eventually.

On the other side of the Alice mirror (both sides lead to wonderland), apparently chaotic activity suddenly "self-organizes" into relatively stable new forms. An example of the activity on this face of the mirror is a vortex suddenly appearing in a fast-moving, turbulent stream. It can be said that all of the forms in nature have appeared like that vortex out of feedback coupling together in high energy fluxes of one sort or another. It's said that DNA appeared this way, at the edge of one of the chemical fluxes taking place in the chemical environment of early Earth. Anyway, Chaos has this quality of turning things upside down: what appears to be regular and predictable has hidden within it this unpredictable dimension which can come out suddenly; likewise, what is irregular and unpredictable can suddenly give birth to "regular" form. That sounded to us like the Trickster, so I added that to my interior mental list of what the Trickster figure could represent.

But I can put this another way. It turns out that native peoples all over the world from earliest time understood that our constructions of reality, our rules and regularities, are in fact an illusion, or at least a woefully incomplete description of what is. These peoples embodied their insight in the figure of Coyote or Crow or Chuang Tzu, a figure who reveals the illusion to us by turning everything upside down and keeping us guessing about what is what. Every time I think I understand what's going on in reality, some Trickster comes along to reveal to me that I don't. Every time I'm in despair about understanding something, a Trickster insight comes along to make some kind of sense.

Trickster invokes and represents my basic ambivalence, the human ambivalence that begins with the paradox that I feel I am an individual and isolated from the world outside, and at the same time that I feel that I am indivisible and inseparable from the world and others. So for me, the Trickster is a handy figure to encapsulate something fundamental I think is going on in the world and in my consciousness. When I take pictures of clouds or trees or stones, I see the Trickster appearing in those forms. That's an individual and particular cloud, but it's also much more than one cloud. It's a momentary insight into the mysterious dynamic of all things. I see that dynamic and I want the viewer to see it. To enter the Trickster paradox. Put another way, meeting the Trickster means discovering the world is a much more interesting, magical, and humorous place than our everyday consciousness realizes.

Aaron: I would like to frame this next question, which relates to how the Trickster "encapsulates something fundamental...going on in the world and in [one's] consciousness," with a summary of one of your articles. The Connecticut Review featured an issue on "Underneath Story" where your "Aristotle's Unintended Consequences" appears. The article begins by establishing how the "Aristotelian paradigm for story" shapes our perceptions of reality (39). From presidential election campaigns (40-41), to TV fictions (41), to reporters approaching stories by finding a protagonist and an antagonist (42), to "biographies, autobiographies, memoirs, eulogies, and obituaries" (43), and even to "Wildlife documentaries" and the perceived concept that natural selection is forming a plot (43) all collectively reveal the pervasiveness of the Aristotelian concept of story telling within Western thought.

The article then turns to explore another mode of story telling, and it begins with a discussion of dreams and the hippocampus (47-50). There, the story progresses not due to causality and a chain of events, but rather through a vortex of images within the mind of the dreamer. Thus, the article establishes two forces that can shape the way in which we think about our consciousness and the stories of our world:

During his lifetime, Aristotle plumbed that aspect of our consciousness that orders the world categorically. He was one of our first theoretical scientists. Perhaps it might be said that other traditions plumb that aspect of consciousness that orders the world as dreams. (50)

In the world of dreams, "time is not linear; it is simultaneous. Then is now. Now is then, renewed" (52). Such a thought challenges the Western perception that life progresses when conflicts develop linearly into climaxes and resolutions.

As the article continues, you counter the Western perception from within its tradition. What often compels us within a story is not its Aristotelian plot, but rather the ironies, paradoxes, and surprises--the Tricksters--lurking underneath. You cite Oedipus, the tragedy used by Aristotle as the touchstone work of plot, yet the protagonist "confronts...an unresolvable...series of paradoxes" (53). Lurking in the plot is an undermining Trickster: "In light of the paradox, the whole rationale for causality also falls apart" (53). I think of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Puck, the Trickster, who turns everything upside down within the forest (symbolic of the dream world). Shakespeare privileges the story of the dream, but brackets it within the rational world of Theseus' Kingdom.

You conclude "Aristotle's Unintended Consequences" with a thought that unites the two modes of story telling (the Aristotelian Plot and the Dream) as a both/and rather than an either/or relationship, a tension between presence and absence:

Our most significant stories alert us to the reality that something vital is always left out of the story. In fact, the story's vitality--even a news story--depends for our understanding on what it cannot include. (55)

And it is the tension between plot and dream that provides contextualization for your recent work Trickster Tales (2005). What is underneath or left out of the Aristotelian framework surfaces as the Aristotelian plot is submerged within the world of dream-like images.

To understand the happenings of life with the concept of plot in the background or absent altogether requires a colossal shift in ideology, and as the hippocampus dream world of images, objective correlatives, uncertainties, ironies, and paradoxes composes the surface of Trickster Tales, Western readers may struggle. What suggestions do you have for readers and thinkers who are too unsettled by the subversion of the Aristotelian paradigm?

JPB: I like the way you've understood some of the points I made in the Aristotle article in relation to Trickster Tales, which I don't mention in the article. In fact, I like your synopsis of the article's points in some ways better than my original. You're quite right. The idea of the Aristotelian story and my trickster stories are connected. In Western literature there has long been a tension between the conflict-resolution, plot-driven aspect of story, and the Trickster aspect, which includes ironies, paradoxes, metaphors and other dreamlike uncertainties, the very aspects that critics often notice and then attempt to convert into certainties (taking the trickster out of them). Many critics are anti-Tricksters who've learned to advance themselves professionally on the back of the Trickster's hard work (well, maybe not so hard).

One of my points in the Aristotle article is that the conflict and resolution plot has remained largely in the foreground of stories in our culture and the Trickster elements have stayed in the background. Of course, in some works of Western literature the Trickster element is unavoidably foregrounded: the works of Borges, Kafka, Cervantes, Lewis Carroll come immediately to mind. Lewis Hyde argues in his book, Trickster Made This World, that the whole of great literature itself a Trickster enterprise, though we don't often realize it. How can we realize it?--that's partly your question. You're also really asking about the Western way of thinking, a form of thinking that has come to dominate the world and the way we understand reality. Our way of thinking privileges the assumptions that the world is made up of objects-things, that the self is isolated and separate (so that ego, ambition and power are primary motivations and the primary drivers of plot), that time is linear. There are others. To look behind the Aristotelian story is to look behind our assumptions about what we think is "true" and essential about the world.

Quantum Mechanics, Chaos Theory, discoveries about how the brain actually remembers and assembles reality--all these are questioning those assumptions. As it turns out, the Aristotelian story, minus a Trickster in the background, no longer represents our best scientific understanding of how things are. Of course, the fact that we rely on science to tell us how things are is another Aristotelian assumption that grips our culture.

For me, a relatively easy way to get behind such assumptions is to seriously consider the paradox I mentioned earlier, what I call The Primal Paradox: We are both individual, isolated and separate but at the same time indivisible and inseparable from the whole. We are both "I" and "All else." We live in a world made of subjects and objects and also in a world where there are NO actual subjects and objects. We can't resolve this Primal Paradox, but we can suspend ourselves in it, as it were. If we manage to do that, then we enter the Trickster's world, a creative and dreamlike realm where all kinds of life-enhancing things begin to emerge. Great Western literature, like Oedipus, King Lear, Ulysses, Leaves of Grass, leads us on a well paved Aristotelian journey to the rabbit hole and then pushes us in. But the rabbit hole is inside us in the form of this Primal Paradox which unites us and separates us at the same time.

That said, it's bloody difficult to resist trying to resolve this paradox (I am both self and other) by turning the effort of suspension into some clever Aristotelian game. For example, we might end up thinking at some level that "I'm in a rabbit hole but I understand that it's a rabbit hole so it's not really a problem, my separate ego is intact." Something like that. We're very persistent in our resistance to falling in. For example, the Christian golden rule says that we should love our neighbors as ourselves and do unto others as we would have them do unto us. This is a beautiful statement of the Primal Paradox. Nevertheless, Christians invented a religion which rewards individual merit with eternal salvation. Appearing to rely on the golden rule, the notion of individual salvation actually unravels it because it suggests we can individually profit by following the rule, leaving our neighbors out. The Buddhists stay with the golden rule version of the Primal Paradox longer, arguing that final salvation only comes when even the stones have been saved.

I'd argue that to stay with the paradox is its own reward and that tricksters were invented by various cultures to help us do that.

You used the phrase readers "unsettled by the subversion of the Aristotelian paradigm." I think a person who is unsettled has taken an important step toward falling down the rabbit hole and becoming sane. Trickster stories are meant to be unsettling. They're disrupting our certainties. But rather than trying to cling to our certainties or reconfigure them, we might try letting our uncertainties speak. We might be surprised by what they say. This is, of course, exactly what happens in our dreams. The next time you have a dream that you remember, try thinking of it as a reality that is just as real as sitting down over your morning cup of coffee. It's the reality of your uncertainties. See where that rabbit hole leads you.

Aaron: I am reminded of "A Week after your Death" by Robert Bly (201) in which the dream image is validated even as it incongruously relates to "what happened":

I dreamt last night you
Lived nearby, not
Dead at all, but safe
In a blacksmith’s storage room,
With bolts and nails in bins
From floor to ceiling.

You came and brought me
An ivory jar,
Holding a precious fluid,
Which I took. I knew it meant
The time had come,
But I let you leave.

Later a man pushed open
The door and threw
Your body down, a wizened,
Astonishingly small body--
Rope still tied
Around the neck.

I woke and cried to my wife:
"He didn’t die
That way! There was no rope!
All that is wrong!" She
Said, "In
Your dream he did."

The line break, "He didn't die / That way!" captures the complex interaction between the consciousness and the sub-consciousness as the speaker grieves. He has had a rabbit-hole experience that contradicts with "reality", but the poem ends with his wife's affirmation that the irrational dream world is essential to the experience of being human. To apply thoughts from "Aristotle's Unintended Consequences", dreams are powerful story tellers as they resist being forced into a rational causality.

JPB: Poems and dreams have in common that they force us to consider what I call the basic "This*other-ness" of existence. Reality is what we say it is, a "this," (what you're calling a "rational" world) but it is also "other" than this (more than rational). Bly's poem-dream circles round and round (signified by the * in the word this*other-ness). We know the facts of death; we know the theories of death; we have meanings about death; we have ideas about what happens after death; we have ideas about grief. But none of that really touches the "other-ness" of death, its mystery that explodes every certainty. We can say this or that about death, but it's always much more than what we can say. The feeling of "more" is the rabbit hole. Every night we fall down that hole. Most of the time we don't remember our dreams, perhaps because dreams take us back to the ambivalences and uncertainties that surround our rational knowledge. Perhaps in the light of day we need to pretend that we have a handle on that knowledge. Dreams remind us that we don't.

By the way, think about that "precious fluid" metaphor in the poem. As a reader, every time you think you know what that fluid is, look at the metaphor again in its context. I think you'll see that the context constantly re-activates the metaphor so that it suggests something "other" than what you've concluded. I don't know that I would call this effect "irrational" in the Dionysian sense. The metaphor (one form of this*other-ness) rather holds in suspension both the rational and the irrational. It's like the tension between order and chaos. Here it frees the mind to "know" not what the precious fluid is but to "know" what it means to live in a world that we can both understand and misunderstand at the same time.

I recently read an interesting story about that. The great Renaissance poet Petrarch wrote in his commentary to Book One of the Aeneid about experiencing the metaphor of Virgil's descriptions of Aeneus and his men shipwrecked in a storm. "To me," Petrarch wrote, "those winds have always seemed to be nothing but the impulses of lust and wrath, and the emotions dwelling in the breast and beneath the heart, disturbing the serenity of human life, as if they were storms that disturb the calm sea." However, in another essay, Petrarch rejects just such a metaphoric reading, insisting that the reader focus on the physical facts of the situation Virgil describes, the shipwreck by the storm on the shore of Africa. Similarly, Herman Melville, draws us to think about the metaphoric meaning of the white whale one minute and the next insists on the scientific "facts" of whales, drawing us back into our concrete categories. We are all, in reality, in the rabbit hole hovering between our sense that the winds that blow us across the sidewalk are more than the categories of weather, but also that they are exactly only weather. Chaos is a boundary phenomenon. It's what happens between structured order and complete incomprehensible randomness. Our understanding of the world is exactly that boundary phenomenon. Metaphors point us to the vast interconnectedness of all things, the All Else or no-thingness of the universe; our categories of perception and knowledge point us back to the subject-object experience of apparent everyday reality (the word reality comes from the Latin res, which means thing). In a work of art we bitten to hover between the two. That's actually where we are in fact, and the artwork makes us realize it. So the artwork is "truth" in that sense. This kind of truth has nothing to do with the truth that the poststructuralist critics have condemned. They don't understand what artists mean by truth, I'm afraid.

Aaron: Katherine Hayles synthesizes the theories of post-structuralism and chaos in Chaos Bound, and she argues that the text is a "reservoir of chaos" and that "writing is turbulent" (2, 25). I mention this as I noticed the language you use in order to discuss the metaphor of the "precious fluid": "the context re-activates the metaphor so that it suggests something 'other' that what you've concluded". This is where I think Chaos Theory can illuminate what happens in a text. Iteration. The out-put becoming the input. Feedback loops of signs generating a textual turbulence where autopoietic interpretations emerge.

When I read Katherine Hayles--and when I read your above response--I think the application of Chaos Theory to the reading of literature is something more than an analogy; it is a framework through which one can understand, fundamentally, what a text is and how the signs interact within that text--and how, as you stated, a chaotic boundary exists between the symbolic and scientific approaches to the images of wind or the white whale. I find, though, that the amount of background knowledge one needs to apply chaos theory to a literary text (or a work of art) is vast. A potential result is that the ideas of chaos could isolate an esoteric niche within academia (gravitating too far to the “I” of the Primal Paradox). However, the tone of your work (Seven Life Lessons, Turbulent Mirror, Fractals: Patterns of Chaos) suggests a genuine desire for the ideas of chaos to become not only accessible to readers with varying backgrounds, but also an illuminating and pervasive force. What is the impetus behind making the ideas of chaos accessible to the educated reader?--What was the most challenging idea from chaos to distill?

JPB: The post-structuralist take on chaos is...well.. the post-structuralist take. They have their own agenda. I think what is most important about Chaos Theory is the way it shifts how we look at things in general. It's the holism of Chaos that most interests me. I see a connection between holism and "truth" as artists have used it. Everything affects everything else. This means that each "part" is embedded, though feedback, in every other part. Each "part" reflects the dynamics of the whole, in other words. That's why objects produced by chaotic dynamical systems--mountains, coastlines, weather maps, for example--have a fractal nature. The small "parts" of the system--a small section of the coastline--look like (are "self similar") to the larger sections.

I came to Chaos Theory after an interest in David Bohm's so-called holographic interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. Bohm argued, among other things, that each photon of light is, in actuality, an interference pattern of energy waves that imprints all of the interactions the photon has had with other photons. It is, therefore, a microcosm of the whole. Bohm compared this to a holographic image. If you shine a laser through a holographic plate a three dimensional image appears, the image that you "photographed" with the laser. If you break off a piece of the plate and shine the laser through it, the whole image also appears. In other words, the whole image is recorded everywhere on the plate.

I had been working on an approach to the deep structure of works of art and recognized the similarity of this approach to what Bohm was saying about matter and then, later, I saw this phenomenon discussed in similar terms in Chaos theory. Both have this quality of revealing that the "part" is also the whole, or that it reflects the whole, or is a glimpse of the whole if you know how to look. It's easy to observe that this is what happens in great works of art. Whether it's an abstract painting by Piet Mondrian or a naturalistic piece by Constable, the forms that you're looking at are both what they are and something "more," some instantiation of the whole in which one can feel the presence of the whole. In a Beethoven symphony, the "theme", melody, "develops" into variations that move around the orchestra, change in tempo, pitch, that invert and become fugues or contrary motions. Each "part" is a fractal image the whole in a way that both makes the part similar to all other parts and dimensions of the piece and makes it unique and separate in itself. Moreover, the whole dynamic is suggestive that this "part" of reality--this particular symphony itself--offers us a glimpse into the whole dynamics of life, a glimpse into the whole of the way things are—the truth, in other words. The same can be said of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, or T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" or DaVinci's Mona Lisa. I believe this impression that the part contains the whole appears in all great works of art, that is works of art that have shown their ability to embody the particularities of their time and culture and at the same time to transcend them. Each shows us how the whole--the All Else--appears and transforms through particular moments and particular forms. This, we might notice, is another way to state the Primal Paradox.

Both Chaos Theory and Quantum mechanics describe a physical universe that operates on the part/whole principle. Of course, the material that nature works with is matter. The material that the artist works with is human consciousness.

To answer your question directly, then, what I have wanted to do and what is most difficult to do, is to show how the details of Chaos Theory rest on a metaphysics, an aesthetic, which is very different from the one that we use to guide (and misguide) our everyday reality. Our everyday reality has been guided by a reductionism that shows up in science, in criticism, in religion, and in our approaches to spirituality. "It's all about me, my ego." Or "it's all about the All Else, giving up my ego." Art, Chaos Theory, Quantum Mechanics, and the Primal Paradox suggest to me that reducing the world in this way is missing some much deeper point. I don't what to say what that point is, but I do want to say that there is one. Artists have often referred to this point as "the truth," being careful not to reduce it to some idea. In Absalom, Absalom Faulkner says of the truth, "You look at it and you see one phase of it. Someone else looks at it and sees a slightly awry phase of it. But taken all together, the truth is in what they saw though nobody saw the truth intact." Faulkner is making a fractal statement. He's saying that in the dynamics of each part lies the dynamics of the whole. Obviously you can never embrace the whole because to embrace it you would have to stand outside it, which no one can do. In a work of art or in a natural fractal we are glimpsing whole and yet not glimpsing the whole (feeling instead its mystery, obscurity and unknowableness). This experience is another version of the Primal Paradox.

Aaron: Our discussion has thus far touched on philosophy, spirituality, mathematics, science, literature, art, photography, and in Seven Life Lessons, you discuss how Chaos and the Trickster even apply to politics and social revolutions. It seems safe to conclude that you gravitate towards a cross-disciplinary approach to scholarship as well as to life. Certainly, such an approach is more fecund, full of more tantalizing boundaries of infinite complexity, full of more ideological strange attractors and autopoietic surprises than an approach limited to one discipline. That said, what are some of the challenges you have encountered within cross-disciplinary scholarship?

JPB: The big challenge for me is that I don't know enough about the various disciplines I believe converge to tell a single magnificent story (a story with a magnificently indeterminate number of variations). I won't live long enough to describe even small atom of this incredible cosmic story. I'm always wishing I were faster and brighter (I am literally very slow and depressingly dense as an intellect). The kind of brain I have is very useful for seeing the connections and hidden design, but very unhelpful for learning the kinds of details I need in order to tell the story of what I'm see ing properly. I rely a lot on others who have made "translations" of difficult subjects in forms I can process. An example is mathematics, which I gather is studded with demonstrations of the Trickster and this*other-ness (the concepts of infinity and zero, for example). But I'm woefully deficient in math. Today I couldn't solve an algebraic equation to save my life. So I have to rely on others who have studied these disciplinary areas and have a philosophical bent of their own. Fortunately a lot of very smart people in the sciences and humanities are also interested in exploring chaotic boundaries and rabbit holes. These are the boundaries where what we know is riddled not only with the unknown but, more importantly, with the unknowable. Think of the unknowable not as a fixed black, impenetrable wall, but as an obscurity like the blackness of an ocean floor, a dimension beyond the reach of sunlight which is the source for what we know, a dimension that, like the actual seabed, is infinitely rich. Like the actual seabed, the creatures and forms that evolve in the unknowable, rise toward the depths where we can see them, and from them grasp a little more of what the unknowable is about. The object is not to pretend that we can make the unknowable known, but to see a little more how our knowledge is embedded in the unknowable dimension. Out of that unknowable springs the forms of mathematics, poetry and love. Those are three examples. These bear the traces of the unknowable that gave them birth. Or to put it in the terms I used before, the unknowable is the whole which we are part of but can never grasp. The unknowable is the "All Else" side of the Primal Paradox itself. The "I," as knowledge, depends on it and strives toward it, albeit futilely.

Aaron: I have one last question for you, but first, a sincere thank you. I approach ideas through the theory of gift giving, and I believe that the exchange of ideas is sacrosanct. In the context of the Primal Paradox, the exchange of ideas (gifts) from one individual to another helps strengthen the fabric of the interrelated whole. Therefore, I express gratitude not only for your time and thought in this interview, but also for your essays, books, stories, and photographs--which brings me to the final question. Are you working on a photographic or literary project now? If so, when do you see it coming to fruition?

JPB: Aaron, you're quite right. We properly thank each other. Your questions created some lovely rabbit holes and I much enjoyed falling through them and exploring them with you. I believe that when it's taken seriously dialogue is an affirmation of the Primal Paradox and of our natural creative impulse. That is, the dialogue doesn't happen unless individuals assert their individuality, but it also doesn't happen without openness to the discovering oneself in the other and in the All Else. A good dialogue reveals the presence of All Else in each of us. It's a creative act as much as a poem is, I believe.

As to my own separate work (where I try to blunder around in the chaotic boundary with All Else, falling down rabbit holes now and again): the current project is a novel I've been working on for literally forty years, having put it through thousands of pages of drafts. Obviously, I work very, very slowly. Finally, I think I've figured out how to tell this particular story. It's called The Ironist, and it tells about a Faustian figure who attempts to uncover the core secret of reality. To do this, he works to manipulate a young Native American who at first appears autistic but, in fact, possesses prodigious mental powers. The story is told by an onlooker who can't decide what parts of this alchemic project are real and what parts are dream. It's another Trickster story. An interesting rabbit hole, I hope. I have no idea when this "final" draft will be finished. I'm just hoping I'll be alive when it happens.


Briggs, John. "Aristotle's Unintended Consequences." Connecticut Review Vol. XXX No. 2 (Fall 2007): 39-66

---. "Cloud and Stone". JP Briggs Fine Art Photographs. May 2008. 14 July 2008
<http://www.jpbriggs.com/ExhibitionsMenu.html>.

---. Fractals: The Patterns of Chaos: Discovering a New Aesthetic of Art, Science, and Nature. New York: Touchstone, 1992.

---. Trickster Tales. Waterbury: Fine Tooth Press, 2005.

Briggs, John and David F. Peat. Seven Life Lessons of Chaos: Spiritual Wisdom from the Science of Change. New York: HarperCollins, 1999.

---. Turbulent Mirror: An Illustrated Guide to Chaos Theory and the Science of Wholeness New York: Harper & Row, 1989.