The Literary Milestones of the Complex Dynamical Mentality:

Formative: Virginia Woolf, The Waves; James Joyce, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.

(The characters in Woolf ’s The Waves seem like a coral reef of consciousness, as we pass like an ocean current from one mind to another. In this shift from the stream of consciousness of a single mind to an ecology of consciousness, Woolf, along with James Joyce, was one of the major artists articulating the emergence of complex dynamical systems in literature. We are still only in the early stages of this cultural shift. We saw the shift from text to cinema at the beginning of the twentieth century, and the shift from cinema to electronic media in the middle, and the multi-dimensionality of hypertext at the end of the century. God only knows what “krypton crystals” technology is next.)

For each of these literary-mathematical mentalities there is a charismatic object that embodies the uniqueness of its world view. For the Arithmetic Mentality, it is the list, and the recitation of the list carries a performative magical power that captures the mystique of generation – of the many from the One. Originally, the One is the Great Mother, but in the patriarchal shift to a male priesthood, the generative power is contained within the geometrical form of the temple and a new class of specialists begins to dedicate itself to mythic narratives and astrological observances. For the Geometrical Mentality, the characteristic object is, therefore, the temple. When the alphabet arises to liberate writing from the exclusive possession of temple scribes, and when the Aramaic alphabet is transformed into the new lightness of the Indian numeral system, then calligraphy and a celestial code begin to be the new charismatic vehicle of the divine. This entrancement with a celestial code of the Algebraic Mentality introduces a new mysticism, as well as a new erotic mysticism, and the feminine returns in a new cultural system of retrieval in poetry and rituals of courtly love. But as the Taoists of the I Ching comment, “Reversal is the movement of Tao,” so the introverted mysticism of the medieval mentality is succeeded by the extroverted mentality of modernism in the Galilean Dynamical Mentality. With the fall of the fortress of Byzantium in 1453 from heavy artillery, ballistics introduces a new era of moving objects in space – from cannonballs to sailing ships to currencies in capitalistic world trade to the calculus of motion for Galileo, Newton, and Leibniz. This era of single causes, linear narratives, and individual perspective comes to an end in the a-perspectival world of complex dynamical systems – the new world view of Poincaré, Picasso, and Einstein.