"The Bread, the Butterfly, and the Third Bottle of Beer" - Impressionism re-interpretation
AIP2, Session 11
If you have ever built a house out of a deck of cards, and accidentally destroyed it with the wrong sleight of hand (or your brother did), then congratulations! You have just grazed upon the surface of a complex and somewhat frustrating branch of mathematics known as the Chaos Theory.
The rules are simple: the slightest change can bring the biggest deviations. The Chaos Theory was first officially proposed by Edward Lorenz, a mathematician and meteorologist, when he stumbled upon an accident as he was developing a weather simulator. Lorenz wanted to double check a weather sequence, but to his surprise, discovered that the two results varied greatly, even though both were derived from similar conditions. Wanting to see what had caused what was then perceived as a malfunction, Lorenz’s investigation led him to the computer printouts. On the first experiment, he had entered the conditions in 6-digit variables, but on the second trial the computer had rounded it up to 3 digits, so the original conditions of 0.506127 were rounded up to 0.506. Back then, such a small difference wouldn’t be taken into account as results are expected to be similar, but his discovery denied that. This accident revealed that, even though the initial conditions varied very, very slightly, by no more than a thousandth of a mark, they yielded considerably different results.
Seven years later, in 1969, Lorenz billed this phenomenon as the “butterfly effect”, a metaphor that states that a hurricane could be triggered by the flap of a butterfly’s wings millions of miles away, weeks before. This is not to say that hurricanes are caused by butterflies, but that the smallest, most unnoticeable change can yield significantly different outcomes. Had the butterfly flapped its wings a few centimetres away, it could’ve influenced the making of a hurricane somewhere else, or a hurricane could be avoided entirely, or the force of its wings could knock over a dandelion, resulting in the distribution of dandelion seeds, which turned into a meadow, creating an underbush ecosystem, where a clumsy child eventually trips into, resulting in a bleeding knee, an angry mother, and a lifelong traumatic humiliation that makes him hate P.E., ending with obesity and early death.
I’m not blaming the butterfly for this person’s death (after all, it could’ve been caused by unwashed hands in Sri Lanka, an angry monk in Tibet or a faulty USB in Toronto, but I digress) but it’s certainly entertaining to think that everything is caused by seemingly unrelated events in a land far away, long ago.
The idea that energy circulates, that everything in the world is connected on an invisible level, brings a sense of unity, a sense of purpose. To know that your predicament is not an accident, not due to Fate but due to the countless circumstances that came before it, makes acceptance easier.
The world is made of stories, events both seen and unseen, directly and indirectly related, ribbons of tales that are weaved of the conscious and unconscious—that’s what the Chaos Theory is about. An existence both accidental and calculated. A tree is not just a tree, it is a herd of buffalos calmly dumping waste on the land, rendering it fertile. It is a man walking down the path years before, seeds attached and deposited by his soles. It is a bucket of water set out on a hot summer day, its droplets evaporated into cloud, condensed into rain. That is what this artwork embraces—strings of stories, unseen, and yet necessary in building the world as we know it today.
Perched on the roof on a scorching hot day, my eyes scanned the world before me (the world ended a few hundred metres away, it seemed, the foliage was so thick), motivated only by the sheer determination to paint en plen air as the Impressionists did. I didn’t live in a particularly interesting neighbourhood, and was on the verge of moving to Iceland, where they at least have volcanoes, when I realised that beautiful scenery wasn’t the point—it was finding beauty in mediocrity that made the Impressionists what they were. Monet found beauty in water lilies, Van Gogh found stories in corn fields, and Degas found complexity backstage, not offstage, and preparation more intriguing than presentation.
Even if the Impressionists didn’t know of Chaos Theory back then, they sensed the energy behind each subject. History is not merely about kings and queens and who killed whom, but also about the tiniest drip of sweat, the quietest hum in the afternoon, the smallest swing of the arm. After watching (and occasionally painting) at the same spot for a few days, I came to the conclusion that a) people planted rubber because they were lazy (in case you don’t know, my town is built on the remains of a rubber plantation), b) I hate it when it looks like a storm is coming, but none comes, and c) whoever put that electrical pole there must be blind drunk.
And so was born the concept behind this painting. People planted rubber here because a man was sitting comfortably in his house one afternoon, eating bread, and thought about the easiest way to make money without the backbreaking work of sowing, seeding, and looking after (or so I imagine). The not-a-storm-after-all storm started out as a tiny gust of wind when a butterfly in Honduras flapped its wings, but was soon counteracted by another pair of wings, twenty miles south of Tanzania (or so I imagine). The electrical pole was staked into the earth one Monday morning by a drunk worker, possibly because he had an extra bottle of beer that morning (or so I imagine). These are the things I see, and as true or untrue as they may be, it certainly made the scorching day a lot more interesting.
For the only beauty I see, is the beauty I find.