Exogenous Shock

Earliest memory: My father perched on the edge of the couch in the basement of our house in Grand Junction, Colorado as he focused intently on the TV housed in the anachronistic blond wood cabinet.  He strikes a pose that signals remoteness, gravity – leaning forward his right knee propped up his elbow as the forefinger of his hand pressed against the socket of his eye and his thumb supported his chin.  Unnervingly, he stared with raptor-like intensity at the TV through glasses with reddish frames mounted on his deeply furrowed brow.  Dressed in a white tee shirt and khaki pants, he was home from work, unusual for a weekday.  School had been dismissed.  Were my mother and two brothers there?  They must have been, but I do not remember.  At that eternal moment, the compass of my world contracted into a triangle defined by the TV, my father, and me.

At seven years of age, I did not understand the sense of foreboding that hung in the air like a dense fog.  Something terrible had happened.  The moment in the basement was preceded by the inconsolable seriousness of the grownups that constituted the fixed stars in the constellation of my small world.  Some cried – deeply disturbing to a child.

The TV showed a flag draped caisson being drawn along a street lined with crowds.  A riderless horse danced sideways and jerked its head up and down impatiently, boots mounted backwards in the stirrups.  A little boy dressed in a coat and shorts with his bare legs exposed to the winter weather saluted the retreating caisson.

The concept of death was foreign, incomprehensible to me.  John F. Kennedy was my hero – and heroes are invulnerable and immortal.  Watching the funeral procession to Arlington National Cemetery today is a chilling reminder of innocence lost.

Continuing my path through grade school, John F. Kennedy – never John Kennedy – became a talisman that was invoked frequently by quoting from his Inaugural Speech: “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.”  My mother collected Kennedy half dollar coins in a glass jar placed in the cabinet over the oven and encouraged me to insert new ones gleaned from trips to the store like offerings to a secular god.  On special occasions, we dumped them out noisily onto the Formica kitchen table and counted them – a fund for my college education.  Tragedy transformed into opportunity.

***

Forty-eight years ago today, John F. Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald.  Or, should it be: Forty-eight years ago today, Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated John F. Kennedy.  Which version is the more faithful representation of history?  Does the passive voice of the first formulation insulate – soften – the judgment of history?  Is the active voice of the second version too harsh in the face of counterfactual models of history that concatenate coincidences and conspiracy theories to assert that Oswald did not act – could not have acted – alone?

In Ulysses, James Joyce links the travails of his hero, Leonard Bloom, as he walks around Dublin on June 16, 1904 to the adventures depicted by Homer in his 2,000-year-old epic.  On one level, Ulysses is a meditation on the interconnected, iterative neural network of history.  At one point, Joyce alludes to the implacable rule of history by making one of his characters, Stephen Dedalus, declaim: “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”  A nightmare. From which we are trying to awake.  Is history a dream, a figment of our imaginations that allows us to find patterns in correlations without the security of causation?

Politics and economics and religion recur to history.  Filled with inspiring stories of heroes and deeds of an unimaginable courage and suffering, history pulsates with lives lived in extremis. Listen to the rhythm of past glory as it courses through the address that Lincoln delivered at Gettysburg 148 years ago:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

In the Gettysburg Address Lincoln defined the American creed, but like most prophets he was without honor in his own country and was sacrificed on Good Friday 1865 as partial expiation for our original sin of slavery.  History is relentless, its claims endless, its toll unyielding, the number of victims unimaginable.  One hundred and fifty years after the Civil War we are still dealing with the legacy of slavery.

Casting the net further back for another example: the three great monotheistic religions claim the same piece of real estate in Jerusalem based on events thousands of years ago and are willing to sacrifice blood – and the tenets of their creeds – to enforce claims grounded in historical interpretations that are simultaneously unassailable and questionable.

In an effort to travel through time, discover causes, and make sense, literary genres morph and adapt: modernist fiction like Ulysses challenged realism with randomness and uncertainty and stream of consciousness, historical fiction like Gone with the Wind inserted characters into real events, literary fiction based on alternative histories like Don DeLillo’s Libra and Stephen King’s 11/22/63 play fast and loose with the facts in an effort to understand events.

Scholars and scientists approach history from oblique angles by creating models on computer screens that abstract the complexity of reality in order to glimpse unseen structures that support the surface that we experience.  Refracting light through disciplinary prisms, the spectrum is decomposed into concepts that shatter old paradigms in the quest for new truths.

In the 1980s, path dependence – a species of history – took its turn in the spotlight: “A process of change … is path dependent if later outcomes of the process depend on the specific course of preceding events.”  More rigorously, it is defined as: “as a property of a stochastic process which obtains under two conditions (contingency and self-reinforcement) and causes lock-in in the absence of exogenous shock.”  Were the assassinations of Lincoln and Kennedy the result of earlier events that cascaded down through time due to a flap of the wings of a butterfly?  Or did they constitute exogenous shocks that shook up dependent systems and ramify down new paths through time?

Closed systems suffer from the relentless sovereignty of the second law of thermodynamics, which operates according to the self-evident, but often ignored or suppressed intuition that order disintegrates into disorder, that death follows life in an endless spiral.  The future is simply a tendency, an arrow, a vector toward maximum entropy: the undefinable measure of the rate at which disorder exacts its inexorable toll.

Hope emanates from the fortunate ability of entities within closed systems to absorb energy from other systems: the earth and the life it supports partake of power bestowed by a benevolent sun.  Life in the sweep of history triumphs – fleetingly – over disorder in a mystery sublime.