Order, Bruce Kochis

Humans are creative beings and their creativity can produce non-finite variety.  Hence, art of all kinds can constantly amaze us with the new, some of it meaningfully new.  This centrifugal force, however, can spin artifacts out of the orbit of understanding or recognition and we end up lost.  Noam Chomsky’s famous example “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” represents a thought syntactically meaningful (the string of words is grammatically appropriate) but makes no sense.  What we need is the centripetal force of order that keeps creativity inside or near the boundary of understanding (the boundary will be different for different individuals).

Jazz improvisation, for instance, also needs some recognizability.  Saxophonist John Coltrane”s version of “These Are a Few of My Favorite Things” exemplifies the creativity in his improvisation and the order in the underlying melody of a well-known song from The Sound of Music.  In jazz too much order produces blah predictability and too little sounds like chaos (apologies to lovers of free jazz).  

Mussar’s sense of order applied to art is about working the edge between the predictable and the unintelligible new and the relationship between them can be complex yet inspiring.  So Morinis’s claim that “If you are not careful about the cleanliness of your house, you are also likely to be lax about the purity of your spirit” might be a little too neat.