Chaos Can Be Your Friend

 That is what I learned from Jen Fawkes's Chaos Is My Co-Pilot: In Praise of Tumultuous, Unruly Storytelling.

Well, not the whole thing; elements of my first attempt survive in Daughters of Chaos—settings, characters, circumstances. What changed most drastically, in the spring of 2020, was that for the first time, I allowed a collaborator into my creative process—a colleague known as Chaos.

Here, I’m using the word “chaos” in three ways at once. First, a dictionary definition: “complete disorder and confusion.” Next, chaos theory, an interdisciplinary mathematical-scientific field that studies the patterns chaos appears to obscure (a phenomenon I now think of as “chaos masquerading as order”). And finally, the original conception of “Chaos” belongs to the ancient Greeks. In their pantheon, Chaos is the primal deity, the bottomless abyss that gave birth to everything—Olympians, Titans, humans, earth, sun, moon, love, hatred, darkness—and the god Chaos is female.

I saw that working on a concept inspired by actual events and involving historical personages had led me to the mistaken belief that I needed to approach my subject matter directly—head-on. In life, I’m a routine junkie, but when it comes to creating, I’ve always moved indirectly—obliquely. Regardless of how much material I gather on a subject, when it comes to fictionalizing human experience, I have no choice but to write against expectations.

So I set about writing my own “lost” Greek comedy—Apocrypha—a play loosely patterned on Lysistrata, and this anarchic, and quite joyous, act led me to the missing pieces of my brothel book—those pieces I needed to construct a fictional-historical continuum vast and vibrant enough to contain an age-old secret Cult of female power, a brothel staffed by literal Sirens, three Greek Gods and one Demigod, the Aldine Press, Andrew Johnson, The Book of the City of Ladies, Moderata Fonte, dominatrices, John Wilkes Booth, the two most powerful fourteen-year-old girls ever born, and a veritable army of priestesses, bear-women, and sea-monsters.

Writing the Apocrypha unlocked Daughters of Chaos, allowing me to see the historical material in which I’d been mired in a new light. One expects to find sex in a brothel; one doesn’t expect to find magic and true love, indoctrination and rebellion and leviathans—all of which are far more interesting, to my way of thinking, than sex. My brothel book couldn’t be about a single set of “public women” and a single socio-political conflict, I realized—it had to reckon with the association upon which the “world’s oldest profession” is built—the relationship between WOMEN and SOCIETY, writ large. To explore how that conflict has echoed across a span that began centuries before the American Civil War and will continue for the remainder of humankind’s tenure on this planet.

Sorry, hard to parse that one. 

I wrote extensively while I was in prison. I did a series of short stories that became interconnected. There was one that never found any favor with my writing group, or my friends on the outside. I have to admit that I thought it missed the mark. Two years after I got I attacked this story from another angle, No one has offered to publish it, but I think it is a better story. That is the closest I have to a story like the above, but I can understand it. Implementing is always another matter, isn't it?

sch 7/27