What is Crisis?

There's a mathematical theory used to describe abrupt changes or transformations in things - when there are phase transitions for example (water into ice) or fight-or-flight responses in an animal - it's catastrophe theory, and doesn't really refer to catastrophes per se. But what it does imply, at least according to some theorists, is what's called "the fragility of good things" - that there is usually one way for example to do something correctly, but an untold number of ways for something to fail. Failure surrounds the potential for creation, for the good; the good is fragile and teeters. This relates to crisis for me - there are so many ways, for example, for an animal to become extinct, and most fauna live in increasingly narrowing niches. A species also needs a certain population to continue, just as, for example, traditional ceremonies need a certain number of practitioners for them to survive as living culture. Once the tipping point is reached, things disappear - this is what Lovelock was all about with Gaia, the earth as a single organism, a theory he developed decades ago. He now believes that the planet has tipped towards permanent crisis, that there's not enough sustainability  for it to find a way "back." An example would be the coral reefs I mentioned, but it's also the increasing disappearance of Arctic sea ice, the breaking off of ice shelves in the Antarctic, and the thinning of the Greenland ice sheet - all of these creating feedback loops that increase the disappearance of frozen water faster than expected, and raise the temperature of the planet faster than expected.

We tend, if we read things like Wired Magazine, to believe that crises have solutions, and that the solutions are technological. But there are eight billion people on the planet, more or less, and technology is enclaved; you might be able for example to afford a hybrid or all-electric car, but most people on the planet can't afford mechanical transportation at all. My own feeling is that crises don't have solutions, but may lead to states of permanent crisis - for example, the increasing acidification of the oceans with their plastic islands. I think that capitalism and capital itself functions like this; they permeate everything, and operate within a world of markets, flows, and distributions which tend to fill every available space, from spam messages on your cellphone to the sludge in West Virginia creeks which stem from mountain-topping runoff and leaching. My own work deals with this, what I see as a state of permanent emergency. It gives me comfort to make work, particularly to play music (I play a number of instruments), since then, within a tiny world, I'm rendered speechless, and the sound I'm making seems to come from somewhere else.

P.D. James in her latest book, talking about detective fiction, describes one of the functions of the detective story - to create a closed world with a limited number of suspects, within which crime is solved and the reader, knowing this from the beginning, is immersed in the comfort of the unfolding of it all. This isn't the world of the thriller or comic-book hero; it's quieter, psychologically working through things, marking off a corner of the world or room where things are gentle. You can move out from this into the world at large, feeling a bit better, a bit more together (this is my idea, not James'), and I think my work hopes to do this through music or through the sense of wonder I can bring in from virtual worlds. So this is anti-crisis work acknowledging and in the midst of crisis, but hoping in the listening or reading or seeing, something else to emerge, if only for a time.

If you're interested, my music is mostly at http://espdisk.com/alansondheim/ which sometimes doesn't open well in a browser - there's also http://lounge.espdisk.com, where there are also descriptions. My other work is mostly at http://www.alansondheim.org/ but it's a featureless directory, but you could poke around in there.

- Alan