The Arrow of Time
chaoticutopia | May 31, 2007
Poling along the South Platte River in a Flood
This photo was taken in the early 1900's by Charles Lillybridge, during a flood that very likely threatened his own studio. I haven't been able to pinpoint the year of this particular flood. Once upon a time, the river, meandering naturally through the plain, flooded quite frequently. The surrounding prairie wasn't disturbed; rather, the local wildlife flourished after such an event. The nomadic people who originally lived along these banks were able to adapt to the changing waters of what they called the Moonshell River. By the late 19th…
chaoticutopia | February 28, 2007Just in case you missed the date on the headline, it is midnight, after February 28th, and just before March 1st. If there were a day in between yesterday and tomorrow, it would be my birthday. But there isn't. Next year, there will be one. This isn't next year. This year, I lack a birthday. (It could very be ingenious paradoxes such as these which led to my dabbling in the existential arts.)
A lurking friend of mine (also a fellow Talking Heads fan) sent me the following video along with (un)birthday wishes. Thanks, J!
If you really must know, next year at this time, I'll be having my…
chaoticutopia | January 2, 2007I'll admit, I've never been a big fan of New Year's resolutions. It isn't that I don't like setting goals... but vowing to make a major lifestyle change with a time limit does seem to be asking for trouble. After all, there will always be a touch of chaos. With that in mind, I actually made a resolution last year, and more astonishingly, kept it. In fact, you're looking at it... this blog.
Chaotic Utopia was around before 2006, but rarely seen. I had a collection of essays, stories, poems, doodles, and ideas that (to me) seemed rather important (though I wasn't completely sure why) stored on…
chaoticutopia | October 13, 2006Is a place timeless? Is a hill the same hill after a hundred years, or a thousand? For instance, this black and white photograph on the right shows a canal along the Front Range. But how old is it? Does it matter? In many of the photographs I've compared lately, there have been striking or subtle differences appearing over time. This scene, however, has hardly changed in the past 150 years. Before then, there wasn't a canal here, nor a lake in the distance, but there weren't cameras around to capture the scene, either.
A few centuries back, we might have seen a herd of buffalo grazing along…
chaoticutopia | October 9, 2006In the early 1900s, Louis Charles McClure, who studied under the famous pioneer photographer, William Henry Jackson, followed the construction of the Denver Interurban Railroad. In or about 1908, he took a number of landscape photographs highlighting the railroad's journey between Denver and Boulder. I've been following the same tracks, trying to see the landscape through McClure's lens, and comparing the changes over the last 100 years. (My quest was, in part, inspired by John Fielder's work, which is well known for matching Jackson's photography. While Jackson and Fielder were mostly drawn…
chaoticutopia | October 5, 2006Continued from: "Taming the Great American Desert"
John Frank Church was born in the Wild West--a young cowboy on the Front Range. He used to help his Pa, George, with the harvest and driving cattle across the continental divide each spring to graze. The famous (or infamous, depending on your perspective) Buffalo Bill used to stop by the ranch to visit the family. President Grant and his daughter once spent the night, as well. Passengers on the Overland Stage Coach frequently dropped in on their way to Denver or Boulder. Frank's mother, Sarah, was always ready to greet the road-wearied…
chaoticutopia | October 2, 2006Do I have an aversion to technology? It seems absurd; I adore my computer and my microwave, my vacuum cleaner and my Ipod. So, why, then, do I hesitate to write about the impacts of technology on local history?
I've been working on a series looking at the development of the Front Range, fervently delving into local history. This isn't the first time I've indulged myself with the subject. Outside of classes, I've read books summarizing world history from various standpoints. Every time, when I approached the industrial revolution, I've backed away. Strangely, I met the same block while…
chaoticutopia | September 21, 2006Continued from: "Wedding Bells and Wagon Wheels"
The arid, sweeping prairie at the foot of the Rocky Mountains was a challenge to early settlers in Colorado. While most people were drawn to the rugged mountains, captivated by the promise of gold, they brought limited resources. The mountains, while rich in mineral, offered a poor variety of dietary selections. Being raised on home-baked breads, it was easy to grow tired of meals of buffalo steaks and berries. The Front Range needed agriculture.
William N. Byers, who founded the Rocky Mountain News, recognized the need for agriculture. He…
chaoticutopia | September 18, 2006
In May of 1861, George Henry and Sarah Church set out on their honeymoon, into an unfamiliar frontier. They loaded their cart with a variety of comforts, from a stack of homemade potato pancakes to Milton's Paradise Lost and a tome of "Grecian mythology." Then, hitching up their team of oxen ("Buck and Bright, Tom and Jerry") they headed west. Along the way, others told them to head back. Colorado was a bust, they heard. "There was no gold and no farming as it never rained." They wouldn't give up.
Sarah looked at the bleak weather outside, where rain had been pouring for weeks. "It would be…
chaoticutopia | September 15, 2006The other day, I put up a small question about history. What better place could there be to put my answer, but in the form of a fractal? Patterns seem to almost repeat themselves. Sweeping changes result from a single, initial circumstance. Each point is connected to another, within the same set. Are these descriptions of events in history, or the rules defining a rippled Julia set?
Or perhaps the rings of a tree?
The trunk of a cottonwood tree, showing rings formed over many years. Cottonwood trees (below) line the bank of Walnut Creek, which appealed to Sarah H. Church when she arrived…
chaoticutopia | September 13, 2006Does history repeat, or do cycles of change simply overlap?
This week, I'll be finishing up my series on Colorado history and urban development. Before I get to it, however, I'll probably be a bit on the quiet side. I might put a poem up to fill the space, in the meantime. For now, I'll leave you to ponder the question above.
Image taken by the author at Two Ponds National Wildlife Refuge in July of this year.
chaoticutopia | August 15, 2006Here are two poems, each embracing a different perception of time:
Vigor
Go ahead...
Walk all over me
I won't bend.
I'm as hard as diamond
Hidden in the rough
Luminous and resilient
Myriad of geometric facets
Layer upon crystalline layer
Depths of fire you'll never see
Without a cut and polish
But thus enhanced
I'll cost a pretty penny
So leave me be, in the rough
In my dark kimberlitic home
Bearing the weight of time.
Fragility
Time drips like Dali's clocks
Slips and cracks
Nothing lasts.
Even now is sliding away
Years trickle past,
Hardly noticed
Seasons blend
To hazy shadows
But the…
chaoticutopia | August 8, 2006When I last left off, I was describing the relationships between values and matter, and how they fit together to form information or a three-dimensional thing. But something seemed missing. Do we really live in something as simple as a three dimensional world? As I mentioned earlier, the string theorists don't think so, and neither do I. For one, things change. My study of Colorado history has given plenty examples of that. Look at Church Ranch, then versus now, or Lillybridge's studio, and the freeway that sits there today. What makes the difference in forms of these places? Time, naturally…
chaoticutopia | July 21, 2006Note: I originally planned to post this along with the Friday Fractal. Then, like chaos, fractals, and life, it didn't turn out the way I expected. Considering the length and tone of this piece, it will stand better alone. Never fear, the fractal is still on the way.
"They paved paradise, and put in an interstate freeway..." In order to visit the place where the studio/shack of Charles Lillybridge once stood, I have to drive down the I-25, the interstate freeway which runs parallel to the Front Range. It already looks like a gloomy day, with thunderheads looming ominously to the west. As…
chaoticutopia | July 20, 2006An ecosystem is held together by complex interactions between living organisms and their inorganic environment. When early farmers and ranchers transformed the landscape in Colorado, were they destroying an ecosystem, or becoming a part of it? Perhaps there was a bit of both. The settlers who camped near Lillybridge's studio probably didn't have time to question it. It was life. If you worked hard enough, you'd survive.
In 1999, Robin Chotzinoff leafed through the Lillybridge collection for an article in Westword. One quote stood out above all the others, capturing the essence of struggles…
chaoticutopia | July 19, 2006While the world changes around us, does regular, ordinary life change as well? The Lillybridge Collection shows simple, ordinary life, 100 years ago. From that simplicity, personality emerges. Charles S. Lillybridge didn't bother to seek the rich and the famous. Rather, he preferred his neighbors, ordinary people, living in a shanty town off of the South Platte River. By 1910, Denver was a growing city, constructing five story buildings. Instead of seeking these marvels of the day--many now long gone--Lillybridge sought out the young and the old, the working stiffs, the grandmothers, and the…
chaoticutopia | July 18, 2006When most people think of Colorado history, they picture the Wild West--outlaws, ghost stories, prostitutes, and other strange tales that go along with gold fever. (I talked a bit about gold mining on Friday, along with instructions for panning your own gold, in case you missed it.) It was a wild, rugged land, approachable only by the brave and determined. This was true in the mountains, surely, but also down on the plains. When settlers came to Colorado, they didn't think much about preserving the lands or ecosystem--on the other hand; it was a matter of preserving oneself. The plains…
chaoticutopia | July 14, 2006When you peer into a fractal, you're seeing the edge of chaos. If you sift through enough Julia or Mandelbrot sets, you might catch a hint of fractal fever. When you find that point, where order is filtered out of randomness, and glimpse a familiar pattern, you might feel tempted to shout "Eureka!" That triumphant feeling is, of course, much older than the computers that generate fractals. We've been seeking precious patterns for centuries. Compare this fractal image, taken from a section of a Julia set colored with fractal Brownian motion...
...with a much older sorting method:
Panning for…
chaoticutopia | July 13, 2006"A good many of Colorado's mountain springs, especially the hot springs, are radio-active. Eminent physicians are now studying the affects of these to see what curative properties they may have. At some later time these undboubedly will be valued highly."
-Free Homestead Lands of Colorado Described: A Handbook for Settlers, page 41. (1915)
Ah, water. In the rugged, dry lands of Colorado, people would say anything to convince someone else to live there. When the expansion West began, things didn't look too good for farming along the Front Range. Looking across the plains, some called it "the…
chaoticutopia | July 12, 2006...but home is always changing. Every rainstorm washes away a bit of the soil. Trees grow, seasons change, like in so many songs and poems. We say "you can't go home again" because it is never the same, but we forget how it never stayed the same in the first place. Change is a part of life. I've always thought Stephen Jay Gould's theory of punctuated equilibrium applied to not just the speed of evolutionary changes, but of most complex changes. The little things add up, so to speak.
When I returned to Westminster, I found it had changed, in both small ways and big. The once barren and empty…