BIFURCATION THEORY

For Alex Nicolin

“In physics a horseshoe is more than a symbol for luck; it’s a matter of trust,” I tell him. Bohr didn’t believe that luck stepped in in flat iron heels, but he believed the person who said to him that whether he believed it or not, it was true. This is what I would call a ratio of convergence, though Feigenbaum might disagree. “Are you going to hang out with the nerds again,” he wants to know. He heard me mumbling to myself: “epsilon over square root of gamma,” “X is in the rescaled deviation from the equilibrium width.” “Yes,” “I need to calculate precisely how much I’m going to excite the first resonance.” He knows that this is what I do when I go in the negative: no understanding, no knowledge, no vision, no priming of the reader, no spreading of atomic legs, no horseshit, no certain energies, no bouncing. I apply some Bohrian psychoanalysis to myself: g forces, horses and spots set the shape of the function of narrative. Bohr is exasperated: you’re mixing the gs with the qs again. Stick with Gauss. But I’m already in a Bose trance. Condensed thinking is cold thinking. I lose my individual identity. My blob coalesces with exotic geometries. No one understands a thing, but it is beautiful. Blip.