Surfing the Gnarl by Rudy Rucker

there’s some compact master-formula capable of predicting the future with a few strokes of a pencil. And many still have an internal faith in some slightly more sophisticated restatement of this.
    But, as Wolfram so convincingly argues, the world, being gnarly, is inherently unpredictable. We have no hope of control. On the plus side, gnarl is a bit better behaved than the random. We can hope to ride the waves.

    Anything involving fluids can be a rich source of gnarl—even a cup of tea. The most orderly state of a liquid is, of course, for it to be standing still. If one lets water run rather slowly down a channel, the water moves smoothly, with a predictable pattern of ripples.
    As more water is put into a channel, the ripples begin to crisscross and waver. Eddies and whirlpools appear—and with turbulent flow we have the birth of gnarl.
    Once a massive amount of water is poured down the channel, we get a less interesting random state in which the water is seething. At this point I should caution that I’m using “random” the loose sense of “having no perceivable pattern.” It might be that a liquid or some othercomplex process is in fact obeying a deterministic rule and is what we more properly call “pseudorandom.” But I’ll just say “random” to keep the discussion simple.
    Besides the flow of water, another good day-to-day example of a gnarly physical process is a tree whose leaves and branches are trembling in the breeze. Here’s some journal notes I wrote about a tree I saw while backpacking near Big Sur with my daughter Isabel and her husband Gus in May 2003.
    Green hills, wonderfully curved, the gnarly oaks, fractal white cloud puffs, the Pacific Ocean hanging anomalously high in the sky, fog-quilted.
    I got up first, right before sunrise, and I was looking at a medium-sized pine tree just down the ridge from my tent. Gentle dawn breezes were playing over the tree, and every single one of its needles was quivering, oscillating through its own characteristic range of frequencies, and the needle clumps and branches were rocking as well, working their way around their own particular phase space, the whole motion harmonious in the extreme. Insects buzzed about the tree, and, having looked in the microscope so much of late, I could easily visualize the microorganisms upon the needles, in the beads of sap, beneath the bark, in the insects’ guts—the tree a microcosmos. The sun came rolling up over the ridge, gilding my pine. With all its needles aflutter it was like an anemone, like a dancer, like a cartoon character with a halo of alertness rays.
    â€œI love you,” I said to the tree, for just that moment not even needing to reach past the tree to imagine any divinity behind it, for just that moment seeing the tree itself as a god.
    When we got home there were my usual daily problems to confront and I felt uptight. And now, writing these notes, I ask how can I get some serenity?
    I have the laptop here on a cafe table under a spring-green tree in sunny blue-sky Los Gatos. I look up at the tree overhead, a linden with very small pale fresh green leaves. And yes the leaves are doing the hand jive. The branches rocking. The very image of my wandering thoughts, eternally revisiting the same topics. It’s good.
    The trees, the leaves, the clouds, my mind, it’s all the same, all so beautifully gnarly.
GNARL AND LITERATURE
    As a reader, I’ve always sought the gnarl, that is, I like to find odd, interesting, unpredictable kinds of books, possibly with outré or transgressive themes. My favorites would include Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, Robert Sheckley and Phil Dick, Jorge Luis Borges and Thomas Pynchon.
    Once again, a gnarly process is complex and unpredictable without being random. If a story hews to some very familiar pattern, it feels stale. But if absolutely anything can happen, a story becomes as unengaging as someone