Here is a wise man. We came across Dr. Turner’s blog a few days ago while doing a Google search on “The Soul as Strange Attractor,” to see what was what, with this recently published story collection. If anyone wondered how the stories wound up in a book with that title, some of the characters seem to be puzzled by it, Dr. Turner’s essay on “Values and Strange Attractors” will clear it up. If it still seems like a long, pointless march after reading this, then, at least you’ll know where to direct your enquiries. Dr. Turner clearly understands this stuff.

 

The idea of ideas having their own subtle substance, a swirling, piebald, scattering of stuff that touches momentarily, unsuspectedly, into the actual, brick and mortar quarks and leptons of our senses, is felt instinctively by everyone, at their most primitive level. We try to shake it off as that quark reality fills up the spaces of our mind with its ruthless insistence on time and space ordering, but it’s still there, down at the interstitial level, and we can get to it if we try. Read a few of Dr. Turner’s poems. That will help.

 

The characters in “The Soul as Strange Attractor,” most of them, are embarrassed by the title, as the chorus alerts us early on, but their embarrassment is one of recognition, not of association with pretentiousness, as they lament. If we let them tell their stories without a lot of prompting and preconception, we can glimpse what is directing the flesh of their coil, and the energy of their spirals.

 

What makes Dr. Turner a wise man? Why, he had a notion about the soul and strange attractors that was similar to mine. Agreement is wisdom, or, if it is not, then it is certainly on the right path. Unless it’s not. That’s the way with wisdom. It is or it’s not. Check out Dr. Turner, it will be worth your effort.



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