26 April 2005 | Bug
If I understand correctly, entropy is the tendency for things to fall apart. I think of this in almost mathematical terms: Since there are so many more ways for things to fall apart than remain together, they fall apart. It’s a probabilistic inevitability.
I mention this because of a project I’ve been working on. Last October I walked Manhattan’s High Line with five other people. Things fell apart on this walk, in predictably unpredictable ways, and then a few months later, four of us tried to write about the experience, and this too went badly.
I blame both failures—if failures are what they were—on entropy.
Actually, I blame both failures on what I think as the bug. The bug is my name for a group. I have a little saying about this: A group is a bug with a brain in each leg. I should be famous for this saying, and maybe I will someday, because of how true it is. With little effort it could serve as the basis for a revolutionary new theory of why groups suck. For now I will share but one key postulate: The bigger the bug (that is, the more legs it has), the less chance it has of moving in any particular direction. One need only recall one’s experience in groups to confirm this.
Some of my collaborators would object to my use of the word failure. Given the chance, they would characterize our experience differently, and indeed our conflicting characterizations could form the basis for a fascinating meta-project, one that would fail just as swiftly as its predecessors, of this I’m certain.
However I’m not here to speak of failure, real or projected, but to make an announcement. My compatriots and I have put together a collection of our original accounts, more or less as we wrote them. We call the piece High Line Rashomon. Having read it many times, I don’t know what to think anymore, aside from the obvious, which, not knowing mathematical notation, I tend to express using its English equivalent: entropy’s a bitch.
Update (April 29, 2005): In keeping with the overall project, today one account was withdrawn by its author. This weakened the piece sufficiently for me to decide to take it down. Hello and goodbye. I have recast my own contribution as a stand-alone story called Group Encounter on the High Line. Entropy, as we know…
