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It could be said that knowledge grows as chaos, incomprehensible chaos, and is transformed into order. But this is only half the story. Order is that domain of experience where familiar actions produce desirable responses. Order can become stultifying, however—crushing, deadening, oppressive, predictable, dull, lifeless, obsessive, colorless, willfully blind, self-satisfied, arrogant, unchangeable—precisely because what has always been done leaves no room for the experimentation necessary to adapt to the unknown future (and the future is by definition the emergence of the unknown).
Sometimes, therefore, knowledge grown as order is demolished, when it has become deadening. This is why the great hero who confronts the dragon is often the killer of a giant, sometimes a cyclops, one-eyed—too one-sided—too enamored of its own singularity of vision. And, in truth, every confrontation with something new is the death of an old preconception, a revision of an old map, the editing and updating of an old story, so that the true act of creative adaptation is always partly the death of anachronistic order and partly the admixture of the chaotic and revitalizing. It’s a high-wire act. It’s the surfing of a giant wave.
It’s the impossible mid-air catch. It’s a musical solo that goes beyond perfection because of the bending or breaking of a thousand well-known and well-practised rules. It’s the tight curve of the race car driver who pushes his vehicle to its mechanical and physical limits. It’s the brilliant and passionate speech of someone who is risking everything just to state what he believes to be true.
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