“Almost every case study we perform involves a divergence syndrome. That is, some quantity that is commonly expected to be positive and finite turns out either to be infinite or to vanish. At first blush, such misbehavior looks most bizarre and even terrifying, but a careful reexamination shows it to be quite acceptable. . . , as long as one is willing to use new methods of thought.

. . .

Fractals star in two distinct stories, separated in time by nearly a century, between which they underwent a total role reversal. In the first stage, some fractals … were deliberately designed from 1875 to 1925 to eat away at the foundations of the prevailing mathematics. Everyone viewed these sets as ‘monsters'.’ While the rest of mathematics was regarded as a potentially promising hunting ground for physicists in need of new tools, everyone agreed that the monsters could safely be assumed to be totally irrelevant to the description of Nature. Hardly any variant of these monsters was created for fifty years. The role reversal started as I began to find in my research work that one of these monsters after another could serve as the central conceptual tool to answer some old question that Man had been asking about the shape of his world.”

- Benoit B. Mandelbrot, The Fractal Geometry of Nature

Fractals challenged the simplified, classical assumptions of Euclidean geometry. In doing so they proved to more accurately represent much of the physical world. I believe the same may be true of language and human nature. Take for instance the concept of the “rational actor” underlying economic theories or the “reasonable person” standard ubiquitous to legal principles. Comporting those concepts of human behavior to whatever situation one is currently processing/complaining about with one’s friends or therapist is nearly impossible. The truth is humans are messy. I don’t think that’s a design flaw. But the history of language—who has access to learning it, who has access to distributing printed words, who feels safe enough to use language to tell their own truths—has always been limited. Further, language has been used to simplify human experience in an effort to not only communicate things quickly in small groups, but also to create and maintain power dynamics in large groups.

As a writer, I am deeply interested in how language can be used to more accurately reflect the broad, discordant, and magnificent scope of human experience. As a licensed but non-practicing attorney, I remain fascinated by how I, as a human being living with the Constitution for the United States of America as the exoskeleton of my society, a document that claims its goals to be to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, can transform those aspirational words into experiential resonance for all humans living beneath their wingspan.