Chaos Theory in a Tokyo Bar, by Pierce
Timberlake
Mark Charalambous
With Chaos Theory in a
Tokyo Bar, Pierce Timberlake uses a past event, an evening in a bar in
Tokyo, as his launching point into another of his sublime meditations on the
human condition.
The topic this time is the psychology of risk. Timberlake’s fictional alter-ego
Thomas finds himself at age twenty in Tokyo visiting his parents, where his
military father is deployed. The impetus
for his first foray into the nature of risk is a young soldier who more-or-less
invites himself to their table.
The young GI is gung-ho to get to Vietnam, “where the action
is.” Thus begins Timberlake’s first analysis of the human propensity to engage
in risk. Does a young man’s sense of
invincibility merely stem from the seeming unreality of death, as its natural
occurrence is so far in the future that its acknowledgement can’t find purchase
in the mind? Or is there more to it?
Timberlake springs backwards and forwards in time from the
Tokyo bar to visit other moments in Thomas’s life when he confronted fear and
took the road of recklessness.
There’s the ten-year-old Thomas who decides to swim off the
northern California coast and may have encountered a shark. There’s the
slightly older motorcycle-riding Thomas who takes up the gauntlet thrown down
by a passel of teenagers in a Mustang on a dangerous 2-lane coastal road. Several
other instances are recounted, each one leading into a further exploration of
why people take chances with their lives.
The list of causes builds with each story. In his words:
“To the factors Thomas had
previously considered that he thought could lead an individual into reckless
behavior—egotistical
paralysis that won’t allow you to deviate from a course once you’ve taken it;
acclimation, when a minor risk increases gradually; social pressure—Thomas
could add a fourth: a tendency toward solipsism.”
Readers of Timberlake know that his philosophical excursions
always lead into mind-bending spaces. Is the many-worlds theory of quantum
uncertainty an expression of chaos theory writ loud across the multiverse? Is
it possible than in near-death circumstances reality branches into universes
where we do actually die, but then our consciousness transfers to an alternate
universe where we continue our lives?
Timberlake’s thought experiments are guaranteed to stimulate
the imaginations of the reader. My thoughts drifted to reflecting on how the
size of the “world” increased non-linearly with each new scientific
revolution. First the “world” was
centered on our globe with a firmament hiding the heaven that shone through its
holes (the stars). The Copernican revolution (really renaissance, since it was known in the ancient world) expanded the
size of the “world” by orders of magnitude. Further advances in astronomy
revealed that each star in the sky was an actual sun, which may have its own
planetary system. Yet another increase in the size of the “world,” by a greater
order of magnitude. Next, the discovery of galaxies. Some of those stars were
actually entire galaxies: another increase in the size of the “world”—now
formally renamed the universe—again by even larger orders of magnitude.
What then about the multiverse? An infinite number of
universes, a new one created with each quantum event’s collapse of its wave
equation. Such an increase in size of
the “world” (after all, we can’t just use plain old pedestrian “universe” to
describe this reality) is beyond human
imagining. We have no hope of appreciating the size of such a beast.
Perhaps it is at this point that solipsism enters the
picture. As our minds employ the scientific method to ever greater advances,
refining and periodically overthrowing past scientific paradigms, we are forced
to entertain the notion that perhaps we are not really perceiving the world (with ever greater accuracy) as much as we are
actually conceiving the world.
This last cause of recklessness, solipsism, is further illustrated
by what I found to be the most engaging part of the book: the account of Thomas’
off-and-on employment by the larger-than-life “Alan,” a truly colorful
character. Emerald smuggler? Drug
smuggler? Hi-roller gambler. Perhaps bullshit artist. Probably all of the above
in various measures, Thomas concludes.
Being myself relatively risk-averse, I find myself drawn to
stories about those people at the opposite end of that spectrum. I recall being
fascinated listening to a Vegas gambler on an NPR program recount a couple of
days in his life in the casinos. It is inconceivable to me that someone could
possess several hundred thousand dollars resulting from a good day’s gambling,
and then under no coercion whatsoever lose it all the next day. This kind of
behavior is not just anathema to me, it’s totally alien.
In one of Thomas’s excursions with Alan, his employer enters
into a casino game called “Bank Bingo” in a bar in Panama. This is the
quintessential story of the sucker lured into losing everything in a game where
he is clearly being duped. They were not even familiar with this game. They
“learned” it on the spot. I’m a sucker for harrowing tales of gamblers in the
throes of losing yet unable to quit the game.
For the reader’s sake I won’t reveal how Alan’s “tryst” with
Bank Bingo ends...
Timberlake’s last speculation is on Alan’s psychological
makeup—what is it that drives people like him to take huge risks, to slough off
hundred-thousand-dollar losses with just a wry remark? Perhaps it is a tendency to
solipsism: the belief (not disprovable, by the way) that only YOU are real.
Everything else, including all other people, is but a show for your benefit.
Only you “exist” in the ultimate
sense. If solipsism is buried deep into
your psyche, then your behavior ultimately doesn’t matter. Risky behaviors
would be par for the course for such people.
Chaos Theory in a
Tokyo Bar is a fine work. I look forward to more from Timberlake.
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