Preface To "Meet The Fractals"

By Derek Strahan

This Preface is 50 pages long. Why a Preface? Too long? There is precedent for writing a long preface to a theater play. G. B. Shaw’s Prefaces were written to engage his readers’ interest in the play’s central topic and in the dialectic that was at the basis of the drama. Invariably the themes Shaw chose were of social interest, and the prefaces were polemic in nature. This sobriety of purpose never deterred Shaw from imbuing his plays with humor, whimsy and lively dramatic conflict. He incurred the wrath of his Fabian associates who disapproved of what they took to be levity. What they failed to appreciate was that you can’t use drama for preaching. If you have a cause to promote, an option to explore, a paradox to unravel, you must give equal representation to opposing viewpoints otherwise there is no drama! I openly acknowledge my admiration for Shaw, and my desire to emulate his model. I always found Shaw’s Prefaces to be thoroughly engaging, but it was not until I embarked on writing “Meet The Fractals” that I found writing a Preface to be an absolute necessity. It was through writing the Preface that I found the arguments, the plot and the characters.

As the Preface discloses, this is the story of a group of people who, each for different reasons, have decided that monogamy is an outmoded custom because it is more honoured in the breach than in the observance. As statics reveal, fifty per cent of all marriages fail! The union lasts only “until divorce do us part”. In “Meet The Fractals” you will meet ten people, five of each gender, who decide to apply the theories of quantum physics to living. They commit to a group marriage: an extreme form of polyamory. They accept that human sexuality is in essence, chaotic, and this chaos is better managed by accepting it than resisting it. The play covers only the first 48 hours of their meeting and their deliberations, during which time they have to ward off attacks by an ambitious politician and an angry puritan

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Mar 3, 2013
• ISBN: 9781626750838

Derek Strahan

Derek Strahan is a Springfield resident and the author of the blog "Lost New England." He is a graduate of Westfield State University with degrees in English and regional planning, and he teaches English at the Master's School in Simsbury, Connecticut.

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CHARACTERS

REVOLVING DOORS

My twin motives for writing thus play are both earnest and mischievous. Earnest, because the subject matter is of great moment: statistics suggest that around fifty per cent of all monogamic marriages last only till divorce us do part. Mischievous, because I consider it my solemn duty to urge humanity to try its luck on a variant version of the game of love, if only to find out if, when playing to a different set of rules, humanity can still succeed in failing fifty per cent of the time.

Love is often described as a game. We play the game of love, hoping to win. But against whom? Against rivals who try to lay claim to our proposed partner? Or to win in games of dominance played with our partner once the primal choice is made? Or against fate, to maintain the partnership against all odds? Over the centuries dramatists have certainly taken the game of wooing and winning seriously, since this stage of the game has always attracted the most serious attention of the audience. That same audience has tended to view married life following the initial romance as the subject for comedy, even farce, as witness the vogue throughout Europe during the 18th century for revolving door bedroom comedies dealing with marital infidelities. This changed somewhat during the 19th century with the new vogue for realism in both the novel and in drama, especially opera, where tragic outcomes were common. Fashions revolve too, and in the 20th century, in film and TV sitcoms, married life again became the butt of humour. And so, given the choice of dark tragedy or absurdist humour, I opt for the latter in writing this play about group marriage for, as in all previous variants of the game of love, where dissembling and evasion become tactical necessities, there is nothing funnier than revealed truth.

But before the mischief of the play, the earnest enquiry of the Preface.

STATISTICS, SEMANTICS & CHAOS

So this is the story of a group of people who, each for different reasons, have decided that monogamy is an outmoded custom because it is more honoured in the breach than in the observance and that, therefore, adherence to its moral codes and the customs that support it leads to the living of a life based on dishonesty, deceit and hypocrisy both in outward behaviour and in the secret labyrinth of each individual’s subconscious. I propose to write this story in the form of a play, but, having decided on that approach, I find that to apply it requires a great deal more preparation in terms of structure, and cast of characters than would either a comedy or a tragedy based on humanity’s favourite fable: the love triangle, with its predictable personal geometry and its participatory circle of advisors, onlookers and spurned lovers. Therefore I have to write the preface to the play before writing the play, which is, perhaps, an inversion of the usual order where the preface is written after the play as an apology for it.

My need to begin work by writing the preface to an as yet unwritten play arises from the need to bring some order to the chaos of issues that arises from its central proposition: that the human race would benefit from a less dogmatic attitude to the formation of domestic units in which personal bonding and procreation are interwoven through socio-biological cause and effect and embedded in law and common morality. The benefits that law and morality are supposed to confer upon society are the twin blessings of order and security. The main purpose of morality is to render human behaviour predictable by prescribing modes of conduct, and the main purpose of law is to enforce such prescriptions by punishing those who ignore them.

The most successful application of law in moderating human behaviour is the traffic lights, and the main reason why they are successful is because the lights are not always red. By this simple device chaos in vehicular traffic is avoided, and the punishment inflicted on those who ignore a red light is universally regarded as just.

In the conduct of human amatory affairs, similar order is much more difficult to achieve. The reason for this lies in the observable fact that, despite all attempts to regulate amatory behaviour, it remains chaotic. The chaos resides in nature, and in the observable fact that nature over-insures, to an absurdly excessive degree, that procreation will occur. Let us now consider some observable facts, prefaced by quoting a poem by Aldous Huxley:

A million million spermatozoa

All of them alive

Out of their cataclysm but one poor Noah

Dare hope to survive

And among that billion minus one

Might have chanced to be

Shakespeare, another Newton, a new Donne

But that one was me.

Had Aldous been a biologist like his brother Julian, he might have avoided the numerical error in the first line – there are 300 million sperm in one ejaculation, not a million million – but poetic license can be granted in the cause of illustrating with such verve the immoderate bounty of Nature, which some might attribute to God: indeed, if you believe in God you must make such attribution to Him, since the religious regard Nature as the work of God.

Now let us view some statistics that reflect upon the success rate of another work of God: the institution of monogamic marriage. These figures are drawn from the mind of another deity, the mighty Google, and date from the year 2012, and in particular from the NCHS website of the National Centre for Health Statistics (UK). In one year, the total number of marriages in this Western democratic country was 2,077,000. The marriage rate was 6.8 per 1,000 of the total population; and the divorce rate was 3.4 per 1,000 of the total population. In other words, half of marriages ended in divorce. To those numbers we must add the fact that there were approximately the same number of people living together as unmarried couples, and for whom there are no divorce statistics. Attempts have been made to assess how many fathers are unknowingly bringing up children of whom they are not the biological fathers. Estimates vary from 1 in 25 children to 3 in 60 children. This issue is, of course, a difficult one for which to gather statistics because most people either do not want to know about such a moral anomaly or, if they do know about it, don’t want to proclaim it publicly, or even have it recorded as a statistic.

What does all this prove? Can statistics ever prove anything? Perhaps not, but they can indicate tendencies, and these do perhaps indicate that monogamic marriage is failing to hold back the tide of chaos that is lapping at its heart and hearth. King Canute knew that he could not command the tides of the sea to go back and only demonstrated his inability to do so as an object lesson to his courtiers to show that he was not as powerful as God. However, no