Order, Chaos, and Entropy: a look at Pamela Zoline’s Heat Death of the Universe

Order and chaos are intimately related. Only man made distinctions attempt to hold them apart. Order is found within chaos and chaos within order; one is yin to the other’s yang. This is the idea that Sarah Boyle fights against in Pamela Zoline’s Heat Death of the Universe. Sarah wants to surround herself with order and push all the chaos away. While her physics education tells her that this is impossible, she remains unaware of the fundamental contradiction in her actions. Happily, the story is one of learning, and ultimately Sarah accepts the natural order that links these two ideas.

Sarah Boyle tries to regulate her world in ways most people wouldn’t dream of, placing labels on everything, keeping a constant count. Sarah Boyle should know this pursuit is hopeless. She knows her physics and has studied thermodynamics. The second law always wins. The second law, an enigmatic child of statistics more than actual physics, has been described in The Rocky Mountain News as, "Entropy is the physical force that ensures that things inevitably go from bad to worse." Even this witty remark sheds light on the deep misunderstanding that surrounds entropy. It is not a force. It is not a thing. It is a physical law that just is. Things progress from order to disorder. Teacups fall and break. A breeze hits the pile of clay shards, and still, even if we repeat the process millions of times, we never get a new tea cup. Why? It’s hard to say.

Even though she knows the theoretical idea of entropy, Sarah can’t quit fighting it. She seems afraid, deeply and unnaturally afraid of an impending chaos which she seems to just barely keep at bay with her constant organizing. Zoline lets us in on Sarah’s knowledge of her own impending when she writes, "With some reluctance Sarah Boyle dishes out Sugar Frosted Flakes to her children, already hearing the decay set in upon the little milk-white teeth, the bony whine of the dentist’s drill" (4). Sarah knows that even the most ordered and regular action, feeding her children breakfast, is a one way ticket to chaos. Teeth decay. It cannot be stopped, only slowed.

In her analysis of the cereal box Sarah lets slip that deep inside she recognizes just a bit of the interrelationship of order and chaos. She worries that the cereal may be defective, may cause some terrible disease in her children. The surprise gift, the fancy advertising, the multiple offers on one box, it’s all too good to be true. The phrase is a cliché, but it shows an underlying understanding of the idea Sarah is fighting against. The cereal box is too perfect. Somewhere beneath all that order, chaos must be hiding. Sarah sees that here, but hides from in it in other aspects of her life.

If this story were only a battle against entropy, it would be a depressing one indeed. Entropy never loses; it never even gives ground. There is much more than that here though. The key element is the constant hinting that there exists order, not apart from chaos, but somewhere within it. The cereal box is the perfect metaphor for this. The initial description of the box is in perfect order, "Giant size. Net Weight 16 ounces, 250 grams." The box is without flaws, carefully measured into just the right rectangular shape and filled with the perfect amount of cereal. Feeding the children will only ruin that. No longer are there 16 ounces (250 grams) of cereal as labeled. The box is torn open, loses its structure and shape. There is more though. From the wreckage of this box we gain a mask of William Shakespeare.

Shakespeare seems to be a symbol of human intellect and achievement. That’s the real beauty that Sarah is about to discover: that despite the whole world rapidly descending into chaos, order and beauty keep popping up on their own. That’s the beauty I see in natural law. Somehow a few laws of physics and some fundamental constants have led from the big bang, an incomprehensibly intense explosion, to everything we have ever known. Everything we have ever read, watched, enjoyed, debated, or loved is only a creation of these laws, the same laws that guarantee a rapid descent into chaos.

Zoline does add a catch here, though. The Shakespeare masks aren’t Shakespeare; they’re a shoddy imitation. She writes, "He appears at once more kindly and somewhat more vacant than we are used to seeing him" (5). Shakespeare is still an exception. Shakespeare is a swing too far in one direction on the continuum of order and chaos. The kind of beauty he brought to the world is rare, a product of luck, not of a Kellog’s assembly line. This is another hint at the lesson Sarah has yet to learn. Order cannot always be forced. Nature does it on its own.

This early in the story, Sarah still tries to force her own order on the world with he cleaning supplies and counting. She catches glimpses of this truth and uses these to pull through her day-to-day existence. On the diaper bin she writes, "The nitrogen cycle is the vital round of organic and inorganic exchange on earth. The sweet breath of the Universe." Nitrogen is essential for organic life. It is the active ingredient in most modern fertilizers. It is also found in high concentrations in animal feces, including that of humans. Here in changing diapers, Sarah encounters a great disorder: dirty smelly clothing and children, things she would have liked to have kept clean. In this instance she has come to recognize the importance of the disorder. It really isn’t random. The disorder in her life has to exist to achieve some universal order, the transfer of organic and inorganic materials throughout the earth, that life may go on.

The phrase Sarah uses, "The sweet breath of the Universe," is oddly reminiscent of the story’s title, The Heat Death of the Universe. This is the first glimmer of Sarah’s new understanding. There is a direct relationship between this ordered occurrence, the nitrogen cycle that allows life to exist, and our descent into entropy. Just as all living things breath and die it seems that the universe is breathing, breathing in countless ways. It sucks nitrogen in through death and decay and exhales in the growth of all life we know of. This breathing gives the world life and beauty, simultaneously guaranteeing its ultimate demise.

Life seems to be behind all of Sarah’s dilemmas. She sees life as something negative. She forgets how many children she has. She views the children, and even life itself, as messy and destructive. This is shown in her description of her after breakfast cleaning, "The floor sweepings include a triangular half of toast spread with grape jelly, bobby pins, a green Band-Aid, a doll’s eye, dust, dog’s hair and a button." All of these items, with the possible exception of the dust can be traced directly to some living thing. Sarah has trouble dealing with the baby’s diapers and has to rely on a mantra to help her through it. She sees all this mess and chaos as the result of life.

All the time she’s looking the wrong way. If evolutionary biologists are to be believed, and I feel they are, life somehow sprung into existence on its own, a result of only physical laws. One day some chemical structure started reproducing itself. Eons later, by some unknown miracle and the simple process of natural selection, nature gives Shakespeare. Still, Sarah misses it. She sees in life the destruction of order.

Sarah is much quicker to see the hints given in the inanimate world than the animate. Her view of the dust shows an understanding that is almost out of place with regard to her overall ignorance of nature’s balancing act. For a moment, "Sarah Boyle realizes that the dust is indeed the most beautiful stuff in the room, a manna for the eyes" (26). For just that one moment she considers bringing that kind of beauty into her life, but she quickly turns from it, admonishing herself for even that brief consideration. "‘That way madness lies, says Sarah,’ says Sarah" (26). In addition to her recognition of the dust’s beauty, it is significant how she describes it, "a manna for the eyes" (26). God gave the Israelites manna from heaven when they were hungry for nourishment. Identically, God gave Sarah manna for the eyes when she was hungry for beauty. Here is another hint that only nature creates the beautiful mix of order and chaos, not us. Sarah was given the dust, as if by a miracle. The best she can do in ordering her room is to eliminate the dust altogether.

Sarah’s breakdown is precipitated by the death of the turtle. She views the turtle as something that should have a long life, almost as something eternal. In many ways the turtle seems to be a metaphor for the universe itself. Some ancient cultures thought the Earth was supported by an elephant who stood on four turtles. The giant turtles were the ultimate foundation of existence. The death of Sarah’s turtle then, represents the death of that foundation. When the turtle dies, Sarah is forced to accept that the universe will one day die, that, "[a] time must come when the Universe ‘unwinds’ itself, no energy being available for use." She feels that life only makes this time approach faster.

This is what leads to her eventual breakdown. She cannot live her life if life is the destruction of order. She cannot survive with this division. Finally she lets herself go. Throwing eggs and jam and pots and pans, she embraces disorder. It is never stated, in fact only very subtly implied in the last lines, but I think Sarah finds peace with herself and the natural relationship between order in chaos in the world in this final bout of hysteria. Everything she throws creates more disorder, more entropy. The final few lines read:

The sand keeps falling, very quietly, in the egg timer. The old man and woman in the barometer never catch each other. She picks up eggs and throws them into the air. She begins to cry. She opens her mouth. The eggs arch slowly through the kitchen, like a baseball, hit high against the spring sky, seen from far away. They go higher in the stillness, hesitate at the zenith, then begin to fall away slowly, slowly, through the fine, clear air. (54)

In these last lines everything is brought together. Time continues regardless of her hysteria as shown by the egg timer. The relentless pursuits of human life do not cease with Sarah’s surrender, the barometer tells us. Even in her most painful personal moment, crying, open mouthed, Sarah sees the beauty of nature and physical law. The eggs she throws trace out the same perfect parabolic path of a baseball, the same mathematically ordered path that Newton recognized some 300 years ago and first attributed to gravity. The order and beauty are present, amidst all the chaos. Order is not something to impose on nature, but something to search for. It’s waiting, secretly, beautifully hiding in the indescribable motion of the wandering planets and every other mystery we have uncovered in our constant search for truth.

When Sarah sees this beauty, she has to accept it. She has to acknowledge that while the universe may eventually die that doesn’t lessen the glory of its life. If this story were to continue, I think we would see that Sarah Boyle is done living for the future, for some unattainable infinity. Her delving into entropy has revealed that infinity isn’t there; there will one day be an end to all things. Knowing this, it only makes sense to appreciate the present, to search out those unique combinations of order and chaos that thrill, inspire, and enlighten.