Leon Lett and the Poetics of Chaos: A Failed Essay on Failure

by Abbas Abidi

Let us begin by defining what I mean by chaos. Imagine a man waking up one morning, moving his feet out of bed, heading to the bathroom. Here he has a choice: he can either shower or shave. In this moment he decides to shave. He lathers up his shaving cream with hot, steamy water. He puts it on his face in an even, circular motion. He begins to shave, guiding his blade down the circumference of his cheek to the edges of his jaw. Here a slight twitch in his wrist causes the blade to turn slightly into his skin, pricking the corner of his chin. A drop of blood trickles out, slowly. He loses only a milliliter. He finishes shaving, washes his face with warm water, and douses his cheeks with aftershave to help curb the bleeding.

As he gets ready for the day, the blemish on his chin has scabbed over. No one will notice the small mark. He goes to work, where he is faced with an important decision. It is a decision that will alter the rest of his life, but at the time seems completely innocuous. The decision he makes ends up being the wrong one, and his life heads toward an unpredictable conclusion.

Now let us imagine the same man, waking up one morning, moving his feet out of bed, heading to the bathroom. Here he has a choice: he can either shower or shave. He decides to shave. He lathers up the cream with hot, steamy water. He applies it to his face in an even, circular motion. He guides his blade down to the circumference of his cheek to the edges of his jaw. Then he has a slight twitch in the wrist, causing the blade to turn slightly into his skin, pricking the corner of his chin. No blood comes out. He finishes shaving, washes his face with warm water, and douses his cheeks with aftershave.

At work he is faced with an important decision, which will alter the rest of his life, but at the time seems completely innocuous. He ends up making the right one, and his life heads in the same general direction it was before this important decision. But was it a matter of a tiny cut less than a millimeter wide on his chin that changed his life? Had that milliliter of blood not seeped out, would the possibility of making a wrong decision even exist?

Let us say that every event in your life can be plotted graphically. The amount of times you open a kitchen drawer, the angle of your elbow when you do, your breathing pattern during the action, your thoughts at the time the drawer is unlatched, all this can be represented through graphs. Let us say that you could get a graphic representation of every event in your life. In no way would the initial conditions of your life lead to any predictable conclusion, only guesses based on probabilities. If you put the elementary data about your life, where you were born, who your family is, your socioeconomic status, your intelligence, your talents, there would be no way that anyone could make an accurate prediction of where your life will lead, and there would be no way you would live the same life twice.

So let me again define what I mean by chaos. Chaos generally means a state of utter confusion or disorder. The aim of civilization is to move away from chaos to a system of authority based on obedience, which is the most basic element in modern social life. Society as we know it is in perpetual conflict between chaos and systems of order.

Chaos theory is a field of study which posits that small differences in initial conditions yield wildly diverging outcomes for dynamic systems, rendering long-term prediction impossible. This theory complicates the divide between order and disorder, as it shows the futility of planning and preparation. 

Indeed, any microscopic glance at nature reveals there is very little truly chaotic about the natural world. And with the advent of mass media, we are learning that we can make very few accurate predictions about the future, if any at all. Thus, chaos theory is one of the curses of modernity, in that as things appear to become more developed, the world becomes harder to understand.

Though the ground work of chaos theory was done by the French mathematician Henri Poincare in the late 19^th century, it was not completely expressed until the 1960’s. Poincare simply pointed out that Newton’s differential equations only worked for two sets of data, not three or more. This posed a significant problem for Newton’s calculus, which had worked for science so well until that point, as it allowed for easy, simple predictions based on the data given. Chaos theory’s complexity was fully realized in the most unpredictable of sciences, meteorology. Ed Lorenz, a mathematician turned meteorologist at MIT, was tinkering one day on a new computer. When he ran the same set of data twice, the weather model, which was based on Newtonian deterministic equations, yielded two entirely different conclusions. Lorenz found the problem was the decimal degree to which he entered the variables. He labeled this as “a sensitivity to initial conditions,” echoing Poincare, who some years earlier noted that "It may happen that small differences in the initial positions may lead to enormous differences in the final phenomena. Prediction becomes impossible." Lorenz described the problem as the “Butterfly Effect” because it implied that a butterfly flapping his wings in China might set off a chain reaction in weather patterns which would lead to snow in Texas. This sensitivity might be as small as a drop of blood dribbling down your cheek while shaving, which shows the margin of error is razor-thin, and that chaotic events in life are always assured.

Then it is only appropriate that the story begins with snow. I’ve tried to enumerate this story many times, and it is a failing of my voice that I have to begin again. The event of this retelling has always ended in frustration, the result a bastard, mutant child made of formaldehyde. Or perhaps it mimics chaos theory itself, the story becoming the initial data, the words that follow the unpredictable conclusion.

Now I will begin again, in a completely harmonious fashion. Indeed, to be afforded the chance to begin again illustrates just how low the stakes of this essay are. I’m saying nothing. I don’t wish to offer a thesis. I write to resist a subject. I wish to make no point. I’m writing as a function of my existence. The very fact of this writing compels me to speak half-truths and half-lies in tandem, a recursive algorithm where the sum disintegrates upon reaching a conclusion.

What is forged is something elemental, statements so meaningless in content that they become a meaningful representation of the person stating them. These sentences are like elements on the periodic table which exist for mere moments, as if to provide confirmation that they can indeed be created, before dissolving into something more chemically stable. 

The sum of this voice is chaotic, whirlwind, a singular assemblage of sundry parts, placed into a machine which exists only for the sake of a machine existing. There are times when I’m speaking that I am not speaking. There are times when I’m not speaking but speaking. There are times when I’ve tapped into a glossolalia which only I know, my tongue moving in ways I cannot control. At the precipice of this religious frenzy my words reach meaning without any attempt to become meaningful. I want to speak nonsense, give you translations of the hieroglyphics which line my intestines, the gibberish of my soul. I want you to understand that understanding is unnecessary, that those things which I speak of, then immediately drop, are placed there in a mise-en-scene of disorder. I don’t mean to mislead you. But as you try to understand, you will mislead yourself. I just want you to know that my voice means to be meaningless.

And now I will lie to you and say that the origin of this aimless voice started with a meteorological event: Snow.

It was December 1992, in Mobile, AL. My family had only moved there the previous January, and had only moved to America three years earlier. I still did not understand why I was here, or where I came from; all I knew was that I had a deep sense of alienation, of not belonging, a dissonant chord in an otherwise mellifluous harmony, an estrangement from everything around me which was given to me at birth, and only fully expressed once I became aware I was living in a land foreign to me. 

It was snowing. I had never seen snow before.

My grandparents were with us, straight from Pakistan. This was the first time I met my grandfather. I’m always compared to my bookish grandfathers. My father’s father was a poet. My mother’s father was a doctor. My sense of dissonance is heightened by the fact I’m always compared with the dead. But my grandfather was still living then, though by this point his brain was worm-eaten, so I saw none of the famous doctor I had heard so much about. All I remember was his hand slapping me across the face once he discovered that I was the one who would turn off his bedroom light each night. His disease made him afraid of the dark. He chased me from room to room. He slapped me. It was snowing.

Again, I’m deflecting. The story really begins on Thanksgiving Day, 1993. It was snowing on the television. I had only experienced snow for the first time the previous year. Now that I’ve given you the setting, I will go ahead and lie to you and say I date all my memories from that day. Now that I’ve spoken this lie, you know it is a lie, but you know I lie out of necessity. In the half-life of this lie, its auditory diffusion through your ears into your neural network will act as a sieve, until it becomes a half-truth, when your memory will convince you that everything began on Thanksgiving Day, 1993, with a seven year old boy watching a football game.  Or the lie which I’ve moved from the abstract to the concrete by throwing ink into air will fall under its own weight to the floor, where it will have a life of its own, a house, a car, two children, a spouse who will leave at a predetermined moment, a life that ends with an epiphany in a rocking chair.

Then you will recall the story of the seven year old boy watching the Dallas Cowboys play the Miami Dolphins on Thanksgiving Day, 1993. The field was snowy. My experience with snow was so brief that I wondered whether these players were putting their lives at risk. I only half-knew what was going on. Perhaps this was the moment that began my obsession with half-ness. The neat division of a half, which has the unique ability to retain mystery, has always moved me. I read only half of books, beginning from a random page and moving backwards and forwards at will, only reading half the pages. I’m only half-attentive in conversation, so I’m excited by what I miss. I only enjoy life if I experience half of it at any given time. To experience fullness of a moment risks boredom, and the realization that there is no substance in full moments; in my half-world, things exist fleetingly, where all I observe treat me in the same way I treat them, acknowledged with only a passing glance. My daily experience has an etherealness which puts a lucid film upon all I see. Everything I lay my eyes on is in danger of disappearing. I cannot even trust my sense of touch because I know the wide gaps in the atoms of my hands. My senses are always betraying me. This knowledge ensures that the mundane always has a chance to become beautiful, since everything I encounter is forever on the event horizon of destruction. 

Thus my obsession with halves began on this day. I only remember the second half of the game. That is not true. I only remember one play. It was a play of such beauty that it seems appropriate that all footage of the incident exists in the fuzzy purgatory of analog recording. Nothing is as clear as I remember it, and it seems appropriate that those devices we use to store objective memory decay at the same rate as our own. But these videos exist in opposition to our personal version of events, as they are an accurate record of what actually happened. What actually happens is rarely interesting. How we remember those things is where we develop a texture for lying and deceit, a canvas for truth and conceit.

Here is how I remember that one play. Blurred slightly in the snow, the Miami Dolphins, dressed in turquoise and white, lined up for a field goal kick which will win them the game. Without understanding what was happening, I saw the Dallas Cowboys, dressed in white and blue, block the kick. The Cowboys jumped in jubilation. I saw the Cowboy’s owner, who I now know is Jerry Jones, raise his hands in triumph, only for his eyes to marquee to confusion, then horror.

There was a rush, a gaggle of players attempting to retrieve a loose ball. Then there was anguish for Dallas, as Miami had somehow recovered and was lining up for another field goal attempt, which they converted, and won the game. 

How closely sadness and joy exist, I thought, as the shoulders of the Dallas players sagged, and the shoulders of the Miami players rose. The only physical difference between the expressions of these emotions was the angle and speed with which the arms were raised or lowered. I learned that day a statement of modest aphoristic quality that seems to have been repeated ad infinitum by many artists. But never has it been so clearly expressed as it was on that day, in the snow, sadness and joy shoulder to shoulder.

Let me describe it again, as the memory is diluted. On Thanksgiving Day 1993, the Dallas Cowboys hosted the Miami Dolphins at Texas Stadium while a blizzard raged around them. Again, recall the flapping of butterfly wings in China affecting the weather patterns in Texas. Dallas led by the score of 14-13 with 15 seconds remaining on the clock, as Miami attempted a 41 yard field goal to take the lead. The kick was blocked. The whole stadium erupted in celebration. A Cowboys player, oblivious to the happy scenes around him, attempted to recover the ball, but slipped, and Miami recovered it on the one yard line. If this player had waited a moment, and had seen the celebrations around him, the Cowboys would have been in possession, and would have won the game. Instead, by touching the ball, and subsequently losing it, the player allowed the Dolphins to gain possession and attempt another field goal kick. This attempt was successful, and the Dolphins won the game, 16-14.

I realize now how little I remember from that time in my life, and as I grow older, the memories become even more effervescent. Who were my friends when I was seven? Did I have any? In what house did I live? Where were my parents? My siblings? Did I watch this game alone? What grade was I in? Did I smile a lot? Could I say to myself that I was a happy seven year old? 

I couldn’t answer any of those questions with any accuracy, as I have little use for what is accurate. The scientific method compels all truth seeking thoughts to be both precise and accurate. My brainwaves are subject to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. At no point will anything I say be both precise and accurate. At one point I can be precise. At another, I can be accurate. Never can both exist in equal measure, in the same slice of time, shoulder to shoulder. Any attempt to make my thoughts both precise and accurate will lead to catastrophe, the words themselves dissolving before you can remember what they meant. 

All that remains from this particular recollection is the image of a Dallas Cowboys player sliding headlong into the snow, hoping to recover a ball he didn’t have to. 

The player in question was Leon Lett, a six foot six defensive tackle from Fairhope, AL, just a short drive across the bay from where I was raised. The fact that he was from the area where I grew up made me partial to him. Living in Mobile, I had little to cheer for in terms of sports teams and heroes. As a very tiny South Asian boy living in Alabama, I had little to identify with in general. I couldn’t support a vagrant like Jimmy Buffet, who was the only celebrity people seemed to talk about. Every other hero Mobile had left town long before they were famous.

All I knew of Fairhope was from excursions my parents would take us on whenever we had guests in town. Fairhope was picturesque, a tiny hamlet on the bay with large homes everywhere. The city had this small pier on the bay with a restaurant and a marina, with a small patch of sandy beach in an adjacent park where my family would picnic. The pier itself seemed to jut out into the bay forever, and for that reason, I never walked on it past where I could see its pylons in the water. Our trips had religious connotations as well, as for some reason unknown to me, we would drive to the pier, write our most sincere wishes for the coming year on small morsels of paper, tear those pieces into crumbs, and drop them into the water, hoping the fish would eat them and take them to some wish granting island in the sea. 

I had nothing in common with Lett, but somehow I felt we had a connection. The thought that he and I walked the same streets gave me a sense of belonging I never had, and I secretly imagined he was as afraid of the pier as I was. I also hoped that somehow I would follow his flight-plan, grow big and tall, leave Mobile and become a famous NFL player, who would exact revenge on those larger classmates of mine who insisted on bullying me.

Now that I watch that play on Youtube, over and over, I am moved by its beauty, by the sheer rejection of logic; who knows what Lett was thinking when he decided to touch a dead ball and make it live again, like some false prophet who cannot convince anyone of his holiness, and thus resurrects the dead without any concern for the living.

Was it a moment of epiphany, of genius, of artistry, that compelled Lett toward the ball? In the mathematics of chaos, is there any other outcome that could possible occur? Perhaps Lett didn’t realize the ball had passed the line of scrimmage, or maybe he thought Dallas had to confirm possession by actually holding onto the ball. It seems like an intuitive response to uncertainty, and in the heat of the moment amidst the snow, can you fault Lett’s desire for certainty? Wasn’t this desire for certainty a reasonable reaction to the disorder swirling all around him?

But was this a moment of failure? In Super Bowl XXVII, the previous season, Lett was poised for greatness. Against the hapless Buffalo Bills, he picked up a fumble and nearly returned it for a touchdown, if not for the fact that he held out the ball to his side and began strutting in premature celebration, and had it knocked out of his hands by Don Beebe, the ball falling harmlessly out of bounds. It has become an iconic Super Bowl moment, where the foolish fatman Lett plays his predetermined role, punished for his arrogant little jig a few yards before the endzone. The celebration was cut short, and Lett didn’t get his touchdown, a vivid example of coitus interruptus, which no doubt increased Lett’s thirst for glory.

Maybe on Thanksgiving Day, 1993, Lett was attempting to rectify his Super Bowl mistake. If you watch the Thanksgiving Day play again, you will notice it was defensive tackle Jimmie Jones who blocked the kick. It was this same Jimmie Jones who let Don Beebe rush past him on his blindside as Jones was supposed to be escorting Lett to the endzone in Super Bowl XXVII. Lett obviously blamed Jones for the most embarrassing moment imaginable, on the biggest of stages, and on Thanksgiving Day, 1993, wished to enact revenge on Jones by recovering the ball, ensuring Dallas’s victory, and becoming the hero for the day. But Jones was merely a proxy Lett, a living voodoo doll that symbolized all of Lett’s angst. 

On Thanksgiving Day, when the kick was blocked, space-time collapsed as the ball was sitting on the snow, and Lett recognized the singularity. The ball that was fumbled out of bounds in Super Bowl XXVII was the same ball used for the field goal attempt on Thanksgiving Day. It was a moment Lett dreamed about, a chance for closure, as his nightmares since the Super Bowl incident had everything to do with his mistake. Both balls had the same trajectory in and out of time. Lett attempting to fall on the ball in Thanksgiving Day, 1993, was ostensibly a revenge plot on Jones for Jones’s unnoticed failure in Super Bowl XXVII. The reality was that because space-time was singular in that moment, Lett was acting out a revenge plot on himself. It was a reiteration of vengeance against himself, a re-vengeance, or literally, a re-venge, an act of self-flagellation which crossed the boundaries of relativity and entered into the sphere of tragicomedy. The fact that Lett saw time in four dimensions in that instant shows a reality that chaos theory has laid bare, a realization that at the microscopic and macroscopic level, we have no idea what is going on, and at any moment, an object from our past can re-enter our present and change our future. 

But as a fortune cookie once told me, “he who seeks revenge always keeps his wounds open.” The bitterness caused by having glory ripped from him so violently hurt Lett’s pride to an irreparable degree. How can this not explain Lett’s motives? I’m reminded here of the Czech art critic Mukarovsky, who said, “the form of one thing follows from the failure of another to function as we would like.” When we combine this idea with something Ernest Becker says, that “our central calling, our main task on this planet, is the heroic,” we make a startling discovery about Lett’s psyche. His failure on Thanksgiving Day was a direct result of his failure in Super Bowl XXVII to achieve the heroic. He was thwarted so viciously that his psychological disposition was affected. He held a heroic moment in his hands, twice, and each time it slipped away from him, beyond his ability to control. He walked the razor’s edge of greatness, but a misapplication of Occam’s razor led to his failure. 

Could you imagine what Lett saw when the ball was loose, sitting silently in the snow? Was there a turning of light in his eyes? How many permutations of the same day-dream flashed across Lett’s mind? Perhaps he imagined he could pick the ball up and glide into the endzone, completing his run from Super Bowl XXVII, and ensuring his beloved Cowboys a victory? If, according to Becker, heroism is “first and foremost a reflex of the terror of death,” then Lett’s actions after the game might be seen in a larger framework. Lett’s most pressing fear after the Thanksgiving Day debacle was that he would be cut, so he hid in the training room, though one would assume that it would not be a place devoid of players after a hard-fought game. Yet the move was instinctive. Lett now understood that what was wounded was his pride, for which no salve exists to soothe its aching pain. Being cut would have been an execution for Lett, a death in the prime of youth, the equivalent of a gladiator becoming a babysitter, or some other equally hyperbolic metaphor.

Lett was an agent of chaos, a manifestation of the godhead, an avatar of Lord Krishna, who chose to speak to us about the futility of heroism in a chaotic world. No matter what good deed you do, many things out of your control will transcend at the same moment nullifying your intent. 

Lett’s actions do open up new space about notions of the heroic, however. He seems to imply that a well-executed beautiful failure is as sure a path to infamy as what we generally consider heroic. All Lett wished for as he flurried for the ball in the falling snow was for long-sought glory, for someone to remember his name, for his number to be retired on the wall of heroes that circle so many stadia.

As Erasmus says, “and what is this life but a comedy wherein men walk up and down in one another’s disguises and act their respective parts.” Lett shows us that even if were to shed our roles, and act as we want to act, we will be thwarted in our goals by absurdity and chaos in equal measure. In Lett’s wanton desire for glory, he destroyed typical notions of the heroic, and recreated them in his large, rotund image. 

Lett’s aesthetic of destruction has its origins in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamozov. Lett is both Fyodor Pavlovich, the morbidly plump father, and Dmitri, the tortured, estranged son. Lett is like Fyodor in that he lets the impulse of shame drive him toward further embarrassment. Lett is like Dmitri in that he is a sensualist, someone who does things merely for the beauty of doing them. This aesthetic of destruction underpins the most engaging performance art of the last twenty years. Lett’s existential despair drives him to combine philosophy with science. As the first law of thermodynamics states, matter must always be conserved, never created or destroyed, only moved into different states. Jean-Paul Sartre echoes this notion when he says, “there is no less after the storm than before.” In this way, Lett is a human form of entropy, his flailing body reaching for the ball in the snow closing that small loop of time where he could have attained the heroic, and in doing so, changes notions of the heroic. He recreates the heroic by failing, highlighting the fallacy of the fatman. Lett’s work is a parody of a parody, mocking both our notions of heroism and our sense of security about the future by simply occupying the liminal space between being and becoming. 

Then Lett’s art becomes sublime, as he shows Catastrophe Theory at work. Simply put, Catastrophe Theory states that we cannot predict catastrophe because it is a necessary and sufficient condition of the system to which it belongs. In essence, our whole civilization has built into its very structure the mechanisms of its own destruction, as well as a system by which it can regenerate. Our society is an iterated function, eating its sum over and over, until there is nothing left. Even our body, in the form of the enzyme telomerase, has the capacity for planned obsolescence. Chaos and catastrophe ensure our destruction and our recreation, but only if we survive the initial salvo.

Yet what concerns me most is the fact that if you repeated Lett’s actions 100 different times, you would have 100 different scenarios, but only two outcomes, with either the Dolphins winning the game, or with the Cowboys winning the game. Lett’s movement shows that the desire for certainty and the forces of chaos cannot exist in the same place. If his notions of the heroic were tied to the sport he played, then a ball sitting silently in the snow was too much like death; it’s an image that signals the end, of a game, of a career, of the chance to become a hero. Could you blame him for attempting to prolong the game, if only for a second, though the end was assured? Lett’s actions combine Chaos Theory and Catastrophe Theory into one unified theory which says that we do not know where catastrophe will strike, nor do we know the mechanism it will use, but it will come upon us, especially when we are on the edge of achieving something significant. What Lett shows us is that the world is always in danger of crumbling, of disappearing, of being lost like a ball in the snow, and despite our valiant efforts to prolong time, we have no control over this disorder. This unified theory confirms what science has been hinting at for a long time, that we don’t know what we’re doing, we don’t know who we are or why we are here, and all efforts to gain knowledge will be futile, as that desire for knowledge will spark our destruction. 

Lett’s failure to reach the heroic reminds me of what someone told me some years ago. They said, “The unlived life will always seek its revenge.” In my youthful naivety, I took this maxim to mean that one should pursue every possibility, study every potential path of life thoroughly before discarding it. After all, if you know the outcome of every life you could have led, you will never feel regret, and you can look back at your life and smile at the path you’ve chosen. 

I see now I was mistaken, that it was actually Lett’s attempts to live out his unlived life that led to his failure and therein lies the tragedy, in that moment, in the snow, when all Lett wished for was for someone who would always remain unknown to him to remember his name. And in that precise instant, there was a seven year old boy in Mobile, AL, watching, who remembered only the architecture of that play, a boy who observed and understood that he did not understand, could not understand, the gravity of what was disintegrating before his eyes. This boy became Abbas Abidi, who is now narrating to you the events of Thanksgiving Day, 1993, and the story of Leon Lett, and in doing so, attempts to give a name to what he could not understand. What that boy saw that day was his hero, chosen in an arbitrary but meaningful fashion, failing so magnificently that the boy would be haunted by failure, and obsessed with failure in all its forms.

Abbas Abidi is a physician who resides in Alabama.