{"id":7451,"date":"2015-03-08T12:50:20","date_gmt":"2015-03-08T12:50:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.earthwidemoth.com\/blog\/2015\/03\/08\/eucatastrophe\/"},"modified":"2015-03-08T12:50:20","modified_gmt":"2015-03-08T12:50:20","slug":"eucatastrophe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.earthwidemoth.com\/blog\/2015\/03\/08\/eucatastrophe\/","title":{"rendered":"Eucatastrophe"},"content":{"rendered":"\u23f3 Approximate reading time: <\/span> 3<\/span> mins<\/span><\/span>

Every so often some never-before-heard-of idea comes along, claims you as its host. Claims me as its host for a while. Right now that idea is eucatastrophe<\/a>, or “good” catastrophe, a sudden, unexpected, magical reversal of fortune, a rebound, turnaround, do a little kick. Eucatastrophe comes up in J.R. Tolkien’s work as a kind of happy ending. Something terrible, catastrophic is going down and then, suddenly, everything is okay. Storm clears. Protagonist is spared. But I didn’t find this idea by reading Tolkien, nor by reading second-hand stuff about Tolkien. It was mentioned in an undergraduate stylistic analysis essay draft I read and commented over winter break in late February. Eucatastrophe. There it was, a parasite slaking on my brainbody ever since, like these back-to-back late-winter colds I’ve been sniffling through. There it was, gently, persistently.<\/p>\n

I don’t need this idea for anything. I suppose I will name my NCAA tournament bracket Eucatastrophe, since I usually pick too many upsets in the first two rounds and then have a shot, if I am lucky, as late as the Final Four. Bracket by some miracle is spared. Or else it is catastrophic.<\/p>\n

But this idea has forked as it settled in, associating for me with two loosely related ideas. The first has to do with wicked problems, inquiry, and research. The second with the pop adage about jumping the shark (I guess it’s not quite an adage, something like that).<\/p>\n

In the first sense, eucatastrophe is for the quicksanded, lost-in-the-mess researcher, the sudden reversal of fortune by which everything turns out okay. What was a problem is, by declaring it a non-problem, doubled back. One of my committee members at SU spoke of a similar idea that had surfaced in some lost-reference 1970s scholarship: Lance jumped out of the pit. The anecdote goes that in Lance’s dire predicament (no, really: extremely fucking dire), everything seeming like it was headed for ruin, Lance (could be anyone?) simply jumped<\/em> out of the pit. And everything was fine again. Eucatastrophe meet Lance; Lance meet eucatastrophe. It’s the same idea, no? Close enough.<\/p>\n