Keeping Chaos at Bay: Between The Fixed and Floating Worlds

I find this an indespenisible quote from a book im reading called "The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure" in which the author describes that within the self-imposed formal restrains of society there exists by necessity a magical interzone wherein our poetic, energetic imaginations are alloted time and space to subvert and reinvent what we consider the normal and acceptible.

"Society is a process rather than an abstract system ... [it is] a process in which any living, relatively well-bonded human group alternates between fixed and - to borrow a term from our Japanese friends - "floating worlds." By verbal and non-verbal means of classification we impose upon ourselves innumerable constraints and boundaries to keep chaos at bay, but often at the cost of failing to make discoveries and inventions: that is to say, not all instances of subversions are deviant and criminous. Yet in order to live, to breate, and to generate novelty, human beings have had to create - by structural means - spaces and times in the calendar, or, in the cultural cycles of their most cherished groups which cannot be captured in the classificatory nets their quotidian, routinzed spheres of action. These liminal areas of time and space- rituals, carnivals, dramas, and recently, films - are open to the play of thought, feeling, and will; in them are generated new models, often fantastic, some of which may have sufficent power and plausibility to replace eventually the force-backed political and jural models that control the centers of a society's ongoing life."

- Victor Turner