Word: formlessness
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...wrong to expect too much coherence from any quarter, writers on foreign policy warn: with the end of the cold war, the world is formless -- no | longer Manichaean, no longer organized around two neat poles of ideology. America's conception of its national interests and its moral role abroad, to say nothing of its idea of itself at home, is disheveled. It is therefore natural that in trying to find its way through problems like, say, Bosnia and Somalia, the Administration can see no farther than the range of its low-beam headlights...
...view of the artist Henry Miller. Jong warns her readers about the biographies of Miller currently in publication: "Henry Miller's recent biographers try, willy-nilly, to fit him into preexisting patterns; and when they fail, they blame him. But Henry's very message is that life is formless, and that creativity partakes of divine chaos." But you would probably gain more from these "willy-nilly" scholars than from Jong. Jong doesn't explain the chaos, she just adds...
Dorothy Bush was of another era, and her sense of propriety and modesty and self-control was cast in iron. Never trendy. It was forever. That armored her second son for the rough reaches of politics. Hindered him too, in a fuzzy and formless era of national debate...
...their eyes traverse the pavements, inevitably they light upon the homeless--many of them plagued with alcohol problems or by mental illness--and suddenly the formless cloud of anger that hovers over the square takes on a definite shape...
...lovely, that never become a forest. Interlocutors both fascinating and tedious, mundane sight- seeing jaunts and profound observations, telling vignettes and pointless collections of detail are all jumbled together in a work too long by half. Good questions are posed but not answered. Glass himself remains strangely opaque, a formless conduit, until the account of his captivity. At first his prayers sought to bargain God into releasing him; later he tried "to make myself known to God, asking less, offering more." But to his readers, Glass has not offered enough of the analysis and synthesis needed to transform sharp observation...