2/9/15
"The past is prologue!"
My sixth-grade teacher made sure the title to this post stuck. That was 47 years ago, so I suppose it did. The problem I have now is that nobody else seems to remember it. Look at the diagram that accompanies a recent (DEC 2014) article in Wired on Euler's Identity. There's no past there. How can this be? You have no future without the past. In the graphic accompanying the article there is 'reality' going one way, 'imaginary' going the other way, and 'time' going a third way (perpendicular to the other two) but starting from the 'reality/imaginary' Cartesian nexus and, apparently, just rolling forward. What gives? For the record, I like Wired, and I liked this issue well enough to pool my scarce resources and buy a copy. The problem I have is not with the magazine, its staff, the writer of that particular article or the artist who created the illustration. The problem I have is with their teachers -- or more likely, their teachers' teachers. You are the past. You are its creation. The past lives in you. This is a fact, but a fact that is easy to ignore. We are creatures that face forward. "Dwelling in or on the past" is said to be a fault (It is, but not in the way many people think.).
The irrational numbers spread continuously over the whole {number} line in spite of the density of the rational numbers, so now the rational numbers are the raisins scattered in the cake of irrational numbers.
The quote (with brackets mine) is from Playing With Infinity by Rozsa Peter, a Hungarian mathematician and teacher who is credited with creating (or at least helping create) recursive mathematics, without which (I'm told) the machines I'm posting this on and you're using to read it would not work. Chapter 15, called "Write It Down Numbers", explains the concept and basic use of i -- the square root of negative 1 -- to non-mathematicians (who at least remember some parts of Algebra I). This chapter should help most general readers understand more about the formula known as "Euler's Identity", though it does not discuss that formula specifically. To me, the past is like the negative part of the number line. It exists in the present, whether we want to admit it or not. The question is 'how' the past exists in the present. It exists through us.
2/11/15
ewe'n'eye
Let's pretend. Let's pretend we are numbers. You are 1, and I am negative 1. We look at each other, but we need a looking glass to do it. That looking glass is called 'zero' -- a word from the Arabic that also is the root for 'cypher'. In short, zero (the something that's nothing, and the nothing that's something) is a type of insoluble puzzle called a 'paradox'.
But we can see each other through this strange looking glass that's also a window. You can see through it and see yourself in it at the same time (and in the same space!).
This point in timenonspace/spacenontime gives us the ability to see ourselves as others see us -- the gift Robert Burns longed for. But only upside down and in reverse, as in a camera. Or in a retina.
And our ability to see each other teaches us about each other by teaching us about ourselves. Because we are something (or negative something). We are the first something, called the 'unit'.
It's my understanding (weak and uneducated though it is) that much mathematical research has been devoted to learning the properties of the 'unit'. After all, it's the loneliest number -- and therefore needs philosophical mathematicians to keep it company.
The reason living in the past is so destructive is found in the legend of Narcissus. He died trying to love himself, failing to understand that he was only loving his reflection in the lake.
He could only see himself as he was, not as he is. "Only the lonely", as the song goes. If he had realized that he, as a unit, needed to see his negative self through the mirror/window/mirror of the null to progress into the future, then he would have survived the experience of seeing his reflection in the lake. Because he then would have realized that he changed the moment he saw his reflection, but his reflection could only describe who he was, not who he (as a newly minted 'reflective') is.
Is/was is (or was) a modulus.
So let's pretend. Again. Now we are particles of light. Small particles of energy so small we are known as 'quanta'. And we can be, once we see each other down in the zero (forgive me, Andrew Vachss) and realize our positive/negative nexus. And we are/were/are in two places at once. As we will be. The way we were. (You can start singing, if you like.)
The mysteries of quantum mechanics really aren't all that strange, after all, are they?
2/20/15
Snowdrifts
You hate them. You really do. All of them.
All -- including the ones you do not see. The ones who see you. And never admit it.
They never admit it from the difficulty. The difficulty of living in moral winter. They live there because they must, they are called to it or they choose it. And they know what you know -- that living in The Land of Moral Winter is tough. And they know what you don't know -- that they are warm-blooded, unlike the many who populate that land: the uncreated reptiles of the snow.
Now you see them, the warm-blooded. You see how hard their lives are. They are not like those you say you hate. The warm-blooded in moral winter share your goals, but they live them on Everest. Their climb grows exponentially harder with every step they make.
They know the goal they strive for will be impossible for them to reach, impossible for their children, may be even for their grandchildren. If they have any. And the gain is so very modest. They simply want what you want. To be real.
So, what to do? You in the light of moral summer fly like fat sparrows, full of energy and self. What to do for them that you thought you hated, but then discovered they merely live in another season of right and wrong? Where the wrong feels good. And the right feels -- does it?
You will never know, you in moral summer. Until the season changes for you. Then you will long for the sun's warmth: the only heat you feel, the heat of hatred from those you once hated yourself.
Will you hate yourself then? Will you know how?
Will they?
3/6/15
Baptism
" ... all ye angels, progeny of light, | Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers;"
-- Paradise Lost, Book V, ll. 600-601.
Five. The spectrum.
But is that all? Do we of two legs miss the range of those on four, on six, on eight? On fins and tails? On claws and wings?
The black light on either side of the five. The white light of them all, in balance.
That would make eight, would it not?
3/13/15
Stereoscopes
They have much in common, owls and bats. Winged. Nocturnal. And they see in stereo.
Both pairs of eyes face forward. Looking into the night. Vast land the daytimers fear, they enjoy.
One can howl or screech. One barely makes a squeak. Both need each other to complete the night. Both need the night to complete them.
What spectra do they reach? What roar do they defend? Feather or fur, what storied forests do they redress?
What 'disorientation of the senses' must we find through them?
3/21/15
Wild Roses
They are five. Each pulling outward into individuating florescence. Each directing when and where and how the fruit will one day come. Each opening the door into next.
Some are yellow. Some are pink or even white. Some are green. And they serve to indicate who -- the nature of it. The sap of it.
They are common. They are unusual. They are, in their own secret worlds, only what they are.
Are we?
3/25/15
In the world, but not ...
Insects see a different world from humans, their part of the spectrum shifted away from our visual ability. Wolves, like dogs, sense the universe largely through their noses with a sensitivity unshared by us.
The universe of invisible energy permeates the visible one in ways we do not commonly fathom.
Negative time exists in positive space -- making our world possible, however improbable it may seem.
The self exists in a universe of laziness, moving around its center in frequency we may dimly perceive, but only if we prepare ourselves properly.
Harmony exists in the fifth dimension. But is it 'of' the fifth ... ?
Will we ever know?
9/9/16
Starting Over
I am today re-purposing this blog, which began life as a backup for another blog on a different service. Posts after this will feature ideas on poets and poetry, both contemporary and traditional, with an emphasis on structural approaches and analysis. I'll leave previous posts up, so feel free to enjoy reading them while I work on new ones again.
10/6/16
Shopping Around
The workshop.
We who toil in the world of poetry (denied from calling ourselves anything lest the very pretense destroy what we're trying to accomplish) have it all our lives.
Musicians have their 'woodshed', artists their 'atelier', dancers their 'studio', and so forth. They go within them to work, to study, to dream, to renew. They then can enter the stage or the gallery to show forth the results of their efforts.
But we have only the workshop. We carry it with us. We never leave it; it never leaves us. There we stay, wherever we go.
There are readings, of course, public or private. These challenge us, at best -- hollow us, at worst. But readings do not give us anything beyond a venue for seeing what we cannot achieve: oneness, the one thing the lack of which drives us to redress through our work.
The power of creativity itself flies through our fingers like dandelion seeds. On the wind, our words may transform others, but never us. It's back to the workshop, the one on our backs.
What a curse! Yet I believe there is something we can do to ease its bane. We can give.
Money? What good would money do? Power? Again, the same question that carries the same answer.
So what to give, then? I believe the gifts are three:
Time. Trouble. Treasure.
Time? Itself means-ingless, time can be stolen by device, or by devices. But, face-to-face, the gift of time is invaluable.
Trouble? It's been said that 'a genius is simply someone who takes the trouble'.
In other words, the desire to do that little something extra, to improve by a single degree that simple task, to perform that singular service with one additional imaginative effort, is all it takes to create something new, now.
Treasure? Fathomless, the void -- until we structure it. Vanishing, the sand grain -- until we preserve it. Meaningless, the enveloping vastness -- until we reflect it. What treasure greater?
What we do extends from us: all the other arts, each created before history before ours, must learn this from us. We first brought them together, so many human eons ago. And that capacity remains still within us.
So the workshop becomes not something with us. It becomes us.
Oneness, then?
10/7/16
Poetry is Code
workshop=soul
money=service
power=sharing
gift=work
time=mind
trouble=body
treasure=heart
Lest our age pervert* our metanoia into paranoia, isn't slang a type of code?
"'Genius' ... means transcendent capacity for taking trouble, first of all." -- from Frederick the Great by Thomas Carlyle.
___
*pervert - "distort or corrupt the original course, meaning, or state of (something)" -- OED
10/25/16
Pass the Salsarium, Please
Vowel gradation. The r/n stem variant. Grimm's Law.
Change is amidships: the very belly of our world shifts like sand alone against itself. We are grains in the captain's hourglass, sliding into one another, back and forth. As one glass empties, the other fills. Then the captain inverts everything, and the process begins again.
Survival of the fittest. Ontogeny vs. phylogeny. Darwin's Theory.
Conflict competes with co-operation: the nature of the struggle subverts itself. We are seeds in the husbandman's hand, to be cast, dropped, implanted, let dry. As one seed sprouts, another withers. Then the husbandman calls the workers to the harvest, and seeds are gathered anew.
Speed of light. Space/time loop. Planck's Constant.
Expansion swells into void: the process stagnates as it renews itself. We are ants riding a ball of wet dirt and gas in gravity's invisible hand, to be shaken, stirred, swept, dropped. We dig, we fly, we run, we walk: heads ruled by antennae we do not know, bodies left to chance we cannot understand. Then gravity does what it will with its solar marbles, and ...
... then what?
11/5/16
This salt tastes ... smoother?
YES/NO
ON/OFF
CAPSLOCK/unlock
11/10/16
Bias Cut
The trace from form and function cuts both ways. The seam amid fate and fortune binds the same.
Moebius double twists infinite; Poincare finite yokes two spaces between.
12/15/16
Ellipsis
The self disappears into the selfless | The selfless whorls from the void
We see the stars whorling around the dark | Galaxies of selfhoods in whom we fathom never
3/1017
Organic
"... the distributions and partitions of knowledge are not like several lines that meet in one angle, and so touch but in a point; but are like branches of a tree, that meet in a stem, which hath a dimension and quantity of entireness and continuance, before it come to discontinue and break itself into arms and boughs ... "
-- from The Advancement of Learning by Francis Bacon, IV, 2.