Mathematics

"Art is fire plus algebra."  ~Jorge Luis Borges

***********************************

Geometry is not true, it is advantageous.  ~Poincare

***********************************

Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things. ~Henri Poincare

*****************

Confessions of a Music Box                          Bruce Bond

No larger than a bird coffin,
the kind that opens its one wing
onto a sky it cannot take to,

save as the thin and silver trickle
of a tune, a feather fanning
the ghost goodbye, as if to say, yes,

it’s true, how the ancients saw it,
that music is the sound numbers
make on the verge of extinction

or sleep, whatever comes first,
that it sends its arrows through
the ear’s window, clean through and yet

attached, brightening the glass.
That’s why a monk I read loved
music, not merely for the holy

signatures, the geometry
of tones that are its body, but how
that body dies again and again,

how it slips its box like steam, like gold.
Ask any star in the Greek
toy chest of stars, any sphere,

and it returns you to an image
of this, to the singing of a thing
you wind, or someone winds, the grind

of a song it never tires of.
A lullaby. How like a box
to hoard its measure of nothing

we speak of until, that is, the box
of dark inside breaks, confessing
the way an old grief confesses

or some nocturnal heating vent
pouring air between its teeth.
But then... if you call this news,

it is never news enough.
Only paired phrases like a doll
house on fire, like the small

murmur of a child at her bed,
talking to a god she has only
heard of, a father locked up in

the rhymes of parables, of hymns:
and if I die before I wake.
Either way she dies, she wakes.
*****************

The Prophecies of Mathematics                  Gary Fincke

Not even his wife wanted to listen
To Francis Galton explain that prayer made
No difference, that insurance companies
Knew the facts of longevity, and there
Was no adjustment for people who prayed
And the various buildings they lived in.
Not even, but he said it anyway—
The pious live no longer than the bad.
It's always this way with Jeremiahs.
In the prophecies of mathematics
Are equations for hours in the sun,
Alcohol in the blood, early marriage.
There, among the numbers, lies the total
Of the truth of ourselves, and I admit
I've counted the daily steps from my house
To my office through six possible routes;
I've counted the frequency of letters,
Rooting for underdogs like b and k
To outdo their predicted sums of use.

Trivial? Stupid? I estimated
The minutes, once, until the end of school,
Wrote seventy-five thousand, six hundred,
In my September notebook and followed
The lurch of each long minute on the clock
For three periods of world history,
Latin, and plane geometry until
I rejoined the classroom of common sense,
Abandoning the women who number
The knocks on a door to seven, the breaths
Before starting their cars to six, knowing
Nothing about the habits of Galton,
Who kept track of boredom by numbering
The small fidgets of a congregation,
Who counted the brush strokes as his portrait
Was painted, who evaluated place,
At last, by the beauty of its women,
Selecting London like a pageant judge,
Leaving it to us to tally the days
Till what's longed for mayor may not arrive,
Keeping calendars of Xs that end,
Each time, on the eve of possible joy
Like a merciless cliffhanger for faith.

*****************

All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.  ~Gustav Flaubert

*****************

There is still a difference between something and nothing, but it is purely geometrical and there is nothing behind the geometry. 

~Martin Gardner

****************

The Dome  by CHAD SWEENEY

When we were the poorest,
mom paid my weekly allowance
in birds. That one is yours, she whispered

so as not to disturb it.
If you clean the oven
I’ll give you that red one.

In a few months
I owned all the birds on the street,
blue jays, finches, a lame owl

cowled in the clock tower.
We had to walk farther each Saturday
to find a new fountain or thicket

so mother could pay me what she owed.
We stood on a bridge.
Our soldiers were marching away,

singing
and trying to sound brave.
Their numbers were staggering.

I invented a mathematics
to understand them.
I subtracted them from summer

and it was winter. Most of our houses
were gone, and the birds too.
The university had been bombed

with my father inside, attending a reading
by some Polish poets.
The poems were so sturdy, he said,

they held up the dome of the ceiling.

****************

“I know that I have an instinct towards math and cleverness in structure that I work against, and so I try to make something … I make this whole structure which takes up a cork wall of index cards, and then I feel that is the architecture of the book, and what you do with architecture is that you cover it completely . . . And why I am driven to make something this complicated I don’t know. It’s just a pleasure for me always in all kinds of reading and fiction to know that there is some kind of clock ticking in the background. It could be rhetorical device, the way that language goes in the book. That there’s a pattern to it, because it’s nice to feel when you close the book that there’s a pattern to life.” 

~Andrew Sean Greer in an interview with Michael Silverblatt on KCRW’s Bookworm 

****************

37. Poetry is a mystic, sensuous mathematics of fire, smoke-stacks, waffles, pansies, people, and purple sunsets.

from DEFINITIONS OF POETRY by Carl Sandburg

****************

Pattern

Something and Nothing                            Katie Ford

In the month my brother began to love a married woman,
the month the lantana took all the heat of late summer
into its orange sanctuary blooms, bearing it, storing it
as if for some suddenly-cold October night, he let her be.

In a twilight in which we are told the stars are portioned
into patterns like goblets and horses and archers he slid
her photograph into a copper frame welded
at the edges with a darker wire melted against it

and in. And it became
something of untiring capacity, growing
like the miles of hollowed land stunned and crafted
so far before us the metallic light of morning
that we could never imagine
unmade the land,
then towered the rain down, centuries worth,

to make a lake of what was gone, desire in which he let
her be and waters where the tired
but living carp swim back and forth. 

**********

We thrive, in part, when we have purpose, when we still have more to do. The deliberate incomplete has long been a central part of creation myths themselves. In Navajo culture, some craftsmen and women sought imperfection, giving their textiles and ceramics an intended flaw called a “spirit line” so that there is a forward thrust, a reason to continue making work. Nearly a quarter of twentieth century Navajo rugs have these contrasting-color threads that run out from the inner pattern to just beyond the border that contains it; Navajo baskets and often pottery have an equivalent line called a “heart line” or a “spirit break.” The undone pattern is meant to give the weaver’s spirit a way out, to prevent it from getting trapped and reaching what we sense is an unnatural end.    Sarah Lewis in The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery

**********

The Pieces That Fall To Earth                           Kay Ryan

One could

almost wish

they wouldn't;

they are so

far apart,

so random.

One cannot

wait, cannot

abandon waiting.

The three or

four occasions

of their landing

never fade.

Should there

be more, there

will never be

enough to make

a pattern

that can equal

the commanding

way they matter.

**********

“I know that I have an instinct towards math and cleverness in structure that I work against, and so I try to make something … I make this whole structure which takes up a cork wall of index cards, and then I feel that is the architecture of the book, and what you do with architecture is that you cover it completely . . . And why I am driven to make something this complicated I don’t know. It’s just a pleasure for me always in all kinds of reading and fiction to know that there is some kind of clock ticking in the background. It could be rhetorical device, the way that language goes in the book. That there’s a pattern to it, because it’s nice to feel when you close the book that there’s a pattern to life.” Andrew Sean Greer in an interviewwith Michael Silverblatt on KCRW’s Bookworm 

**********

Time                                                    Robert Creeley

Moment to

moment the

body seems

to me to

be there: a

catch of

air, pattern

of space— Let’s

walk today

all the way

to the beach,

let’s think

of where we’ll be

in two year’s

time, of where

we were. Let

the days go.

Each moment is

of such paradoxical

definition—a

waterfall that would

flow backward

if it could. It

can? My time,

one thinks,

is drawing to

some close. This

feeling comes

and goes. No

measure ever serves

enough, enough—

so “finish it”

gets done, alone.

**********

Desire is, among other things, a function of repetition, or so the very patterns of your life have led you to believe. John Keene

**********

Greer on Working Against Cleverness

“I know that I have an instinct towards math and cleverness in structure that I work against, and so I try to make something … I make this whole structure which takes up a cork wall of index cards, and then I feel that is the architecture of the book, and what you do with architecture is that you cover it completely . . . And why I am driven to make something this complicated I don’t know. It’s just a pleasure for me always in all kinds of reading and fiction to know that there is some kind of clock ticking in the background. It could be rhetorical device, the way that language goes in the book. That there’s a pattern to it, because it’s nice to feel when you close the book that there’s a pattern to life.”

 

Andrew Sean Greer in an interview with Michael Silverblatt on KCRW’s Bookworm

More of Madness, Rack, and Honey

KCRW's Michael Silverblatt interviews Mary Ruefle about her new book of essays, Madness, Rack, and Honey (new from Wave Books), on the radio program Bookworm.

Ruefle says such things as "Every poem moves forward by getting lost and then finding itself, and then getting lost and then finding itself." And "I never have anything to say when I begin a poem. When I begin a poem I have nothing to say and I think the poem is my way of saying, 'I have nothing to say. Give me a moment and I'll talk forever.' (laughter) That's my experience of writing."

Time of Useful Consciousness

At age 92 (93?), Lawrence Ferlinghetti is coming out with a new book of epic poetry chronicling "American consciousness." It's called Time of Useful Consciousness, which is an aeronautical term meaning the time between oxygen loss and the moment a pilot becomes unconscious due to that deprivation, the last chance the pilot has to save himself. Ferlinghetti uses this as a metaphor for the ecological condition of the earth and our response (or lack of ) to that.

Ferlinghetti is interviewed by Michael Silverblatt at KCRW's Bookworm show. Enjoy hearing from this legend.

Angry Poets

I was just listening to the Lannan Foundation's sponsored reading by and interview of W. S. Merwin with Michael Silverblatt (of the podcast Bookworm, which I listen to religiously). In this reading/interview, I heard W. S. Merwin say something about anger. Quickly skiming through the program I can't find the part I want right now, and I haven't got time today to listen to the entire program again, so I will just paraphrase. Basically, W. S. Merwin said that of all the passions, anger is the one most dangerous to poets, to poetry; that poetry written in anger tends to be bad poetry.

For me, this is true. I don't even think I can write when angry. My thoughts enter into their self-spooling loops and I can't think straight when angry. And so, another motivation for me to learn to give up my anger, to forsake it.

What about you? How does anger affect your writing?