4.29.2003

Reading an interesting book about the mathematician Georg Cantor, of infinity & set theory fame. Proved that any point, numbered on a grid of any dimension (2, 3, 4, 5 dimensions...), can also be located on a line (1 dimension). Not sure why this was so shocking and revolutionary back in the 1880s, since a point is defined as dimensionless, hence you could locate infinite points anywhere. But I'm not a mathematician.

But it makes me think of poetics of Mandelstam & Joyce. Mandelstam describing poetry as an art whose humble exterior disguises a multidimensional reality of "terrifying density". Omry Ronen, in his book Approach to Mandelstam, took him at his word, and in a huge book analyzing just two poems, gives them an image of allusive INFINITY : each LINE bearing so much weight of fused & transmuted literary echoes & other references. Joyce does something similar in the prose of Ulysses & FW.

And of course verbal art in general is a process of compressing multidimensional reality into a near-dimensionless medium.

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