Neva serpent ocarina

AT VLADIVOSTOK

One might say mathematics is a matter

of cascading functions,

with parenthetical canyons

in canyons (as at Vladivostok, or the Matter-

horn).  Rivers flow this way,

then that way, back,

forth, clattering

from Hackensack to Housatonic (May-

November).  So the game of numbers

is a mode of streambed too –

your Itasca-sprung Rio

del Espiritu (time-numbing mine of hours)

whose ceaseless surge bends past the prong

of Louie’s Gateway Arch

that budgeth not (March

to September), stills the monotone like a gong

of bronze.  Thus Mrs. Slippery, crowned,

extends her clayborne banks

beyond New Orleans... her phalanx

of ‘gators flanks her onward, azure-bound;

so the analogy of brazen serpent

lures this goldfinch dream

into Leviathan trireme

wreathing America in mist, unspent –

as when a dervish Morning Star

raveled Guillaume into her web

grappling Jonah (fledgling pleb)

into the shimmer-seine of River R.

12.27.19

Osip Mandelstam's final i.d. card (internal emigre)

vive la France

CALM RONDURE

This rustic humble tablecloth

from Vienne street fair

(crowding her amphitheatre

hewn by Rome) poses a math

problem : how can I square this

table ronde within

the weathered octagon

of an American gazebo?  Ms.

Emily might know, or maybe Marianne...

some mounded clay pitcher

of accurate grace.  Her

toss across a potter’s wheel (nine

innings for a feline Muse)

spins stars like comets

through snarled sailor knots –

Mary & Rachel, bearing news

of natural law so blazing sharp

as to make arrowhead

speed from seabed

(trompette marine like Jonah’s harp

reshuffling my raven coil

into the Argo figure

of a prow’s green furl).

Honey from spun goldfinch foil

will pour like waxen flame – the living

sœur de Jeanne d’Arc,

sourire of each undying spark –

calm rondure of a square (Thanksgiving).

5.8.17

Jesus Thoughts (13) : Psychic Sidestep

Being what they call a glutton for books, a non-stop reader, & working in a big library, & always following vague hunches & intuitions in my hunt for material, which is all caught up with what I'm trying to do in poetry, which is an obsessive pursuit in tandem with the reading.... well, it leads me into obscure corners.

"Synchronicity" : the term from Jungian psychology for the uncanny conjunction of seemingly chance events in the outside world, with one's own thoughts, or the inner world of the psyche.  I'd been thinking about this lately since I was working on a book review of Christian Wiman's volume of Mandelstam translations (Stolen Air) - why?  Because the review work brought back memories of my own first encounters with Mandelstam's poetry, back in the 1970s... which led me to reflect on the psychic crisis I went through in college, & the literary-synchronic strangenesses which happened to me - the happenings - in those days.

& perhaps I also began to triangulate recently on these issues due to some other recent researches, into the cathedral of St. Apollinare in Clase, and its connection with imagery in Dante's Paradiso (see Jeffrey Schnapp's book, Transfiguration of history... on that). A pun is a sort of miniature synchronism (of senses in sound)... & it got me thinking about one of my favorite poets from the old days (my old days, early 70s), Guillaume Apollinaire (though come to think of it that's not really a pun : who knows, Apollinaire may have originally been named after the saint).  Soon enough I was immersing myself in a flurry of old French poets, as if part of me was sinking back into a 2nd literary childhood...

What does all this have to do with Jesus, you ask?  Well, I was going to say that this general trend of my book-devouring led me to a very interesting & curious little-known (eccentric?) interdisciplinary book by Marie-Louise von Franz, a student & disciple of Carl Jung : Number and Time.  This is an extremely erudite & wide-ranging meld of physics, mathematics and Jungian psychology, which examines this phenomenon of synchronicity, and proposes a sort of cosmic order rooted in basic numbers (1, 2, 3, 4...) which embody forces shaping both the mind and the physical universe - Franz's unum mundus (world-unity).   It's rooted in Jung's metaphysical psychology, which posits a cosmic Self uniting all opposing forces in nature, mandala-like.  An awesome and mysterious (strictly beyond conscious awareness) Mind or conjunction of opposites (subsuming good & evil).

I've always had mixed feelings about Jung.  On the one hand, he seems remarkably perceptive about the artistic personality, and many of the things I went through in late adolescence seem amenable to a "Jungian" interpretation (those uncanny experiences in the midst of a crisis).  On the other hand, he strikes me perhaps as a kind of Gnostic : as a "scientist" of the mind, he pursues explanations of things down dark corridors of mind & personality - explanations which reach toward the mystical & the cosmic.  Yet I wonder if his  theory of the cosmic Self might be a sort of spiritual over-reach of some kind.  It's so close to the religious vision - the sense of a metaphysical dimension transcending & ordering the physical - a dimension which is also personal in some mysterious fashion; yet in trying to present a theory of Totality rooted in a Self which combines good & evil, it seems like he may also be reaching beyond Christianity.

There is much of warning in the Gospels about the awesome threat of God the Father's eternal judgement.  "If your hand causeth offense, it is better to cut it off than to lose your whole soul to hell" (rough paraphrase from memory).  Or : "Do not fear those who can destroy the body; fear Him who can destroy the soul in eternal fire!" (another rough paraphrase).  A Jungian might see these warnings as evidence of a parallel notion of the frightening aspect of the ultimate Self.  But what Jungianism might be missing is the time dimension of salvation history.  The work of the Christian Trinity is manifest in time as a procession of saving acts.  We have to grasp that this invitation to salvation and renewal is addressed directly to us, now, spoken by God-become-Man : the context of understanding (the insight of the Holy Ghost) is everything in these realms.  We have to move beyond theory & intellectual speculation to action, to personal commitment, body & soul.

Jung, it seems, was fascinated by the mathematical structure of the psyche : the basic orientation by four (in the human body, in mandalas, in maps, etc. etc.).  Marie-L. von Franz explores these concepts in great depth.  Jung saw an oscillation (in the psyche, in reality) - a flickering - between three-four... I find these concepts very fascinating too, esp. in relation to making poetry.  If we think of the Trinity - the Son & the Father, leading to the "procession" (the manifestation) of their witness & "advocate", the Holy Spirit (the very spirit of God in the body of the Church) - perhaps the matrix of that body - be it the Virgin Mary, the center of the earth, the center of the church, the center of our own individual soul - could be thought of as the "fourth".  I think Jung might assent to this (though I'm by no means an expert, or even very familiar with his complex work).  Where I hesitate to "follow" Jung is that sometimes in reading him I sense a curious kind of gnostic pedantry at work : the "explanation" of mysteries takes the place of a more active, direct commitment to the historical, actual embodiment of faith.

I'm probably not being fair to Jung.  After all, Jesus himself says "God is Spirit and truth : & those who worship him do so in spirit and truth" - and there's something heroic about his liminal truth-search into the dark underside of the human mind.  Often enough he prefaces his writings with a disclaimer : they are psychology, not theology.  Maybe it's my own problem : a personal hesitancy to grapple with some of my own "unconsciousness".

I have to say I'm deep into Number and Time, though.  Franz's discussion of the numerical dimensions of Chinese thought - the mandalas of number from the I Ching etc. - is very absorbing.  Having just finished a very very long poem designed ornately around a symbolic number (the atomic number of Lanthanum, #57) - I feel an affinity here...

p.s. (a few hrs later.)  I'd like to summarize with a little more precision what appeals to me in M-L von Franz's Jungian approach, and what gives me pause on the other hand.  One of the main themes of Number and Time is the view of number as a mediator or mid-point between the psychic and the physical; Franz examines ancient Chinese modes of divination as representing an approach to reality which is irreducibly personal.  The aim of divination is to examine the "field" of phenomena (by numbering) at a certain moment in time, in order to understand its meaning for the person for whom the die are cast.  The play of chance allows for the decree of fate.  Franz explores how this attitude is not that different from certain streams in 20th-cent. physics; time & space and physical phenomena are inseparable from the position of the observer (I'm drastically simplifying Franz's thesis here).  She concludes (in a Jungian mode) that the ultimate meaning of phenomena involves the person, the self - perhaps in a dramatic analogy to the cosmological or collective Self at the creative source of all phenomena.  These are "fields" which cannot be objectified or depersonalized.  This I can agree with, I think : & it rhymes with my sense of the epistemology of Michael Polanyi (in Personal Knowledge and other writings).

What I am less taken with, in the Jungian approach, is the idea of a collective unconscious, structured by  fixed "archetypes" shared by all human beings, and unified by an unknowable Self (in the unconscious) with which the ego seeks to be (re)integrated.  There may indeed be certain "constellations" of mythological projections, representing durable aspects of human nature & personality : I'm just not sure I would grant them autonomy within an unconscious "structure".  To do so seems to lead in the direction of what I was trying to describe above as Jung's turn to abstraction or gnostic "knowledge" in the description of ultimate Reality.  Again, this is probably being unfair to Jung, a many-sided, subtle thinker if there ever was one.  Yet for me the ultimate Reality does not "reside" in the unconscious, or in any identifiable metaphysical "place" or intellectual formulation.  The ultimate Reality is not an objectively describable "Self" (no matter how awesome or obscure) : it is a relation between persons and Persons, not fixed by anything other than agape, caritas, love.

Again, to repeat : I'm not representing either Franz or Jung very thoroughly or accurately here.  I'm just responding to them, informally, provisionally (this is a conversation, not a paper).

Can I pull any threads together from the jumble of last few days?

- mountaineering

- the "Math World" comparison

- going to the boundaries

- poetry : civilization (part : whole)

- Acmeism (humanizing the earth)

It's a mess! & the bit about Russell's Paradox & etc.... way too mushy & vague.

Later...

Henry's Sermon for Lent 2006

I was never very good at math. It bored me so much my head spun, though I liked geometry.

But I'm intrigued by mathematicians : Godel, Turing, Cantor. Nicolas of Cusa : not exactly a mathematician, but he liked to frame his spiritual insights in math/science language. Simone Weil!!!

I used to do diagrams of God/Word/Man, using sun/moon/earth & a compass, when I was a young Jesus freak. (This was in London, when I was trying to convert the Rolling Stones. Happy Mardi Gras.)

You confront the finite/infinite whenever you draw a circle, or diagonal a square.

Liking Andrew Hodges' bio of Turing.

Lying in the meadow grass, inventing the computing machine.

& I'm thinking of the formal aspects of poetry as algorithms (again). My experience of metrical pattern over long stretches : you let the machine take over, in order to do something more subtle on top of it. (But that doesn't really do justice to the give-&-take.)

Thinking of Poetry World in relation to Math World. Is it possible to master certain traditional knowledge (as a mathematician must) in poetry, & then work on a certain "cutting edge" of the unknown?

(This would inevitably lead to poetry's boundaries : history, ethics, politics, religion, science, linguistics, anthropology, society, art, music, culture in general, comparative literature, comparative culture studies, Brits vs. Yanks vs. N'Orleans Suthuners.... ie., traits...)

Oh, God (says God). That's more boring than math, Hank!!!

g'night, fellow weirdos. tomorrow is Ash Wednesday. see you in Ashcan School.

Maybe I have time to do a little more mental mountain climbing (or digital finger-slalom) this morning.

Continuing with the Turing biography. "turing" makes me think of a lathe; but apparently the family name stemmed from "Turin", Italy. A.T. was certainly an Olympics-class mental climber.

He's in college, & getting into mathematics, & Russell's Paradox ("the set of all sets, which contains itself", etc.). "'Normally,", wrote Russell, 'a class is not a member of itself. Mankind, for example, is not a man.'"

(Aye, there's the rub.)

Georg Cantor's infinity [of infinities] research.

The fractal spiral of self-reflective patterns [the J! the J! the blue J!]. Art's resonant echo-chamber.

But let's get back to poetry. I have a hunch this Russell Paradox can be applied, in some kind of analogy, both to literary style ("what do we do after MODERNISM???"}, and on a more basic level, to the relationship between text (written symbols) and real experience; AND, on a more cryptic level, to certain theological notions.

I won't try to cover all this in one lecture.

On coffee break, I'm reading about Turing, and I'm watching college students go by, umbilically attached to cellphones, I-pods. & I read, "This lack of any simple connection between mathematical symbols and the world of actual objects fascinated Alan." I'm watching the students go by, I'm slurping my coffee, & I'm thinking about the relationship between text and person, and between poetic text and vocal recital, dramatic performance.

I'm thinking about that relationship, because I'm trying to follow up on the previous post, the bit about poetry's serious side opens a space for its aesthetic reception.

This particular intellectual/emotional/spiritual pleasure & value, as we know it anyway, follows specifically from writing & reading, from texts.

But, paradoxically, the benchmarks, the classics, the models which make up the substance of an ongoing tradition in poetry - these originated in periods of revolutionary change : when 1) writing, printing & literacy spread far & wide, and 2) when the vast energies of vernacular languages were absorbed into poetry.

So the classics are packages of newly-grasped forms of energy (reading; new languages).

Our pleasure & learning - through reading & writing - draw on sources which are amalgams of spoken language & new writing tools.

I'm reminded of one of Mandelstam's most striking formulae : "Poetry is a plow which turns up the deep layers of Time, and spreads them on the surface." He's referring to contemporary, Acmeist poetry as he understands it & wants it to be : reaching back into those vital sources, those original amalgams of popular speech and writing technology (Dante, the classic of classic exemplars).

& it's close to Hart Crane's Nietzschean sense of poetry's potential to "reincarnate", to re-capitulate, archaic or eternal times (Marlowe, Pindar...).

"I don't want Ovid in translation; I want the living, breathing Ovid," Mandelstam wrote. (I'm quoting from memory.)

The forms taken suddenly by ancient poetry are springs or sources : fresh, eternal beauty. (This is a sort of classicism, I guess.) Why? Because they embody this symbiosis of text & speech, of symbol & actuality, of poem & person.

Not models or patterns; sources.

Russell's Paradox, which arose in the attempt to conceptualize the basic nature of mathematics, also applies, somehow, every time we read the "imitation of a speech act". It applies, somehow, to our concepts of rationality itself : what is the status of an abstraction, a metaphor, a word? What (if anything) grounds their logical architecture?

& what is "reality", then? Maybe Mankind, for example, is, indeed, a man...

[see, philosophes, the much-debated Aristotelian/Scholastic notion, that there are no universals, only individuals... nominalism loops into Berkeleyan idealism... & back into Peirce's futuristic, "thought-like" realism... & back into poetic quiddity, vivid particularity... ut pictura poiesis... I-am-That-I-Am, I-will-be-what-I-will-be, JHWH...]

and the poem & the person, and the text & the real, and the student & the mp3-player, inhabit this unpredictable borderland, where they flow back & forth...

I'm circling around a holistic conceptualization of art which includes personhood. Getting back to those dilemmas outlined in Carol Christ's book (Victorian & Modernist Poetics).

OK, class dismissed.

a "9" is an upside-down "J". both are spirals. fascinating, isn't it?

I'm looking at various emanations of "9" in relation to the Siena poems. "The Nine" was the name for the commune governors during one period (when Lorenzetti's murals were done). Siena has 9 gates.

I'm thinking of the nine circles in Nicholas of Cusa's "Game of Spheres", too.

"J", of course, is very important in Stubborn & other places.

I'm looking at the spirit/nature, divine/human, substance/image, nature/art dichotomies... in terms of number & geometry.

Duccio's (& many other medieval & renaissance painters') designs were based on ratios having to do with the square & its diagonal (an irrational number, the square root of 2).

N. of Cusa, I'm sure found this of interest. Creation/incarnation (or Cusa's "infinite", for that matter) can only be analyzed by means of "irrationality" or immeasurability.

does a J reflect 9, or vice versa?

Dante, somewhere in the Commedia, writes: "Beatrice is a 9". (Beatrice, of course, was a sort of avatar of/from that other "J")

Holy Roman Emp. Henry VII, Dante's messianic Arrigo, died near Siena on a Friday in 1313.

I gotta finish muh poem.

Josh with some more interesting thoughts on "post-postmodern pastoral", etc.

Interesting that he starts the genealogy with Pound. You could think of epic, long-poem, and pastoral (the goal of epic?) as sharing a certain space. Pound thought of his long-poem as a "tale of the tribe" (see Michael Bernstein book on this).

When I started exploring this area for myself, back in the early 80s, I was still working as a VISTA volunteer for various community/activist groups in Providence. I had managed a food coop & community gardens, & a CETA project with high school kids, to build a "community solar greenhouse"*. I was finishing a M.A. in community organizing at Beacon College in Boston. This work influenced my literary outlook, too. The notion of a long poem for me had to do with forms of poetry which were able to connect with historical movements & narratives, and with a kind of ideal, at least, of "public speech".

So for me the notion of pastoral had (& still has) a populist-political cast. Just part of the general awareness or desire for a "sustainable" common life, in harmony with the world (with people & nature in general). The relationship between social justice, the common good, and a healthy integration with nature.

In the days of VISTA we had a sense that the right thing for young people to do, before they plunged into the private sector in one way or another, was to work in the public sector - to monitor and rein in private interests on behalf of the common good. We were young & naive enough to imagine we had a pretty clear & reasonable notion of what that common good was, and that there was a kind of heroic grassroots/everyday struggle going on, against business interests & corrupt pols, that grassroots people could get involved with.

Why this was the right thing to do was precisely because the common good, since it is so vast, amorphous, and future-oriented, really has few advocates - unlike the narrow & short-term interests of the private sector. And this amorphous ideal quality was akin to the interests of the poor, who also had few advocates. And young people, because of their relative freedom from narrow obligations, were in a position to be those advocates. There's something beautiful about this notion, almost romantic. During the course of the 80s and 90s, political advocacy expanded, sharpened, and professionalized to a great degree. Lines were drawn more sharply, and soft-romantic idealism was curtailed.

This is how I see (very vaguely, anyway), the process happening over the last few decades. But I think underlying the rather naive and perhaps arrogant worldview of those times (mid to late 70s), there is a kernel of truth, an unresolved goal. How so? Well, politics, social policy, social justice are basically about figuring out how to live together. And there is always going to be a necessary balancing-out, an equilibrium, between particular special/private interests (both economic & political), on the one hand, and government policy regarding the welfare of the whole (the common good), on the other.

If one recognizes that political participation means engaging with the project of fostering that equilibrium - and if one accepts the notion of a kind of social-historical poetry (epic/long-poem/pastoral) - one might see how in different ways these two activities intersect. Because an "achievable" or sustainable pastoral world is obviously a project of social justice, in the most general and inclusive sense (ie., all the multifarious ways people engage in beneficial social activity). So pastoral poetry would necessarily have a political aspect.

Language - and poetry - of course, cannot be channeled or directed from the outside, not by any political strategy, philosophy, or 5-yr plan. The force of language - lyric, dramatic, narrative, didactic, satirical, comic - manifests in autonomous and unpredictable fashion. Setting aside any purely aesthetic argument, poetic language is a manifestation of the freedom of the human spirit. The project of epic/long-poem, however - akin to similar efforts in other modes of literature - is to represent "social wholes" or shared realities; they are narratives which reach for wide public recognition and assent/dissent.

[*in the 2nd collage in Stubborn Grew, there's a little photo of me standing next to that greenhouse. The CETA project which built it was probably one of the more unusual in the history of federal programs. A 6-sided solar greenhouse, about 40 ft long and 20 ft tall, designed so its 6 points would touch the side of a "vesica", the geometrical figure formed by the intersection of two circles; length dimensions were drawn from British author John Michell's various books on ancient "sacred geometry". Constructed by Brown student volunteers & CETA high school kids from Fox Point. One of the Brown students, Mark Van Noppen, went on to become a leading builder of urban rehab housing in Providence.]

Reading some interesting books on Kurt Godel, the mathematician/philosopher. Happens he gave his last public lecture at American Math Society, here in Providence - hope I can find a copy of that somewhere.

You think poets are crazy... just read some of these math biographies!

I'm not saying KG was crazy, however. (Though extremely paranoid & eccentric toward the end - died in Princeton of "inanition" due to lack of food. His wife, & Albert Einstein, were just about his only friends, and things went downhill after they died.) He was brilliant. A few pithy pages changed the course of mathematics, & possibly philosophy too.

I can barely follow the math, logic, physics. Good brain exercise, though. Gets me thinking about what sets poetry apart from philosophy, etc.

this is how new things start, possibly (always a maybe). from Dove Street draft:

Close your eyes   and step into my summer garden
(empty, small, forlorn)   come into my cloister
built of whispers   among chunks of dove-grey stone
from Guillem-le-Desert   and listen, now

 
to the cicada-continuum   hidden in leafy shade   overhead
a droning one-one-one   of winged heartbeats   eyes
closed   the threads of sound proliferate and
lose themselves   and then   (returning)   come around again

 
and where the small courtyard   (behind your eyelids)
contains the world   a heavy heart spreads canvas sails,
takes flight   like a gray brush-stroke   toward Yellow Mountain
or   as a fiddlehead uncurls   in chilly mud   toward the sun

 
In the abandoned cloister   your gnomon leads the way
toward noon   thus   at the vanishing point of appearances
a warmth exudes   light flashes in a spring   wounded, unwound
there   and gathering the earth   and all its dusty paths

 
into a balance   graceful, just   barely   there
afloat   like gnats in the evening   over a wide river
the particulars of every dream   that ever was
were there   with you   empty-hearted Orpheus

 
waiting   for the light-fall   the wing-beat
bringing word   of your beloved
from the grave of winter   embedded
in the purling spring   a sign   (J-fragment

 
from a fiddlehead)   the only sign
shrouded in murmurs   of mourning dove
or some Shoshone June   ghost-dance
here   in the empty garden   (at the entrance)

        
                            2.18.04

Cosmipoetics. From an article in Tuesday's NY Times science section:

As they try to figure out how this strange behavior could be happening to 
the universe today, astronomers say the ultimate prize from all the new observing
projects could be as simple as a single number.
      That number, known as w, is the ratio between the pressure and density of
dark energy. . .

You could say that Stubborn Grew (or at least Bluejay's presence in) is about the pressure and density of dark energy. Here's Bluejay, intimating to unknowing Henry what he's about:

Hey!  C'mon Bluejay!  Live ain't over yet!  Let's go -
up to the Terrace!  There's old Roger himself, up there!
Bluejay turned SE to see.  Yeah, I see the ol bear.
He got up and shook himself - blood to flow

 
into his phosphoric, porous feet and hands -
and said:  you know what you doin, Henry m'man?
You know you zigshaggin?  Raven an zigshaggin
a sweetblack rizebury W, man - donch U?  Unnerstan?

 
A what?  Sho.

& then the letter "W" takes on a multivalent quality in many sections of the poem : a shorthand for Whitman or William Blackstone, a reflection of "M" (both Mandelstam & Dante's stellar icon for Justice in the Paradiso), & other things. Here's something toward the end of Forth of July as a whole:

         1


  
         We are coming to the end of Henry
 Navigator's long voyage, Elena –
 circling around an elephant ear (Abul
 Abaz, or Barnum's Jumbo) – see

  
         how everything grows simpler,
 more harsh, more true.  Still
 the well is always there (and will
 be) – like the man standing here

  
         beside it in the dark courtyard
 (strange blooming out-of-season
 almond branch).  A stone,
 a star, a well.  A cup of water

  
         from a rainbarrel (or Tartar
 wine).  A circling dragon-boat
 or scrap of origami writ
 folded to float so lightly... there.

  
         You fold Andromeda into a W,
 a mountain range back into M.
 You cup them in your palm
 to make a diamond, or double-

  
         diamond – cat's eyes, Pushkinian.
 Delicate Blue Morpho wings
 woven with microscopic strings
 of quipu thread (gentian-

  
         gentle, violet, and red).  A knit
 crossroad, then – red, white –
 streams into Cassiopeia's
 mother-night (at last).

      
                               5.22.2000

(Cassiopeia being a constellation in the form of a "W", and linked mythologically with Ethiopia - another thread in the poem - source of Nile, "dark energy", Ark of Covenant legends, etc.).

some comments on Silliman's WCW etc. over at Hotel Point. "Form is finite, structure is infinite." (Charles Wright) I like that.

34. Imagine two similar oblogs (I have a cold) or ellipses, intersecting at points A & B. Let us call them oblogs O and 0 (zero). Let us let oblog O represent "poetry", and oblog 0, "poetics". Color in the intersecting area (a muted colorado or vermilion will do well; your choice), and call this area Q. Now apply your Ziescchen microscope so that the focal area corresponds to the center portion of area Q. Look closely. You will see, standing there at approximate lat/long 35'/18', with one hand in a gray raincoat & the other clutching his pipe, none other than - Friedrich Hinkel, Prof. Emeritus.

But, Tom of St Louis will recork : it's not the poet's emotions, it's the emotion expressed.

In other words, bladderdash, sorry, gotta go.

There is only one number; the rest are just repetition. & that number is. . .

knot to. Quipu.

Nada on subjective formalism vs. mathematical. She's right to counterbalance the model-making head trips with a more centered "mimesis" (the "canons" of Leonardo & predecessors - squaring the circle on the human microcosm - were centered on genitals or navel). But math is everywhere. Nada herself did some division (Nada divided by Ron = Ada with remain d'Or). Gaze into your navel you'll see a very physical umbilical cord back to nautilus spiral seashell.

Thinking about the Cantorian infinite-dimensional line, come to think of it, there's quite a bit along those lines in the 3rd chapter of Stubborn Grew ("Once in Paradise"). It's a chapter about painting, perspective, Berkeleyan-Romantic vision, etc. Wish I had the book here, various stanzas. . .

There was a line, so that the generations live.
Source of all the. . .onion domes,
.. . million ghetto'd Romes.
. . . of the infinitive : to give.

*

A point. Then a line to the end of the.
Forms frame for all the others.
The other colors.
De materialibus ad immaterialia.

*

The point is in the line now, Dino.

De-materialize a bus ad?

(I know I'm mixing this up. Will post corrections when I can.)

Last Sunday was Kurt Godel's birthday (Cantor's successor).
[correction : Monday. April 28. The day I was posting about Faith & Reason to Anastasios. At 1:32 pm, same time as this post. 132 : the number of Stubborn Grew. (Why? Long story. I used to live at 132 6th St. It's the number of a waltz (a 1-3-2. . .). It's the number of Beethoven's most beautiful quartet. It's the number of rooms in the White House. It's the number of acres in N. Main Cemetery. It's the # of square ft in Grace Church, downtown Providence. Add "one" and it's the secretive number of Finnegans Wake (1132).]

Creation like a mobius strip, because:
there exists no set which contains everything (since a subset of this set would be the set itself, and it would take a yet larger set to contain the set which contains everything). Cantor equated this vanishing pt. with God, the Absolute.

Poor Cantor ended his days in an asylum, alternating between the riddle of transfinite numbers, and trying to prove that Bacon was Shakespeare. Maybe he was reading Ignatius Donnelly, who also turned to the Shakespeare puzzle when his career (politician, in this case) was hitting the rocks. Great orgone boxes think alike.

Mysteries of the infinite continua of the line.

((Rudy. Georg Cantor, a persecuted Jewish mathematician, who showed that infinite dimensions were contained in a 1-dimensional line, who was grief-stricken at the early death of an only son, named Rudy :: Leopold Bloom, a persecuted Jewish Irish fictional character, contained within the lines of a microcosmic verbal Dublin, who was grief-stricken at the early death of an only son, named))

. . . so I guess if you wanted to play with the analogy between the Cantorian infinite-dimensional (geometric) line, and the Mandelshtamian infinitely dense (poetic) line - and you thought of writing in general as a compression of dimensions - and you thought of Time as one of the dimensions. . .

then you could imagine a technical basis for the notion that poetry is this sort of distinct perennial activity-in-Nowness, as I tried to outline earlier in the archives. . . Mandelstam [paraphrasing]: "we don't want the text of Ovidius Naso, we want the living breathing Ovid!" - and - "only the moment of recognition is sweet to us". . .

- thinking of when I read the Sonnets at age 19 and had the uncanny sense that Shakespeare was talking directly to me from another dimension. . . and then Ecclesiastes dropped by ("vanity, vanity. . ."). . .

Time dimensions encrypted in sentences. Someone speaking to you, face to face.

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.