Infinity, repeat
Are you standing at the edge of a cliff with a stone in your hand? Have you drawn a breath and tensed the muscles of your throwing arm? Are you feeling strong and brave? Throw then, but take well your guard. For the smooth and perfect stone of your careful selection is racing around the planet to strike you on the back of the head!
The big philosophical questions are inevitably this way. The more zealously you pursue your answer, the more likely you are (if you are very talented and very child-like in your thinking) to finish right where you started, to get hit on the back of the head by the very stone you threw. Math is that way too. Logic is the heart of both. “If this, then that”, and so forth. Run enough iterations, step closer or farther away enough times, and you’ll see yourself, eventually, in the picture you have found - cocky bastard - with that stone still in your hand.
I’m on record as a believer. So it may just be that faith begets proof. I may be seeing only what I want and expect to find. It’s easy to see God in Man, because we want to. But how ’bout Man in God? That too, I’ll bet. Reflections, even from a mirror, are made of more than light. There are those lovely themes, which nature does recur, in scales as grand as small. Things which spin round things, and such. But how much smaller than an atom can our solar system be? Oh, we are great in our ken, but not so great as He. Our sight goes up as well as down, but always to a ceiling and a floor, and never more.
When we cast our minds into those darkly distant places of imagination, what light there is comes only from the candles we have brought. There is heaven here, too, and God in every face. Nothing is different anywhere. Infinity is no closer now, even from this prideful promontory. But, like an avid mouse, I have found her dispersed crumbs. Is this my own tail that smells so sweet as cheese? Or a ladder to another place? I see the steps! As can you, if will prevails. They go up and down, both ways to God, and never do they reach an end. These musings relate to musings on the Mandelbrot Set.
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on November 4th, 2006 at 7:15 pm
[…] The Mandelbrot Set may offer us a true and terrifying glimpse of “divine intelligence”. It may be a Rosetta of Creation. There is a place just beyond philosophy and outside of mathematics, where only the poet can go. His capacity for awe and sensitivity to beauty cast a light where others find only darkness. Emerson had those eyes. Perhaps you have them too. Can you conceive of the mind for which infinity itself is not a difficult abstraction but a territory of touristic familiarity? The Mandelbrot Set places in our hands a view of the universe which our own science can neither refute nor confirm, for we cannot see the edges of its truth. It suggests that all of the recurring patterns in nature we have so far discerned (the tree, the spiral, radial symmetry, the orbit, etc.) are the consciously duplicated themes of an intelligent and systematic Creation. God’s own fingerprints, if you will. Are these recurring themes merely signs of the Maker’s creative style, or are they the perfect designs which only a perfect designer could have achieved? Faith can accommodate both interpretations. The Mandelbrot Set is quite simply a “little universe”, which humans can inspect from the transcendent perspective of an omniscient god. As we can perceive and marvel over Mandelbrot, so must God see all he has made. And in the same way that there are no insignificant replicas among Mandelbrot’s infinite replications, we are as sovereign in all of existence as we have so often dared to believe. […]
on November 4th, 2006 at 8:39 pm
[…] Used to be I had to work at my fantasies, shut my eyes and find some quiet place, like inside momma’s closet. I’d spend at least five minutes just setting the stage. I’d have my timid little thighs all shut tight, bracing in my need. I’d lean way back into the depths of momma’s fake fur coats. It was black as pitch in that closet, but I knew those colors of artificial mink and fox and the other one. I knew them good, and they were a sumptuous glory into which I pressed my little girl’s body. In the dark, thinking about the colors was the best part. One of momma’s silk slips pressed to my cheek made it all sexy. I’d breathe into it and make it hot and humid from my breath, almost felt like skin after a while. I made my kissing movements into it, which only made it wetter still. My fingers, inspired by some magic, formed those lips I wanted so bad. My fist, with just a little effort, became a cherished skull, and the silk slip was a skin and the complexity of the knotted part was like his hair mounding powerfully downward to where I was imagining the rest of him. I could feel his press, the insistence of his need, and the fur coats prickled my most delicate skin. The hardened knot of him, the bunched silk slip into which I had breathed its nightly life, passed over my entire body, and took its leisure where I knew he would. That was back in the day, before what I call the “Renaissance of Darcy Davis”, before he kissed me. Every day after that one was different, and for good. I’d be at Von’s with momma, right there in the chilly aisle, feeling cold in all the best of ways. He’d come to kiss on me, without me asking for it. Didn’t even have to close my eyes. He’d just come, and it’d be less cold. If I wasn’t careful, he’d have me, right there in Von’s with momma looking on me and wondering what was wrong. It worked out well to get kissed when I thought I wouldn’t, and then to have Mr. Carrier tell me he thought I was so good in math, all on the same day. I guess it made it clear how loving Sam was just like math, and how my future was bound up inside his, like some geometry. It was nice to have those things so close. Seems like all that life from before is already part of a closed chapter. I mean, where do you know that you’ve been changed? It must come at some moment before the actual event. When I knew, I suppose, that Sam would have me, that must have been when everything really changed. ‘Cause here I am, riding like a bullet, like some derailed train in Sam’s Impala. And it may as well be a convertible, the sky’s so big under my wide eyes. He’s got this tape he made special playing, and all the songs are right. We’re going on the highway too, we looked at each other in complicity when Sam took the on-ramp. There’s so much possibility in the Eastward direction. We could be going anywhere, but somewhere along the journey, we’re gonna stop, and Sam’s gonna make me a woman. I am so surrendered to our speed. Mr. Carrier has this way of wrinkling up his nose, when he thinks you’re not gonna get it. It’s like he’s apologizing ahead of time for making you feel less smart than you should believe you are. I’ll bet he hates that part of his job, handing out F’s and D’s, when he’d really love it most of all if his students just fell into natural love with Calculus. It makes me sad. I wonder if Sam is good in math. We’ll have kids, and they’ll sit around on the floor just staring at the ceiling, while neon numbers dance above their little heads. Sam’s got the car fixed up special for the occasion. The smell inside is just like in Mr. Carrier’s car. He’s got that amber jar sitting on the dashboard too, looks like a little genie’s bottle, kinda magic. Never saw one at night before, the way the liquid is thick and moves around in little waves. I hope we’ll kiss a lot before we do it. I think I like the kissing best. I knew Sam was gonna be the one when I saw the beautiful mathematics in his mind. It was about a week before Sam kissed me for the first time, and Mr. Carrier had been talking about complex numbers, and making me feel a little woozy but every bit as smart as I knew I was. There just seems to be all this space opening up all the time, and it’s just like driving really fast at night. Mr. Carrier, he just goes on and on, and I get the scary feeling there’s some crazy sort of infinity that’s gotten into his mind. I want to go there, and he makes me feel I could follow. Mr. Carrier just gave my nose a little squeeze, right where any other man would’ve done something else. And I was ready for any assignment. Then Sam told me how much he loves me. And there was all this clockwork in his head, as if he were reckoning the ratios of his passion, and wanting to steady us, because the numbers were too powerful. I almost fainted, there was so much restraint in him. But Mr. Carrier is the champion of restraint. I’m sure he’s holding himself in line all the time, wanting to laugh out loud for all the symmetries inside him. It’s so dark down here up close to the upholstery in the back seat, and warm. Sam is busy with his calculations, preparing his descent on top of me. The windows have begun to fog, and the lights in the sky are all a milky glow. As a vice to be conquered, most of all I want to concern myself with exactitude. I want to be clear and certain, like Sam, making no assertion before the moment is right. For all his capacity for precision, Mr. Carrier rusticates in theory most of the time. He’s all invitation and no consummation. To succeed, I’ll need a lesson he can’t give me. Sam gave me a new pet name, when he picked me up at home tonight, said it was gonna be the name I’d hear myself called in my dreams. He said there was math in it too. Wrote it on my hand with a Sharpie pen: “0+”. “What’s that mean?”, I said. Sam was light as the air inside the Impala, on top of me. He made himself into a point, and the darkness swallowed him up, and I looked out through the fogged rear window up at the foggy stars. So much space out there, Sam! “It means ‘Zero Positive’, Darcy. It means you’re still nothing, but you got ambition.” Sam was displacing great volumes of nothingness inside me, without filling me, only defining a space. Outside the car, inside the cradle of the road-side dark, my neon numbers were tumbling end over end. I clung to Sam as he drew his lines and slashes over me, and loved him even more terribly than before, for the cruelty of his math. […]
on November 4th, 2006 at 8:44 pm
[…] Forgetting the nearness of the edge, Willie had fallen down into the Well and could not get out. He could not see any circle of light above his head, nor could he see any lines that might separate this thing from the other thing. The only reference to distance was provided by a tiny spot of pulsing pain encased in an absurd complexity of soft pulp and warm blood; but it was very far away. Very far away. Between himself and the spot of pain everything else had been crammed, all in a chaotic flux, shifting ceaselessly within a river of infinite length. […]
on November 4th, 2006 at 8:46 pm
[…] As far as Willie was concerned, the most troubling thing about the dreams was the way they seemed to extend strangely into the daylight hours, making him ponder over them to the exclusion of any other thoughts. Truly, the dreams were changing the waking life. And this is where Willie became confused and alarmed, for he did not know how he understood this, nor could he find any evidence of this fact that the adult world might have held up to the light of understanding for him and, to his infinite relief, declared a childish silliness. The reason that Willie was able to understand what little he did understand, was that the dreams had been bubbling up from a new source of clarified meaning, sort of, from a place in Willie’s mind that was not entirely unlike the dusty shoe box which sat in a corner of his closet. The seeming relationship was such that whenever he tried with any measure of concentration to penetrate the strangeness of the dreams, he could never explain his findings to himself in any other way than by thinking: The dreams are coming from the shoe box. […]