Okay, its so weird these days, waking up and looking over at an open notebook and not seeing lines of English language in it from the night before, but instead seeing lines full of numbers and variables - I hated math before! But just like I wake up and re-read my sleepy-headed scenes out poems or whatever, I reader re-read the work I did the night before, damn nearly nodding into the equation I do stubbornly pursued, and Im shaking my head and mumbling, gripping around under pillows and things for a pencil and mumbling, No, no, THATS not concise! Or, Thats not even CLOSE! Or, more rewarding, its, Oh! Thaaats why! Wait, so... Same ol same - expressions. For some reason, words dont come as easily these days. I used to actually VIEW English as discrete packets equaling certain quantities of sonance and suggestion which, when plugged in to other discrete forms created a rational sentence equating to some thing harder to express any other way and so the algebra of poetics, so to speak, would read, for example: As my blind lover could not/love to little so loud a beauty/ and it equated to liquid qualities, because the tongue would have to sort of lap up the L sounds, would have to tap the front teeth with those alternating L sounds and the T in little (a word which makes the tongue flicker line a snakes tongue lapping sensory information up to feed to its pit organ, would slope into the S and the round shape of the B; meanwhile, accompanying the syntax of the line was the semantic component, which alternated like the L sound by compounded positive negative values: could not too little so; and finally, the conjunction of sensory data: so loud and beauty, the sound and sight combined. While a poetry professor - and friend long after the course had ended - related to me concerning poetics, words have a specific meaning and specific quantity of syllabic content, and yet they also have a meaning beyond the quantifiable, they have quality. The word stone, how does it roll from the tongue? Now try the word rock. Which sounds jagged and abrupt, and which sounds smooth? She read me a poem by Robert Frost, a very famous poet, just as my teacher in 6th grade did (an act that probably influenced me more than the field trips to the Walker Art Center did), that has a luscious line beginning the last stanza, which reads, The woods are lovely, dark and deep... Of all the reasons why I dropped out once again, it was probably mostly the fact that nothing else I encountered after this line was as valuable to me as a poet (which is why mathematics, comp sci, or physics are candidates for the major I declare when I go back- school cannot teach you poetry, it can only show the way - the rest is just screaming trees, that useless English Lit degree - plus, these other fields move me in ways only a poet could imagine!). She also recommended a book, one which Ive bought over and over for the part five years, always leaving it in some city as I wander the country in search of...I dont know what; often, these copies of the book go to young people I meet who dig language as an art, kids who display that love and perhaps even the seed of a real gift (love is pressupposed within aesthetic brilliance because love is real, it is the very reason poets arent rich, why artists pawn their possessions for Old Holland oils or to buy Escodas from Spain worth hundreds of dollars a piece; it is a selfish, blind, all-consuming love, enough love to blow up the outside world as Chris Cornell wrote, in order to be fully in love - and so the ones who display this are more interesting to me than an aspiring poet who has mechanics and the lexicon at his command but not love (and Corinthians reads, If you have not love, faith is dead). The book was called simply A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver, a Pulitzer-winning poet. The book is an introduction to poetics that inspires and also shows you the music of poetry, like how the alexandrine (a form of sonnet) has this specific metric pattern - which, since I teaching myself saxophone at the time, really interested me. And now, Im seeing how music and poetry relate to math. And somehow, they DO. To even begin to discuss functional programming languages and how the pure ones relate especially to mathematics would require a pretty damn lengthy explanation of mathematicians and philosophers, names like Church and Turing, Russell and Peano; I would have to succinctly elucidate (not an easy task) such things as what computation is, what a machine and assembly code is, how compilers work (and Im just beginning to understand some if this stuff - its endless, for ask intents and purposes!). But what is significant doesnt require all of that, no. The point is that Ive come to a universal understanding, it seems, thats allowing me to take up anything and understand it, given time (for instance, sometimes the high level of abstraction in mathematical proofs for incompleteness are like, ....Uh...(scratching head)....Spongebob, whats that? Lol. Yeah, some things take time - the upside is, when straight up mathematicians convened in Geneva in the 30s or 40s, they were scratching their heads, too, at first!), and what Im finding is just amazing, beauty everywhere, beauty at carrying magnitudes and through different models of reality! Its no wonder da Vinci had to learn so many different disciplines - theres to much out there to love to confine the mind to just one thing! This age isnt the Renaissance but its hit some analogues with today. There is a rising merchant class who offer nothing do much as products and services out of thin air - I mean, theres startups literally need NOTHING except creativity, excellent coding, and serious BALLS, and they can come up with the next big thing, be it an industry-specific solution, a generalized application delivered online, or some brilliant piece of software that only hackers can appreciate and need, to simple INFORMATION - for instance, kids graduates from Stanford with a Comp Sci degree in Big Data, the latest deus ex machina to grace
Posted on: Tue, 12 Nov 2013 00:11:05 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015