Philosophy and Mathematics

Logan Fletcher asks his philospher friends whether this video can prove the Pythagorean Theorem, and whether knowledge can exist in perception. Or something like that. Actually he asks:

When you watch this video, is this a case of *seeing that* the Pythagorean Theorem is true? And if so, does that mean that we can apprehend mathematical truths within perceptual judgments? I'd appreciate any thoughts people have to offer about this.

I start to write him a response:

No. The video presumes unreasonable skill with scissors and paper squares, so it's just one more removal from any actual faith in tangible mathematical proof or provability.

On the other hand, dogs and cats can tell when you feed them less or more, so there is clearly a mathematical element to perception. Great apes can add and subtract and can be taught to show it on touch screens. Even poetry majors can be taught to express opinions of the philosophy of mathematics. So there's hope, but not in animation.

Watching any cartoon is an exercise in the suspension not only of disbelief, but of consciousness. Americans have studied each other's brain activity during various typical activities. The electrical activity while we watch tv is equivalent to that while we sleep. The language of cartoons is a language of cliches of impossibility.

Anvils fall from clear blue skies and only ever land on characters' heads, temporarily crushing them. People and personified rabbits continue walking off cliffs until we notice we have left the ground behind and then decide to fall. In watching animation we turn off our brains and sleepily watch a series of impossible events that vaguely approximate the foolish ideas that get us through our days without questioning the difference between ourselves and a terrarium full of caffeinated yeast.

This cartoon may show that mathematics is simple and beautiful and capable of explaining everything we ever need to know about unobtainable mathematical abstracts such as "right triangles," but most cartoons we watch from before the time we can understand words or count our own thoughts just teach us that life is meaningless nonsense where injuries are inevitable and hilarious. Perhaps if we were ancient greeks watching this cartoon, we could understand some math but not us, not today, not as Americans.

And the Ancient Greeks would be too busy wondering where all the strings were, and how the pictures moved. In the end they'd probably just take your laptop and sacrifice you to Athena.


Then I decide I've been writing in Don Delillo's voice, and I should find my own, so I skip posting it. Life is complicated enough without the requrement that it be unique. At this point I'd settle for a day of focus on anything, whether or not it's happened already.

Mr. Ashbery; You Are like Father

It is the end of the semester and students are returning books. As usual my work is not done. Ashbery says, “You haven’t given me a new poetry.” I can’t remember reading that textbook, but this is not unusual. I forget a lot of textbooks. All through school I have taken on every responsibility I have any remote chance of fulfilling, never committing to want to do anything in particular for fear of failing. I was told undergraduate work was the chance to experiment with different subjects and see what you like. The school told me there were deadlines on this experimentation, and I thought perhaps I had fucked up somehow.

I walk back to my dorm, look around for a copy of New Poetry, and can’t find it. Can’t even remember what it looked like. Have no idea. Nothing. All I’ve got is a worn copy of Poetry Speaks, a few unread chapbooks by local writers I profess to care about and a couple books of Ashbery’s own work.

I understand the device, but this is dream and understanding is not escaping. I don’t owe Ashbery a textbook, although now that I think about it, I do have an English text book called text book. So anything's possible. I don’t owe him one called new poetry, though. I don’t owe him a textbook at all. I owe him a new poetry.

He has sat, patiently waiting. Patiently believing in me. He has loved me, although not in the way my classmates teased that he might be interested after the day I came to class in jeans and a tank top, and everybody else was hot in their sweaters and he offered to lend me his leather jacket so they could open the window and be comfortable. Still, this is a dream. Or it isn’t. But dream logic applies.

I try to figure out how to fulfill the debt I owe to one of America’s greatest living poets who didn’t downgrade me if one week instead of twenty Xeroxed copies of a new poem my backpack contained a mostly-drained handle of Cuervo. Who didn’t laugh, but wasn’t disappointed either when all the underlined passages in my new poem the next week were the parts underlined by the new version of Microsoft Word as potentially containing grammatical errors. Who understood that I was searching for my aesthetic.

Who taught simple tricks of the trade, sure of a few things that worked, sure of a few ways to reach undergrads, and possibly afraid that if he got too bogged down in meter and formal concerns, we’d all lose interest.

Ashbery sat in a room with all the best undergraduate writers at Bard and although it didn’t seem like he did anything sometimes, it must have been hard, this weekly few hours of not dying. No. Of publicly not dying. He taught us about a form called the chimera, named after the Greek monster who grows a new head every time a hero tries to cut one off. No, it grows two new heads each time you hack one out with your sword. It’s like a potato, sort of, with its eyes, but much faster and more dangerous.

But the poetic form is different. That’s one where you take the nouns from one text and madlib them into another text. Then if you want you can adopt another verb list from a third source, and so forth, bringing together all these texts into one, which has as many interpretations as it finds conquering heroes. Since graduation I’ve attempted approximately zero such modern works, but I don’t think the technique is a particularly special way to seek any sort of newness or truth. It’s just a chance to free a couple writers of the burdens of youth, truth, objectivity, fluidity and in some ways even creativity.

The greatest writer in America doesn’t have to sell it, though. He just provides a basic exercise out of a textbook, and it opens ever fixed eye. If teaching is a crapshoot, he rolls weighted dice. Some weeks he told stories. Sometimes he told the same one twice. Sometimes he’d tell us that his students worked so hard and knew so much we could teach each other. Sometimes he’d just sit quietly all class and let us.

One story he liked to tell, when he was telling stories, was about a Japanese businessman who hadn’t liked his (Ashbery’s) attempts to interpret the form of Haiku in English. Ashbery had been paid a handsome sum to read his work by some big corporation, but the work was based on the latest American scholarship about the classic Asian form, which suggested that the normalization of syllables was overemphasized in previous translation and imitation attempts, to the detriment of the brevity, seasonal imagery, humor and momentary, tautological activity that are its hallmarks in the original culture and language.

The businessman who knew much more English than Ashbery knew of Japanese did not ask aesthetic questions. He understood and believed in the metric tradition and defended it thus: Mr. Ashbery, I found your poetry very plosaic.

I’m not sure what work is her for me as a writer. Am I here to teach others to write? Am I here to write when I’ve found something worth writing about, as someone without the courage to survive wrote? The world doesn’t need scared writers, as Salman Rushdie told us in answer to the obvious question only an idiot could be brave and brilliant enough to ask him at the end of a lecture. But does that mean I’m supposed to get out of the way and let the tough guys handle this, or does it mean I need to get going and document something of my experience.

Ashbery looked at us or past us as we read each week poems that we had worked on all week or hadn’t. At the end of the class our big assignment was to submit a long poem. That was it. What should it be like, I asked, naively. Like your other poems. Quotations from different people in a dialogue generally require separate paragraphs, kids, but not when one speaker has long ago obtained the status of omniscient narrator.

After studying with Ashbery, I stuck with creating for a while. He has that effect on people. Of course, others figured out a long time ago they were allowed to write in different genres, and engender whatever different ideas they wanted. Classmates and cohorts have gone on to write plays, comedies, paintings. Different sorts of book reports.

After internal debate that I feel--physically--in my stomach, I’ve decided not to underline the foregoing fragment. That is not my contribution. Word is ephemeral anyway. It lives while it may, and does no harm to me.

In the dream I try briefly to combine my hockey-writing experience with my poetic assignment. The Caps have just achieved a franchise record fourteen game winning streak after trading for former Columbus Blue Jacket Jason Chimera. But I’ve got nothing.

I’m looking for a new poetry. Now it’s due by one o’clock. PM. Things change in dreams, but Ashbery remains, waiting. I see him, impassive, watching like the man in the moon over this oversized campus of my life. How have we lost touch? How has he survived all these years? His ears that he said were going, or maybe he didn’t, seemed to take in more than what we said. This is not to say he was wise. Just that he knew everything, and all the answers.

It’s actually not Ashbery’s idea, that each poet invents their own poetry. He never mentioned it. It’s a ubiquitous American idea, in the forward to many an anthology. Even the title to a few books on my shelves. Definitely a way I measure myself, as I start to write new things. Is this my poetry? Is this my contribution? Contribution to what?

Poetry is not a bank. A blood bank is not a even bank. A sperm bank is not a bank, either.

Still, although it was Peter Klappert who taught me, dogmatically and pragmatically to write right, taught the steps and moves of the fight and taught me that each modern poet creates his own poetry, in this dream it was Ashbery who required it. Like a textbook to be returned. Something given, requiring something earned. A torch passed, requiring an appropriate self-immolation.

The love we felt eating shots of garlic with tequila chasers, calling in and listening to Guinevere, not narrating but giggling, slowly undressing over the low-power radio-station.

There’s more than one path to success and it can be a crooked, Escheresque staircase with the same professor peering in each repeating window, as it was at the end of my dream. At one particularly steep incline, I moved over to the side and held the railing to let a young Japanese girl pass me. Even though I muttered quietly to myself about needing to find my new poetry, she didn’t think me strange.

Instead she said,

“You are like father.

You both have penises.”

She said something else after that, some picayune observation about how I had moved over so chivalrously, or else it wasn’t that, even though I expected that. It was specifically a response to my expectations. I was sure I’d remember it while I wrote down the rest of the dream, but I haven’t. So in your version, she didn’t say anything. That’s another thing Peter Klappert taught me about poetry. Poetry is memorable speech. If you want to revise a poem, write it down again from memory. If you can’t remember it, no one else will, so it isn't poetry. So she said, more perfectly:

You are like father.

You both have

Penises.

Only this and nothing more.