Mathy Poetic Reflection: Where are my Zeroes?
by phil on Saturday Apr 17, 2004 12:36 AM
poetry
Why am I the bucket at this intersection of consciousness and flesh?
This would be a teleological fallacy on my partial differentiation of the function that is life.
What are the zeroes of my purpose? Where do my lines intersect what I expect?
If you are not experiencing the depth of this poem, continue reading for liner notes
Liner Notes.
Perhaps this poem is only comprehensible to me. To the uninvolved reader, it may seem like what I'm saying is nonsense, but you have to trust that there is a lot of weight packed in there. Anyway, this poem encompasses my awareness of my state.
I've provided liner notes as an alternative delivery of the poem structure. Here is a reading between the lines.
RUNNING THROUGH ALL THREE LINES there is this notion of purpose: I use the words Why, teleological (a word meaning "relating to the purpose of something"), function, and I explicitly say purpose in line three.
Why am I the bucket at this intersection of consciousness and flesh?
THIS FIRST LINE is a self-deprecating resignation of what I truly am. There is this flesh here, and then there is this consciousness there, and voila, here I am, the bucket that is receiving all the stimuli. Imagine a grid, with one axis representing fleshes and another axis representing consciousnesses. Each point on the grid is a bucket, and each bucket is a you, a soul. Why am I not in another intersection? I could be, but perhaps I am just not aware of it.
I chose the image of a bucket to emphasize my deadness, my emptiness, the rudimentary reception of junk, water, whatever. I feel like a bucket by the side of the dirt road, constantly receiving the pulses through the intersection. I could have used other words, like mailbox, point, wrapper, toilet, mouth, etc.. but bucket sums up the symbol correctly.
This would be a teleological fallacy on my partial differentiation of the function that is life.
THIS SECOND LINE refers to a common topic on Philosophistry, logical fallacies. Teleological fallacies are the worst by making us assign a reason for everything. We say, "why am I here?" or "why did this happen?" as if some force were willing all these things to be.
Partial is a synonym for "having bias" which is a form of committing logical fallacies. Partial differentiation describes the way we differentiate things in our world and seem to assign a sense of purpose to random things. It is also a reference to a method in mathematics for finding the maximum or the minimum of a function.
function is a synonym for purpose. Life can be considered a function, taking vectors from R-infinity as input and returning a vector or number in R (R-infinity means the vectors of infinite length all containing real numbers, and R means the real number line). This function definition describes how while so much occurs in life, it all gets funneled through this single point of consciousness or bucket. It then gets tunneled through time and produces a time-series graph. Can we find the maximum and minimum of that graph??
What are the zeroes of my purpose? Where do my lines intersect what I expect?
When you do the partial differentiation, you try to set the equation to zero to find the max or the min. I'm trying to touch the extremas of my purpose, i.e. maximal purpose or no purpose (nihilism). Using the word zeroes is like "where can I zero in on the answer?" It's also like, "where does this end?"
Finally, I want to know where this function goes. And, why can't life match my expectations? The whole purpose of all my reflection and grinding is to reach a some life that I intuitively feel I'm missing. If I could just shift to the right tracks or see where the lines connect, then I could maybe get on with good living. Or maybe I need to bring my expectations in line with reality; hence, I need to intersect life with my expectations.
Other notes: I had my headphones on loud and had one of those emotional moments that gave me a wet pen; as I started writing, I felt the magic flowing. By the third line, I was excited by what was unfolding. Unfortunately, this jinxed the process, making me stop. But I am glad. I could've hackneyed this up.
As for the usage of liner notes? I'm not too arrogant to think that my poetry can "stand on its own" nor do I expect others to take the time and treat me like an e.e. cummings and try to do interpretations seriously.
Comments
brandon said on April 17, 2004 5:23 PM:
the explanation does help, not because it was indecipherable, but because intepretations are bound to be biased or incomplete.
