Queer Idea

The characteristic of mathematical work is elegance,
by which we mean economy.
You determine what's true, then
you say it once, succinctly,
and move on.

For instance, Ken preskenis and I
put eleven years into C[z,f],
and then we wrote
a six-page paper.

You work on the assumption that your readers are
bright, prepared to work, and patient.

If you can't determine the truth of the matter,
you keep quiet.
After a year or two, you probably hate the problem,
but you don't give up.
It is merely amusing when someone comes along
and implies that words alone can make
a problem go away.
The editors of Inventiones Mathematicae
would, rightly, give short shrift
to the suggestion that proving Fermat's Last Theorem
is, after all, less important, than
stating the problem in less jaded language.

This trick of stepping over problems
smacks of Alexander of Macedon,
by common consent a distressing young man.
When he ran out of strangers to pick on,
he picked on his friends.
But at least his response to the Gordian Knot
was better than the cop-out:

This knot's not unknottable,
but who wants to rule the world?

Verb Sap (1.viii.87)

We are told, by some who ought to know better,
that the purpose of poetry is to explore the
possibilities of language.

I disagree, and not just because I quibble that
purpose means end, and exploration is not an
end, but a means.

Language is what tongues produce. It's made of words.
Words are made to fit together
in sentences.

Sentences state facts, tell lies, ask questions,
give orders, and beg.
That's it.

Words are not designed to paint pictures,
describe (as opposed to naming) emotions,
or sound musical.

You might occasionally succeed in getting them to do
one or another of these, but it is like using
a fiddle to drive nails.

I could walk outside right now, and find ten things
that no-one ever has or ever will describe,
apart from naming them.

I look in myself, and I know
that how I feel is not
reducible to words.

Nor is there much percentage in slavishly
dodging clichés. As Sam said, Hamlet is
full of them.

The greatest potential in language is to express things
that are true. More could be made
of this potential,

were we not so afraid of it.

Lines written in the Cafeteria at Luton Airport (1-viii-87)

By Luton's tracks a sewage farm
has purple sludge, supporting
scattered islands of bright green
something -- it's too far to see what
hardy flora feast upon
that turgid English shite.

The raking arm that very slowly
stirs the tank and speeds the
cleansing process of corruption
must have stuck. Perhaps
whoever sticks such things arranged
an allegory of politics.

But probably not. As a general rule,
words stand for ideas, but
greenery stands for sunlight,
machinery can always be trusted
to break down, and shite is just
shite. The world simply is.

Yet, in fact, the bursting green
of greed and get and gimme
rides atop this festering state,
and something's badly stuck.
At least this wretched English food
suits green stuff, if not me.

Mute (31.vii.87)

Jesus, I said, Lord,
PLEASE don't let him die! Still, he
died. Why was that, Lord?

What good did it do,
that he lived at all, and died,
with only "Papa" said?

What is the point of
inarticulate lives? No
truth, no praise, no song?

I had no answer, then,
but now I think that all life
is an endless song.

It is not, though, a
song composed primarily
for our amusement,

or even for our admiration.

Half Serious (30.vii.87)

Do you think it peculiar to put
funny things and desperately-serious things
side-by-side?
I did, when young,
and I remember being shocked
when people laughed, and told funny stories about her,
at my grandmother's wake.
But life is no respecter of proprieties,
and freely mixes farce into tragedy.
There are, sometimes, wholly black days,
and there are, however rarely, days of purest bliss,
but on most days we meet
fun and sickness, jokes and death,
crowding on each other,
and we cope, somehow, with this variety,
smiling and suffering, turn by turn.
We are almost endlessly adaptable,
and a good thing, too.
Besides, there is nothing as funny
as someone who takes himself too seriously,
and no-one as solemn
as the editors of humorous magazines.

Picnic (30.vii.87)

We had a picnic in a graveyard once,
in Kildalkey, County Meath,
a small place.

A graveyard is mighty busy
on a fine Summer Sunday.
You would be amazed.

The clay was visited by sons and daughters,
wives and mothers, husbands, sisters,
and a lover.

The lover was the saddest. Why?
Unlinked, I suppose. Incomplete.
Frustrated of union.

At least, if someone is bone of your bone
and flesh of your flesh,
then death cannot change that.

Forever, they will be related only
in her mind, and she can't be
buried with his people.

Liberty (30.vii.1987)

Solzhenitsyn's Gulag book
has over seventeen hundred pages,
and I would not have him remove one,
but what the man is saying
boils down to something simple, and old:

You can lock men up, and maltreat them,
but there is no way to imprison the spirit.
Unless I imprison myself, I am free.

The Gulag and the Hermitage lie in the same country.
The Hermitage is a Gulag for venal money-grubbers.
The Gulag is an Hermitage for innocent and quiet minds.