<<Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote "We do not listen with the best regard to the
verses of a man who is only a poet, nor to his problems if he is only an
algebraist; but if a man is at once acquainted with the geometric foundation
of things and with their festal splendor, his poetry is exact and his
arithmetic musical.">>
I like it, though Emerson may not have been much of a mathematician. My
own stake in this debate (thank you for it) is a book I wrote in which
Weierstrass, Dedekind and Cantor are lined up next to Whitman, Rimbaud and
Laforgue. What could they possibly have in common? My view was that once
you had arithmetized analysis and agreed that the real number line could be
"cut," you were likely to be back in a Democritean mental world in which
continuity cannot be assumed. Poets who at the same time abandoned
continuity -- between the parts of a poem, its dictions and tones of voice,
even its subjects -- were doing something quite similar, replacing these
Victorian literary continuities and smooth transitions with ironic
juxtapositions and perhaps something like the analyst's points of inflection.
I might even suggest an analogy with the point-values of what was once
called a "pathological" function.
Here's a couple of Rimbaud "stanzas" from _Illuminations_, handed to a friend
in 1875, about three years after Dedekind's _Stetigkeit und irrationale Zahlen_
(the Cut):
They are the conquerors of the world
Seeking their personal chemical fortune;
Sports and comforts voyage with them;
They carry the education
Of races, classes and of animals, on this ship
Repose and dizziness
To torrential light
To terrible nights of study.
For from the talk among the apparatus, the blood, the flowers, the fire,
the gems,
From the excited calculations on this fugitive ship,
--One sees, rolling like a dyke beyond the hydraulic-power road,
Monstrous, endlessly illuminated,-- their stock of studies;
They driven into harmonic ecstasy,
And the heroism of discovery.
from "Motion" tr., Louise Var\ese
The Very Best of the Annual Calendrical Discontinuity to You All!!
Bill Everdell, Brooklyn