{"id":19010,"date":"2017-03-31T10:14:51","date_gmt":"2017-03-31T14:14:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=19010"},"modified":"2017-03-31T10:14:51","modified_gmt":"2017-03-31T14:14:51","slug":"the-handwriting-on-belshazzars-wall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2017\/03\/the-handwriting-on-belshazzars-wall\/","title":{"rendered":"The Handwriting on Belshazzar’s Wall"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"'Golden<\/a><\/p>\n

[Image: “Golden Rectangle,” by “Greg” (user “sightrays”) on Flickr<\/a>. (Used here under a Creative Commons license; thank you!) The explanation at that page provides much more detail than I can here. The gist, though, is that a “golden spiral<\/a>” appears to home in on a particular point — where the diagonals of the two rectangles making a golden rectangle intersect — but in fact, never <\/em>really reaches that point: the spiral is infinite in length.]\n<\/em><\/p>\n

Not from whiskey river<\/a><\/em>:<\/p>\n

Nature Knows Its Math<\/strong><\/p>\n

Divide<\/em>
\nthe year
\ninto seasons,
\nfour,
\nsubtract<\/em>
\nthe snow then
\nadd<\/em>
\nsome more
\ngreen,
\na bud,
\na breeze,
\na whispering
\nbehind
\nthe trees,
\nand here
\nbeneath the
\nrain-scrubbed
\nsky
\norange poppies
\nmultiply<\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Joan Graham [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

…and:<\/p>\n

[Let us consider] the common idea that mathematics is a dull subject, whereas the testimony of all those who have any dealing with it shows that it is one of the most thrilling and tantalising and enchanting subjects in the world. It is abstract, but so, to all appearance, is theology. Men have hurled themselves on the spears of their enemies rather than admit that the second person of the Trinity was not co-eternal with the first. Men have been burned by inches rather than allow that the charge to Peter was to be a charge to him as an individual rather than to him as a representative of the Apostles. Of such questions as these it is perfectly reasonable for anyone to say that, in his opinion, they are preposterous and fanatical questions. And what men have before now done for the abstractions of theology I have little doubt that they would, if necessary, do for the abstractions of mathematics. If human history and human variety teach us anything at all, it is supremely probable that there are men who would be stabbed in battle or burnt at the stake rather than admit that three angles of a triangle could be together greater than two right angles.<\/p>\n

The truth surely is that it is perfectly permissible and perfectly natural to become bored with a subject just as it is perfectly permissible and perfectly natural to be thrown from a horse or to miss a train or to look up the answer to a puzzle at the end of a book. But it is not a triumph if it is anything at all, it is a defeat. We have certainly no right to assume offhand that the fault lies with the horse or with the subject.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(G.K. Chesterton [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

…and:<\/p>\n

Teeth<\/strong><\/p>\n

For knowledge, says the Old Sage, add; for wisdom,
\nsubtract. My head in a surgeon’s chair, checking
\nLao Tsu\u2019s math as these teeth I barely knew
\nI had (mumbled of as wisdom) introduced
\nthemselves—rude party guests—right as they had
\nto go, their pinched goodbye-hello. Like learning
\nyou’ve been speaking your whole life in prose,
\nor my late eighth-grade astonishment that I—
\nconfirmed a Gentile in almost all respects—
\nhad hung so long among the circumcised.<\/p>\n

Hard to know what you have, I’ll have you know.
\nHarder to know what you haven’t. Knowledge! The nerve!
\nHushed up like a gulp behind the tongue,
\nshrewdly shooting roots down at an age
\nmy gums were smug from rolling words around,
\nwhen my morals (like my molars) proved
\nbasically interchangeable. Wise
\nI wasn’t, but I wanted it so painfully then.
\nNow I’ve had it—you have it, doc. You know
\nthe drill, or whatever you’ve got. Take it away…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Kevin McFadden [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

…and:<\/p>\n

For the mathematician Henri Poincar\u00e9, beauty was classical, not baroque, a simple purity of line and idea, the absence of ambiguity. Nature doesn’t always reveal itself that simply, but when it does, it strikes a mental chord. Doing creative mathematics meant discovering the rare “unsuspected kinship between… facts, long known, but wrongly believe to be strangers to one another.” For Poincar\u00e9, to invent was to choose. He remembered vividly when the solution to a particularly stubborn problem came to him:<\/p>\n

Just at this time I left Caen, where I was then living, to go on a geological excursion under the auspices of the school of mines. The changes of travel made me forget my mathematical work. Having reached Coutances, we entered an omnibus to go some place or other. At the moment when I put my foot on the step the idea came to me, without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it, that the transformations I had used to define the Fuchsian functions<\/a> were identical with those of non-Euclidean geometry.<\/p>\n

Where did the sudden illumination come from? The subliminal self, including long spells of unconscious toil beforehand, priming the pump, laying down a bedrock of memories. And afterward, the work of shaping, deducing, verifying. Any great lightning-bolt insight requires a before and after.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Diane Ackerman [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

…and, from whiskey river<\/em><\/a> (the poem’s last stanza), the trigger for my own weekly wandering around the Web:<\/p>\n

Self-Improvement<\/strong><\/p>\n

Just before she flew off like a swan
\nto her wealthy parents\u2019 summer home,
\nBruce’s college girlfriend asked him
\nto improve his expertise at oral sex,
\nand offered him some technical advice:<\/p>\n

Use nothing but his tonguetip
\nto flick the light switch in his room
\non and off a hundred times a day
\nuntil he grew fluent at the nuances
\nof force and latitude.<\/p>\n

Imagine him at practice every evening,
\nmore inspired than he ever was at algebra,
\nbeads of sweat sprouting on his brow,
\nthinking, thirty-seven, thirty-eight<\/em>,
\nseeing, in the tunnel vision of his mind’s eye,
\nthe quadratic equation of her climax
\nyield to the logic
\nof his simple math.<\/p>\n

Maybe he unscrewed
\nthe bulb from his apartment ceiling
\nso that passersby would not believe
\na giant firefly was pulsing
\nits electric abdomen in 13 B.<\/p>\n

Maybe, as he stood
\ntwo inches from the wall,
\nin darkness, fogging the old plaster
\nwith his breath, he visualized the future
\nas a mansion standing on the shore
\nthat he was rowing to
\nwith his tongue’s exhausted oar.<\/p>\n

Of course, the girlfriend dumped him:
\nmet someone, apres-ski, who,
\nusing nothing but his nose
\ncould identify the vintage of a Cabernet.<\/p>\n

Sometimes we are asked
\nto get good at something we have
\nno talent for,
\nor we excel at something we will never
\nhave the opportunity to prove.<\/p>\n

Often we ask ourselves
\nto make absolute sense
\nout of what just happens,
\nand in this way, what we are practicing<\/p>\n

is suffering,
\nwhich everybody practices,
\nbut strangely few of us
\ngrow graceful in.<\/p>\n

The climaxes of suffering are complex,
\ncostly, beautiful, but secret.
\nBruce never played the light switch again.<\/p>\n

So the avenues we walk down,
\nfull of bodies wearing faces,
\nare full of hidden talent:
\nenough to make pianos moan,
\nsidewalks split,
\nstreetlights deliriously flicker.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Tony Hoagland [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[Image: “Golden Rectangle,” by “Greg” (user “sightrays”) on Flickr. (Used here under a Creative Commons license; thank you!) The explanation at that page provides much more detail than I can here. The gist, though, is that a “golden spiral” appears to home in on a particular point — where the diagonals of the two rectangles […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19013,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Chesterton, Ackerman, Hoagland, et al., on the mysterious numberings of the universe: 'The Handwriting on Belshazzar's Wall'","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[247,1393,5,251,4159],"tags":[66,236,1972,2728,4513,4514,4515],"class_list":{"0":"post-19010","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ruminations","8":"category-whiskey-river-runningaftermyhat","9":"category-06_writing","10":"category-poetry-writing_cat","11":"category-essays","12":"tag-gk-chesterton","13":"tag-geometry","14":"tag-mathematics","15":"tag-tony-hoagland","16":"tag-joan-graham","17":"tag-kevin-mcfadden","18":"tag-golden-rectangle","19":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/goldenrectangle_gregsightrays_thumb.jpg?fit=640%2C471&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-4WC","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19010","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19010"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19010\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19020,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19010\/revisions\/19020"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19013"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19010"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19010"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19010"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}