Coming to naught

[bodkin]

Coming to naught

All zeros are the same zero, they say
scribbling on the whiteboard in that winter's day
seminar. Your car was iced and bitter
that morning as you chipped out of your bed
and drove away from the news of a parent rubbed
out slowly from the prime of the flow.
Where do you go, when maths is what you know?
You go to number theory, and snub
your cares--if only for a little while.
So... no apples are no lemons and no pencil is no sheep
and the empty set is less, a basic yearning
to be filled with anything in any style.
Until, chairs stacked, we're done. There is no returning.

[Antcliff]

Excellent.

Works very well, both in conveying mood and combining that with the background empty set idea. Fun, but also oddly moving.

Especially liked this..

a basic yearning
to be filled with anything in any style.

And this..

no apples are no lemons and no pencil is no sheep

If I were forced to quibble, I wonder whether cutting this would really be a loss...

There is no returning.

But, as I said, tis excellent. Right up my street.


Seth
p.s. gotta love the empty set, one of the all time great character actors from philosophy of maths classes. Well, either that or the set of all sets that are not members of themselves.

[bodkin]

Or the set of all sets that cannot be used to form paradoxes...

Thanks Seth! I maybe agree with you on the end, it is just that ending on "we're done." felt too abrupt...

Ian

[NotQuiteSure]

Enjoyed this bodkin.
Good opening, but do you need 'they say'?
I think the line would look stronger on the page without it.
'iced and bitter', like the image and how it flows into 'chipped...',
I just wonder if you can't do better than 'iced' (frost, glacial, Arctic...). Even simply 'ice and bitter'?
Would love to know why this is 'prime of the flow' (L6 ),
as it seems to want to be read as 'flow of their prime'. (Though perhaps that's just me)
Following Seth to the end, two alternatives:
Until, chairs stacked, the lesson is over.
Until, chairs stacked, the class is dismissed.
Regards, Not.

[David]

I like this too, but probably in a more uncomprehending way than Seth or Not. Maths - especially further maths, if that is what this is - is a closed book to me. (And I was very happy to close it.) What's all this about sets? (NB: Rhetorical question only.)

Cheers

David

[ray miller]

I like the stoicism, the humour, the dignity. I don't know how you chip yourself out of bed, or what the prime of the flow is, for that matter.

Where do you go, when maths is what you know? - that's a lovely line.

I also don't get the no apples... section. Great finish, though.

[1lankest]

Like David, I enjoyed this for its lyricism and for the general quality of the writing. I am ignorant of the maths, but I do think there are broader meanings in this that I did access (escapism, futility/impossibility).

Could you add a second verse, with an alternative/opposite mathematical reality?

Not sure that makes sense - philosophically, mathematically, but it sounds great interesting!

L

[bjondon]

Hello Ian,

a fine winter's seminar. Bleak and sorrowful but redeemed by the intricate workmanship and maybe a hint of dour comedy : the lemon- pencil - sheep improvised progression and possibly the use of that word 'chipped' - right or wrong I can't make my mind up, it adds a kind of absurd spark.

So many good things about this . . . I especially liked the way 'snub' grows out of 'number theory'.

The last sentence does feel too ponderous though, right as the rhythm and rhyme are. Maybe blunt it a little by replacing 'There is' with 'And no, there's'.

Julian

[bodkin]

Hi all,

Sorry, the board's been down and after that I've not been paying attention.

I'll try to reply properly and thank people tomorrow...

Ian

[Macavity]

Yes, agree with Seth. Excellent. The 'whiteness' reminds me of another of your poems...

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=22418&p=188386

best

mac

[bjondon]

Second bite: There are some puzzles in this wonderful piece which may well have been thrown to us as wabi-sabi-style bones to chew on . . . Perhaps I can persuade the poet to give us a close reading of at least L4 by spilling my own version of what I think is going on.

So . . . both an exposition of grief and a metaphysical debate between the opposing truth-telling devices of maths and poetry, this little word machine gives us a miniature planetary system of wintery, mortality-infused metaphors circling around the white hole of an 'empty set', something even more than an absence.

The equivalences of maths are reductive, simplifying, whereas the tendency of metaphor and simile is to ramify, to expand outwards in a cloud of associative meanings. Really, maths and poetry should be terrible bedfellows, yet here, via this extraordinary translation of the empty set, the ultimate zero, we are pushed through into a zone where lemons equal sheep and pencils might as well be apples. More like the superpositions of electron 'shells' than the orrery of newtonian mechanics our metaphors, our meanings have broken down. This is what grief does.

To cut back to some of the more specific mechanics of the poem. It begins and ends with a truism: the first qualified or credited with that excellent little falling-off ',they say' ; the last one asserted, as if earned. . . I am beginning to accept its awkwardness (something more in keeping with the 'result' of the title would have been neater) as perhaps a necessary fault.

The narrative is fairly clear: most of the action seems to take place in the mind of a maths lecturer standing with his/her back to the rather brilliantly invisible class of students (an empty class?). I love the relentless deadpan piling on of metaphors of futility culminating in that last peremptory 'Until, chairs stacked, we're done.' - both comical and devastating. But something quite odd is going on in that initial disassociated second-person flashback to the journey into college :-
' . . .Your car was iced and bitter
that morning as you chipped out of bed
and drove away . . . '
I read 'Your car' as both concrete and potentially metaphorical - the iced and bitter husk of the soul. The word 'chipped' teases us with the possibility of de-icing the windscreen but then suddenly we're back in bed or rather 'chipping out of it' . . . Perhaps 'chipped' is the way the N has wilfully thrown themself into the morning's routine. You can also chip out of a bed of stone. The ambiguities and the reverse time skip lodge in the brain, but they don't interupt the flow. The lyrics/metrics, as I think someone mentioned are superb. So, one curious dead leaf on a perfect lawn . . . as unresolvable perhaps as it should be.

The final equivalence of this poem is simply grief. It does seem extraordinary that we have to go through this lingual/semantic dance to get there - but it was necessary. Words turn to ashes on our tongues, communication is immensely difficult. Every good poem fights and somehow wins that battle. This one takes us on that journey, but also zooms out to give us an almost 3 dimensional diagram of what we have done.

J

[bodkin]

Thanks all,

A couple of people question "prime of the flow"... but all I mean is the obvious (I thought it obvious) e.g. "life". Prime as in main part, a parent is (or was once) the main part of your life, and flow as in river as in time as in life, etc etc...

NQS -- I like "iced" for its double meaning of "as in cake" and "as in frost"...

I quite like your alternative endings, but I think my original is growing on me now. I like that it because for me it has a sense of "framing" the piece... e.g. we've been digressing into maths, but now we are returning to the main point which is bereavement (or Alzheimer's, which is almost worse...) It's not so direct "frame" as in some poems, but it is a kind of coming full circle, I hope?

Ray -- you chip yourself out of bed because on a cold morning it's a slow and unwelcome process like chipping out your car...

Luke -- I'm not sure there's much deeper in the maths. Mathematicians really do consider that zero of anything is equal to zero of anything else (disclaimer: I am not etc... and also there's multiple branches of maths which make different assumptions) In computer science it is often an error to compare apples and pears, even if there are none of either of them. The empty set is represented as {} and is a kind of nothing, not even zero, not even a set with zero in it {0} (although the crossed out zero sometimes used on computers is a symbol for the empty set in more formal surroundings...)

Julian -- I like your suggestion for the end as a weakening of it, but I don't like that it's a change into a more "chatty" voice...

mac -- we all come back to the same ideas sometimes, don't we. Thanks!

Thanks all, Julian, I'll consider your more verbose second reply in its own post...

Ian

[bodkin]

Second bite: There are some puzzles in this wonderful piece which may well have been thrown to us as wabi-sabi-style bones to chew on . . . Perhaps I can persuade the poet to give us a close reading of at least L4 by spilling my own version of what I think is going on.

Have I explained enough above?

So . . . both an exposition of grief and a metaphysical debate between the opposing truth-telling devices of maths and poetry, this little word machine gives us a miniature planetary system of wintery, mortality-infused metaphors circling around the white hole of an 'empty set', something even more than an absence.

The equivalences of maths are reductive, simplifying, whereas the tendency of metaphor and simile is to ramify, to expand outwards in a cloud of associative meanings. Really, maths and poetry should be terrible bedfellows, yet here, via this extraordinary translation of the empty set, the ultimate zero, we are pushed through into a zone where lemons equal sheep and pencils might as well be apples. More like the superpositions of electron 'shells' than the orrery of newtonian mechanics our metaphors, our meanings have broken down. This is what grief does.

Yes, I was getting at the emptiness and coldness of grief... I'm not sure about the electron shells, as those are a thing (or at least the electrons are) rather than a zero, but yes, I always thought the equivalence of zeros was a fascinating idea, and the correlation with grief is kind of a: "when everything is gone, if no-longer matters what is gone" -- sort of place...

To cut back to some of the more specific mechanics of the poem. It begins and ends with a truism: the first qualified or credited with that excellent little falling-off ',they say' ; the last one asserted, as if earned. . . I am beginning to accept its awkwardness (something more in keeping with the 'result' of the title would have been neater) as perhaps a necessary fault.

I think I've come to like the end now. Yes it's a bit of a cliché and a bit editorial, but it is also a turning away from the more abstract stuff of the main poem and as I said elsewhere, a sort of circling back to the start...

The narrative is fairly clear: most of the action seems to take place in the mind of a maths lecturer standing with his/her back to the rather brilliantly invisible class of students (an empty class?).

Interesting. I won't say you are wrong, but for me the N was a student (albeit maybe a more mature postgraduate...) It doesn't invalidate anything and maybe I like your take better anyway...

I love the relentless deadpan piling on of metaphors of futility culminating in that last peremptory 'Until, chairs stacked, we're done.' - both comical and devastating. But something quite odd is going on in that initial disassociated second-person flashback to the journey into college :-
' . . .Your car was iced and bitter
that morning as you chipped out of bed
and drove away . . . '
I read 'Your car' as both concrete and potentially metaphorical - the iced and bitter husk of the soul. The word 'chipped' teases us with the possibility of de-icing the windscreen but then suddenly we're back in bed or rather 'chipping out of it' . . . Perhaps 'chipped' is the way the N has wilfully thrown themself into the morning's routine. You can also chip out of a bed of stone. The ambiguities and the reverse time skip lodge in the brain, but they don't interupt the flow. The lyrics/metrics, as I think someone mentioned are superb. So, one curious dead leaf on a perfect lawn . . . as unresolvable perhaps as it should be.

Thanks. I suspect I was being less clever but equally crafty. Less clever in that I was just literally referring to the difficulty of getting up and out in the wintertime -- but crafty in as much as winter's days, difficulty getting up, everyday tasks made harder -- these are all also aspects of grief...

The final equivalence of this poem is simply grief. It does seem extraordinary that we have to go through this lingual/semantic dance to get there - but it was necessary. Words turn to ashes on our tongues, communication is immensely difficult. Every good poem fights and somehow wins that battle. This one takes us on that journey, but also zooms out to give us an almost 3 dimensional diagram of what we have done.

J

Thank you, you've put a lot of effort into this,

and, since we didn't interact before, welcome to the board!

Ian