Feb 2019
THE KIND OF THINGS POETS THINK/DO
all its little life
the triangle longed to be
a circle
"I want to get around!"
it piped up
in its little Isosceles voice
"It's...it's preposterous!"
screamed his mother Scalenely
"...whoever heard of such a thing!"
"You should be proud of your lines!"
scolded its grandpa
Equilaterally
"A triangle can not be..."
said his Papa in a right angled kind of way
"...anything other than a triangle!"
"I always felt I was a circle
trapped inside
a triangle's body!"
one day a passing poet
eavesdropped in an idle moment
on what the lines were saying
"Why ever not...why
ever not" said the poet
poet chaps tend to think like that
so he erased the brave
little Isosceles
drew him again as a circle
"Wheee!"
laughed the former Isosceles triangle
delighting in its circle-ness
this is the kind of things
poets think of...
. . .poets do.
all its little life
the triangle longed to be
a circle
"I want to get around!"
it piped up
in its little Isosceles voice
"It's...it's preposterous!"
screamed his mother Scalenely
"...whoever heard of such a thing!"
"You should be proud of your lines!"
scolded its grandpa
Equilaterally
"A triangle can not be..."
said his Papa in a right angled kind of way
"...anything other than a triangle!"
"I always felt I was a circle
trapped inside
a triangle's body!"
one day a passing poet
eavesdropped in an idle moment
on what the lines were saying
"Why ever not...why
ever not" said the poet
poet chaps tend to think like that
so he erased the brave
little Isosceles
drew him again as a circle
"Wheee!"
laughed the former Isosceles triangle
delighting in its circle-ness
this is the kind of things
poets think of...
. . .poets do.
***
‘Art is nothing but this slow trek to discover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence [your] heart first opened.’
So said Camus...I never forgot my first circle and triangle and dodecahedron . I was sad I couldn't get the dodecahedron into the poem but then a poet is a person of many faces and facets so I guess it gets represented in this symbolic way.
A poet I guess, to be more precise, would more likely be a pyritohedron because it has an irregular pentagonal dodecahedron, having the same topology as the regular one but pyritohedral symmetry while the tetartoid has tetrahedral symmetry.
When one thinks that there are 6,384,634 topologically distinct convex dodecahedra, excluding mirror images—the number of vertices ranges from 8 to 20. (Two polyhedra are "topologically distinct" if they have intrinsically different arrangements of faces and vertices, such that it is impossible to distort one into the other simply by changing the lengths of edges or the angles between edges or faces)one can see the vistas that loom large in the eye of the poet and the choices constructed as stellations of the convex form. It's a kind of...I don't know... geometric degree of freedom with limiting cases ...ahhh you have to do it to understand it really. Now to get back to that Camus feeling about writing and the utter simplicity of the circle and how a triangle forms in the mind...it's a long slow trek.
But then as Nietzsche always was telling me, "Donal..." he'd be forever saying:
"We have art so as not to die of reality!" or was it "We have art lest we perish from the truth." It was hard to make out his mumblings from under that grand moustache.
"Are you a moustache or a man?" I'd joke back at him.
***
How lots of things get written...trying to make it interesting for my little girl by "story-ing" so she could take it on board in an imaginative way. Just the simple task of teaching her how to draw circles and triangles by hand and without thought...just the pleasure of Klee's "taking a line for a walk." Not an explanation of mathematical thought...she was only five but a fun way to get her to know how these things form when a pencil wants to draw them...bonky or with a ruler. The story helped push her into knowledge slowly and with ease.
‘Art is nothing but this slow trek to discover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence [your] heart first opened.’
So said Camus...I never forgot my first circle and triangle and dodecahedron . I was sad I couldn't get the dodecahedron into the poem but then a poet is a person of many faces and facets so I guess it gets represented in this symbolic way.
A poet I guess, to be more precise, would more likely be a pyritohedron because it has an irregular pentagonal dodecahedron, having the same topology as the regular one but pyritohedral symmetry while the tetartoid has tetrahedral symmetry.
When one thinks that there are 6,384,634 topologically distinct convex dodecahedra, excluding mirror images—the number of vertices ranges from 8 to 20. (Two polyhedra are "topologically distinct" if they have intrinsically different arrangements of faces and vertices, such that it is impossible to distort one into the other simply by changing the lengths of edges or the angles between edges or faces)one can see the vistas that loom large in the eye of the poet and the choices constructed as stellations of the convex form. It's a kind of...I don't know... geometric degree of freedom with limiting cases ...ahhh you have to do it to understand it really. Now to get back to that Camus feeling about writing and the utter simplicity of the circle and how a triangle forms in the mind...it's a long slow trek.
But then as Nietzsche always was telling me, "Donal..." he'd be forever saying:
"We have art so as not to die of reality!" or was it "We have art lest we perish from the truth." It was hard to make out his mumblings from under that grand moustache.
"Are you a moustache or a man?" I'd joke back at him.
***
How lots of things get written...trying to make it interesting for my little girl by "story-ing" so she could take it on board in an imaginative way. Just the simple task of teaching her how to draw circles and triangles by hand and without thought...just the pleasure of Klee's "taking a line for a walk." Not an explanation of mathematical thought...she was only five but a fun way to get her to know how these things form when a pencil wants to draw them...bonky or with a ruler. The story helped push her into knowledge slowly and with ease.
