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One of the subtle yet profound joys of working with clay on a potter’s wheel is that you will inevitably make shapes that found their way more in spite of you than because of you, because the clay sent you urgent “I’m-Not-Right-Yet” messages, forcing you to wrestle. You finally reach a compromise and relax to the inevitable, and you find that the shape you have made looks familiar; then you realize that shapes nearly identical to yours were first introduced to the civilized world thousands of years ago. You are extending an ancient tradition, and interacting with your ancestors. You may even be connected with the Infinite.

2021 0611 icad11

While working on this card, thoughts came of mathematics, and then the Symbolist artist Odilon Redon. The math thoughts began almost immediately as I drew some ovals and then made them into flat toruses. It occurred to me that I was inventing laws for them. Examples: the ovals must not touch each other, but they will follow some sort of hard-to-discern alignment. Round-sided triangles will intersect them and change the shade of their insides. The background will have a similar tone-change, seen through the insides of the ovals.

And then, as I ground my pencil into the index card to make the background very, very dark, I thought of Redon, who lovingly called some of his charcoal drawings mes noirs–My Blacks. He liked black. “Black is the most essential color,” he said.

And it came to me that one of his noirs had the title “The Eye, Like a Strange Balloon, Mounts Toward Infinity.” Looked at the card I’d near-finished and something went clickclickclick. Some of the math I learned as a first-semester calculus student, almost half a century ago, had to do with summations, and limits, and what happens when the value of the unknown labeled x approaches . . . infinity.

The summation symbol is the greek Sigma, which looks like this: Σ (lazy M? Broken E? Yet in the Greek alphabet, it represents the S sound. Go figure!). A loose interpretation of the way I Sigma-ized and finished this card is “This is the limit of ICAD 2021 card #11 as G Bowers June 2021 approaches Infinity.” Mathematically all wrong, but artistically acknowledging the influence of Odilon Redon (and also my Drawing & Composition teacher Darlene Goto, who urged us always to render “Darker darks!!”) and revealing a greater truth than the false mathematics: Everything, and all of us, in however minuscule a way, approach Infinity.

I had ten minutes before I would probably be late for the bus. I drew a hand, and its reachout aspect suggested an arm, so the arm ended up reaching for a moon, but we’ve all been there with that one, so do a series of spiraling spheres engulfing and whooshing through the outstretchedness, which needs more than an arm, so becomes a guy-or-not with spiked hair, communing with Infinity, and what original thing might we say about humankind’s communion with Infinity? Make it ten words or less, Bud. You have a bus to catch.

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Tip of the hat to the late Martin Gardner, polymath and numbers man who wrote the “Mathematical Games” column for Scientific American for many years. This page is really about Luck, and posits that there is no such thing, good or bad. There’s just good and bad and in between, in shifting emulsification. –Maybe. What the Hell do I know?

2020 1214 nes 169

2019 0714 infinitie catI have owned cats, and cats have owned me. I have loved women with cats, and in every instance I have loved their cats. It cannot be otherwise.

infinitie cat

insatiable creature quells the cynic
neonifies the photons to actinic
for kicks conducts an effortlessness clinic

if frisky, what a fresh bouquet of freesia
no jumps through hoops would ever so much please ya
it’s just rare times you’d wish milk of amnesia

this friendly foe’s st. francis and iscariot
it’s sometimes motel 6, sometimes the marriott
each trip though’s on a cosmic-powered chariot

 

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Apologies for the crude rushedness of the drawing. As has happened before, I was running out of disposable time before reporting to Night Clerk duty. What I intended was, at top left, a closeup of a flying insect; then down through the diagonal a closeup of the top of a building; then a not-so-closeup of a couple of skyscrapers, looking town at them; then the Earth-Moon pair; then the Milky Way Galaxy from afar. I like the conception; I’m ashamed of the execution. But I think the double-acrostic poem is OK without adornment. Here are the words:

Defining space & time is not unpeeling a banana
Infinity is out of bounds beyond a mortal span
Sequential myths abound & all untrue as ABC
Though we all chase them ardently, horizons tend to flee

 

From top to bottom, and left to right:

First there is a sandwich. “Home is where the Cardioid is” is the bread, and that heart-shaped function dubbed the Cardioid is the meat. Then is the classic, simple equation f=ma: Force equals Mass times Acceleration. To its immediate right is the example of a gun firing a bullet. When a bullet is stopped, it accelerates its mass of lead from, say, 1000 ft/sec to 0 ft/sec in very little time–a forceful wallop indeed.

Next is the Math Thematics acrostic:

Mapping reality calls 4 sum thought
Minds hear the challenge [congruent-] equals flame 4 a moth

Antwerp, Armenia, Cannes, Chillicothe

Tackrooms & classrms & Batcaves by Gotham
Teach us Utopia–give us Golgotha

Here be the dragons of all & of naught
Here asymptotes may be deadly as Gotti
Half-solved equations turn sum cyanotic
Heroes’ resolve gives us answers by lots

Under the first acrostic is a gap described (and, ironically, filled) [discontinuity]. One example of a discontinuity is when the curve of a graph shoots upward to infinity and then an infinitesimal smidge to the right comes up from the depths of negative infinity.

Under the ungap is a Mathematical quadruple acrostic:

Menthol-vaporic
Arrangements–a
Testimonial thrill

Menthol-Vaporic doesn’t quite rhyme with Euphoric, so it becomes the best phrase I can come up with to describe the frustrating ecstasy Mathematical matters have provided me over the years.

To the acrostic’s right is a graphicrepresentation of the square root of minus one, also known as i. To its right is a pirate intoning “i, lad!”

Under the second acrostic is an imagined bumper sticker that reads “Σ: That sums it up.” Σ, the Greek alphabet letter known as Sigma, is the mathematical symbol for summation.

To the bumper sticker’s right (and the pirate’s left) is an equation which reads Infinity divided by Zero does not equal Anything. And, indeed, Anything, including Zero AND Infinity, divided by Zero is what the mathematics realm deems Undefined. However, I vaguely recall from second-semester Calculus taken about thirty-six years ago that there’s something called L’Hôpital’s Rule which allows us to skate around such obstacles in special cases. (Interested parties may do a search on YouTube; I just discovered, in obtaining via search the proper circumflex-and-all spelling of “L’Hôpital,” that there’s an introductory video in YouTubeVille.)

Under the equation is the final, fudgy triple acrostic “Math Them At[t]ics”:

Millennia dictate melancholia
As a threshold means an entrant
The quad takes the quadratic
Humanity’s limits are curves

Finally, at bottom is my signature and date.

I leave meaning-derivation as an exercise for the student. Good luck with that, Friend!

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Here are the words, which are not only snaky but go behind objects:

VelociRapture’s easier to mock than to accept
Or so it seems to one who’s stunned from go go go go go
Recursion’s that divertissement that takes unextra step
To plow through tweaked [infinity] where Tiny makes it so
Inconsequentiality’s what gives the grave its sting
Conversely, knowing that they MATTERED helps most folks feel Super
Understanding Truth it pays to linger on the lingua
Leaving an Escape Clause should you need to fly the coop
A relative positioning will get us low or high
Remaining are unfathomed depths that boil down to Why

This is yet another excursion into Vorticularity. I keep coming back to the subject…inexorably…as if drawn into it…

The truth is, the stuff we’re made of exerts a force on everything else, everywhere. It’s in the equations both Newtonian and Einsteinian. Even a paper clip influences the farthest star.

My own private vortex-maker is my pencil, which is also my ambassador, my spokesmodel, and my toy. I will never be so poor as not to be able to scare up a pencil stub and an illustration substrate. If I were desperate, I’d sneak onto the nearest golf course and lift a scorecard and a pencil from the rack by the clubhouse. They’re complimentary, which is one modest earmark of Civilized Intercourse (that was an awful pun, folks).

I have posted this on a Facebook 30-day artist’s challenge, and a friend of mine commented “Wheeeee!” I’m glad she enjoyed the ride. I hope you do too.