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After he had watched the movie {proof} he got a little angry and then quite sad

His own brain harbored no delusions but it was shrinking and had gone from a fusion reactor of ideas and insights to a sputtering engine with bad carburetion

And the movie did drive home how finite Earthly time can be

So he suddenly felt the urge to settle his affairs of the heart

Got out many pens and markers and dozens of sheets of his letterhead stationery

Wrote a sonnet that would apply to every one of the fourteen significant lovers he had had

And then wrote thirteen more sonnets similarly themed but unique to each lover

Retaining the final line in its original form for all fourteen of them

It was the line that was most absolutely true yet would mean something different to each person:

I so regret we did not make more love.

He sent most of the messages by snail mail. Two he scanned and e-mailed. One, the sonnet in its original form, he kept, because the lady was dead.

.

As often happens, attempts to settle affairs end up with the affairs being more unsettled than ever

but that,

to use a phrase found in many mathematics textbooks,

is “beyond the scope” of this account.

In this image I exploit the checkerboard-patterning connotation of Victory (a checkered flag is waved when the first automobile crosses the finish line in certain international races) and I fill some of the whitespace with certain considerations. One less obvious consideration is the basic function-notation of algebraic variable x, conventionally rendered “f(x)” and pronounced “eff uv ecks.” It is a shorthand way of saying that a variable is being put through a process, perhaps, but not necessarily, describing something happening in the physical world.

2021 0622 icad2021 threefer

For those not in the know, “threefer” is American slang for “three for one.” It is also Gary slang for “triptych.” 🙂

The leftmost card features four similar-sounding words, with an attempt to visually make metaphors of the words. So “deifying” has a celestial tang; “defying” emphasizes the “fy” in the middle, which could well stand for “fuck you;” “DEAFENING” has a huge first syllable, which diminishes the “sound” of the last two syllables; and “defining” has the look of an entry in a dictionary, wherein one may find definitions. Not only does doing this feed my Poetry Beast, it is also a tip of the hat to one of my grade-school art teachers, Mrs. Johnson, who once had us think of a word we could demonstrate, e.g. make the letters of the word TALL tall, grow some hair on the word FUZZY, and so forth.

The middle card has a mesmerized mathematician at upper right, a pole dancer up the pole at center stage, and a festoonment of math symbology and equation fragments throughout. “What the Mathematician Saw at the Strip Club.” This is loosely inspired by Nobel-Prizewinning physicist Richard Feynman’s recollections of his strip-joint experiences, as published in Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! Adventures of a Curious Character. But my drawn mathematician does not bear any resemblance to Dr. Feynman, because his character is quite different, being enamored of the dancer and imagining what the possibilities of Booty were as She [dancer] approaches Me [mathematician]. A bit of combinatorial meandering, mixing playfulness and pathos.

The rightmost card is a drawing of an earthmover that illustrates my double-acrostic poem “Earth Mover.” I do so love the look and dynamics of these mechanized beasts, and do so hate the effect they have on animal habitats. My special Jiminy Cricket in these matters is American/British actress Beth Porter, whom many of you may have seen in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. Beth once gave me a stern lecture of the effect of the palm-oil industry on the habitat of orangutans. And she was absolutely right to do so. “Earth Mover” is dedicated to Beth, with gratitude for making me more mindful.

Earth Mover

Engaging Soil to build a dream
Entrepreneurs may break a seam

Anticipating GO/NO-GO
Are machinations to & fro

Reverse & forward brake & rev
Reraise relower D r o p & Lev

The ground resists is indiscrete
Then Horsepower makes a dig complete

Here rises dwelling-place provider
Here falls the Habitat abider

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.

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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