by
Hugh R. Whinfrey
The handmaiden status of poetry to the quantitative sciences has evoked many self-assessments by the maiden in attempts to regain control of her own soul and to walk with the same sense of self-dignity as the other disciplines of the mind. Poetry has suffered a sense of having been subordinated, the same loss of self-esteem and willpower that goes hand-in-hand with the feeling of having been conquered. A fierce inner resistance still glows, yet the outward obedience is only occasionally broken by frustrated outbursts of defiance.
The matter lies entirely in the repeated and overpowering rape of the truth of poetry by the objective sciences. Plato took what what was of use to him from poetry, and exiled the rest from the Republic for fear of its unconquerable aspects. Fascism may have been born with Plato.
All the various movements in poetry from the classical age on through the present age seem to be have begun with the intent of exercising a rationalization of the subordinate status quo of poetry in the hope that it would lead to a comfortably definitive resolution of the violence of the rape. In the end, these movements all turn out to be just palliatives.
The multiplicity of these movements in our century may be viewed as either that they all had unusually weak palliative effects or that the frequency and intensity of the rape itself has grown. In either event, I would conclude that our society is at a watershed in that we are losing control of our ability to suppress our individual humanity.
It therefore seems inevitable that some radical transformations of our way of life are on the horizon, and I would suggest that these transformations will be complete only when the richness of a palliative allows it to placate for many centuries at a time before it becomes weak enough to need replacement.
The subject of this essay is then a proposal of one possible method to achieve this transformed state of affairs. The crux of the problem is the handmaiden status of poetry, and that all possible passive responses to objective science are dangerously close to being exhausted.
Poetry needs to make some active assertions about the proper stage for its performances, and cease to accept the sacredness of the stage reserved for the quantitative sciences. It needs to intrude without fear into the box seats, having been allotted only general admission tickets. This implies a fundamental re-definition of the conventional scope of poetry. It also implies a conflict and some battles. These are inevitable as argued earlier. The point is that the will to fight these battles is very close to breaking out of its suppressed status.
Mathematics is a form of human communication. It is the language of the quantitative sciences. A language is simply a set of conventions facilitating communication and may be visual, verbal or symbolic. Poetry involves, among other things, a self-consciousness of the language which is absent from non-poetic discourse. A mathematics textbook therefore contains almost exclusively poetic uses of the language. Poetic usages of language, and any language at that, are the province of poetry. Poetry as a discipline touches on all other disciplines, even Plato acknowledges this. However that aspects of poetry are fundamentally at the core of all other disciplines needs to be boldly proclaimed.
The point is that instead of acknowledging the separateness of mathematics and poetry, or seeking a mathematical characterization of poetry, a poetic characterization of mathematics is precisely the manner in which to subdue the beast. I submit that this characterization will inevitably proceed as a by-product of the current state of our society.
The effect of such a poetic characterization of mathematics would be to reign in the pedantic arrogance of the quantitative sciences and to re-connect them with the human condition, thus facilitating the purging of the emotions associated with the aforementioned rape.
Exactly what would constitute a poetic characterization of mathematics needs some description and examples. The extent of a symbiotic relationship between poetry and mathematics could be fleshed out, beginning perhaps with an exposition of the necessity of images to each of them:
E=MC2 is indeed a signifier of an image, and a poetic one at that. The mathematical expression is not understood by one who cannot produce a particular image in response to the equation. That an infinity of particular images exist which are appropriate to the signifier is simply a function of the deliberate ambiguity of the language of the expression. The point is that the reader must find at least one such image in order to comprehend the expression.
Mathematics can as easily as any other discipline be deconstructed and all we need to do is shine a very bright spotlight on the contradictions:
A three-year old who has watched a campfire burn at night intuitively comprehends E=MC2 when he looks at the ashes in the morning. The adult world creates the poetic irony of the equation by going to great lengths to explain that while his image is false, his comprehension of it is nevertheless true. A more "educated" image of protons turning into explosions is again poetically ironic in that while the image is true, it violates the truth of the law of conservation of mass.
It can be pointed out that mathematics is simply a language that is used to describe our limited and incomplete comprehensions of nature, and is not identical with nature herself:
The point is that the significance of E=MC2 originates not in "nature" nor in the language of mathematics, but in the human condition, which is the point of reference for all poetic ironies.
There is ample room for the critique of poetic styles and techniques in mathematics:
Furthermore the objective truth of E=MC2 is not altered if we subtract the cube root of the weight in grams of a Boeing 747 from each side. That we prefer the one form of the equation to the other is simply a matter of economizing the language of the equation to the base essentials necessary for the triggering of the image rather than a prohibition on advertising in the mathematics of the objective sciences. The quantification of force in units of Newtons shows that such advertising does in fact pervade the language.
The infinite regressions of signifiers which create such a problem for the mathematical characterization of poetry are in fact a weakness of mathematics and not of poetry. In the same manner that Plato tried to exile poets from the Republic, mathematics hides its dirty laundry in its number system:
All one has to do is contemplate the number system that our mathematical functions operate upon to realize that the concept of the true existence of any number other than 1 involves a radical act of metaphysical speculation which is consistently rejected in the quest for such things as a unified field theory and other elaborate expressions of conceptually simple identities.
Even the personal expressiveness of mathematical thought can be highlighted:
Einstein's personality is illustrated by both his desire to invent a scientific formula which nobody could disprove and the salesmanship required of him to convince the scientific community to accept E=MC2. Who knows how many other mathematical formulas which cannot be disproved never found their way into currency due to a lack of aggressive salesmanship?
The above give enough examples to illustrate what is meant by a poetic characterization of mathematics. It hopefully should be obvious from the examples that most of the concepts employed in literary criticism can be productively focused on mathematics and the quantitative sciences. I certainly have no preconceptions of what could be synthesized out of the data produced by such a focus, other than to suspect that the results may border on the exotic and ultimately touch the self-confidences of individuals, which of course makes for a long-lasting palliative.
The overall point is that literary criticism has nothing other than timidity preventing it from attempting a poetic characterization of mathematics. Such a characterization is not only possible, but long overdue, and proceeding with it is only a matter of the self-confidence of one's own perspective. The un-scientificness of such an endeavor is a concern only to those whose territory is being invaded by an enemy with weapons they cannot defeat.
Personally, I see the danger of inaction at this time to be that our technology will run so far away from us that the virtual reality of "Lawnmower Man" will be substituted for life itself which is the greatest virtual reality conceivable, and such a step in my opinion would be devolution rather than evolution.
Seattle, June 1993.