There is nothing more absurd than to enter the arena of science with a proposal that emotion belongs there too. Surely, there is nothing more foolish either. Unless it is to ask out loud, to the one who holds your heart, "would you be my valentine?"
In actual life, such risks are contained by their moment for sure. Perhaps the love is already hinted at. Or if too much of a stretch, well then that poor lovelorn fool is already out of the commerce in feelings and needs some social training. If anyone cares even so much.
But the rewards are so great. Especially if there is a certainty about the implicit offer proffered. How I long for that certainty, now sublimated here, into words of abstract love. I am certain of what I offer you, gentle reader, please know that.
It is rather that in the particulars of mind meeting mind or body meeting body, I have nothing left but to break the abstract/physical divide right along with that artificial and fictional one between mind and body. I have no right to the attempt, coming as I do from a legacy of emotional retardation, combined with self-righteous reasoning. Lawyers and engineers, with mothers kept and treasured.
I ponder, for a moment, whether there have been any important female mathematicians. Have there? Could this be another embarrassment of the sort which saw mainstream Larry Summers repudiated from Harvard? The regions of cutting edge mathematics offer few rewards and many risks for sure, if you consider the very real prospect of losing your mind, the actual fate of so disproportionately many. Or is there something about pure abstraction which makes it the province of the masculine?
Often, I speak of my project as though it were to redress an imbalance all too often historically (I refer to mankind's incredibly brief written history here) tipped in the masculine direction. I'm thinking of warfare and competition and odysseys of exploration, not to mention who's always been in charge. For sure, the surprising shift I propose to the language of science takes it in a very feminine direction; bounding as it does the otherwise apparently perpetual questing after ever more complete abstraction.
I don't have the language - the formal training in and control of words, which would take so many more years of study and a disposition much more favorably disposed than mine to learning systems of thought. I don't really know how to define abstraction, nor to what it is opposed. But I have in mind something like the Platonic forms, taken away from the physical substrate which can only shadow them imperfectly. And therefore, as the heretofore project of science, I have in mind a kind of perfect mapping between this abstract space and everything, sort of, sub-emotional about our cosmos.
But just as I have long since lost my lust for shopping, and thus long for a different economy than one which builds on human individuals' seeking after authenticity, so I wonder that anyone seeks more perfect understanding of the physical cosmos. I wonder what still awaits discovery which wouldn't fill my particular soul with compounded ennui. Perpetual energy? Perfect health? The avoidance of all accident or death?
These things have been approximated more than sufficiently, leaving only the matter of distribution to be resolved. Our individual clamorings and clawings after something special for ourselves, or some perfect security which must mean pure repose in absolute assurance that we are the object of most everyone's desire; these wants have surely turned dysfunctional by more than half.
Now, having reached the edge and containing boundary of what can be known or reached, we must look at and to each other for mysteries far deeper and more impossibly unbounded. The alternative is to drown in our own ejected garbage, which we once did think could never fill our own small nest. Or to be deafened in an echo chamber whose walls we once thought more distant. And whose only interesting contents turned out to be the sound dampening living creatures already so wantonly destroyed in manly quest for certainty against life's torment.
God, of course, could never be a woman. The matrix, rather, is what God opposes; apotheosized abstraction and removal from.
Love too, is Platonic abstraction. Here below there is only messy implication with other lives and their cares. Far short of ever after, it is time to turn in the direction of love in the here and now. I surely haven't a clue about how to do it.
Happy Valentine's, nonetheless!
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