CLOUD AS AN OPEN SET MAPS ONTO THE HILLSIDE
under which we do and did sit
smelling the clover
then plucked
a stem which we would knot and
interlace with
another stem forming
a chain of clover in simple knots
as each cloud
of clover blossom
desiccates it loses something life
some of us grew
tired of the game arose
and returned home green stains
on our clothes
were not a problem no one’s
mother noticed that night before dinner.
Were we in any way under the cloud
or under
the shadow of the cloud
the angle of sunlight against us
sharpening as
evening progressed
what is under is it a vision?
HAUSDORFF SPACES
It was like being inside a parachute
after landing—assuming survival—
the collapsing textures with light
shining through and the rotating
earth beneath you benign again.
He said. He had been loved.
A separation axiom, he said, has nothing
to do with love. Metrization, o love,
turns distance into desire, space into
place without distance. She is there
I am here but there, he explained,
being bounded but not totally bounded.
You had to be there, we said to each other.
But to be above yet falling, to be falling yet
to be unafraid, to be unafraid yet to know
reasons for fear, to be secure in knowledge
yet to respect ignorance as a kind of home:
This is not a lecture, he said, it is lunch.
He reached across her hands for wine
to pour for her, for her alone in her neighborhood.
© by Bin Ramke. Printed by permission of the author.
Bin Ramke holds the Phipps chair and is an Evans Professor at the University of Denver where he edits the Denver Quarterly and teaches literature and writing. His first book won the Yale Younger Poets Award; his 10th, Theory of Mind, New and Selected Poems, was published by Omnidawn, which will also publish his next book, Aerial, this spring.
The Chronicle Review‘s poetry blogger, Lisa Russ Spaar, notes: Jokes about soft-sole shoes, thick glasses, and pocket protectors aside, anyone who has seen Max Fischer’s math problem-solving fantasy scene in Wes Anderson’s Rushmore or exulted in genius Will Hunting’s stealth algebraic graph theory decoding missions while serving as a janitor at MIT in the eponymous film Good Will Hunting knows that mathematical ability holds a visceral appeal and powerful allure in our culture. One might also think of Roland ”Prez” Pryzbylewski, Baltimore city cop turned junior high mathematics teacher, who, in season four of The Wire, teaches his ghetto students probability lessons that they then use to win craps games and score cheddar in the streets. A gift for math, it seems, is almost better than requited love. Not that the two conditions are unrelated. As my daughter once reassured me while she was still in high school, “Mom, don’t worry. We all think smart is sexy.”
And just as experts in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields are often eager to apply their knowledge interdisciplinarily, poets, being magpies, are wont to appropriate concepts understood, and even partially understood fundamentals from scientific and mathematical disciplines and discourses, in service of their own work as well. For a while, in fact, it seemed impossible to pick up a current poetry quarterly or journal that did not contain at least one poem making a reference to Möbius strips or fractal geometries.
Not that poets writing about mathematics is a new phenomenon. In her article “Poetry Inspired by Mathematics,” Sarah Glaz (herself a poet), suggests a common ancestry for the two disciplines. “Writing and numbers, and by extension literature and mathematics,” she writes, grew out of “a need to keep track of a growing quantity of riches, in particular grain and cattle,” and the several examples she offers and to which she alludes include an ancient, anonymous Sumerian temple hymn (c. 1800 BC), Pablo Neruda’s “To Numbers” (in which he writes about “the thirst to know how many”), Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “A Mathematical Problem” (Glaz says the poet is “moved into verse by a beautiful geometric proof”), and Ted Munger and Jeremy Teitelbaum’s limericks inspired by Fermat’s Last Theorem. In “Mathematics in Poetry,” JoAnne Growney not only notes a number of poems that borrow mathematical subjects and imagery (pieces by Rita Dove, Howard Nemerov, Sislawa Szymborska, and Wallace Stevens, among others) but also cites poems, pieces by Lewis Carroll, for example, that employ mathematical processes and structures as well.
Bin Ramke, editor of the highly regarded and intrepid Denver Quarterly, is a poet who does both—that is, many of his poems employ mathematical discourse and imagery, but borrow from mathematical concepts and forms, as well. The fact that he appears to really walk his talk in his mathematically inspired poems may owe to his early training in the subject. When he was 16, he attended a National Science Foundation Program at the University of Texas, where the famous topologist R.L. Moore taught him a bit about point-set topology. Ramkes writes, “Many years later I realized how much his famous ‘Moore method’ was like a poetry writing workshop—and indeed even though I abandoned the study of mathematics for that of poetry, I have recently moved back into thinking and reading about mathematics as part of my thinking about poetry. This is due also to my reading Barry Mazur’s discussions of image and mathematical objects.”
As someone who never made it past Algebra III and Trigonometry in 11th grade, and who was for many years annually seized by panic at my children’s Back-to-School Nights whenever I’d enter the math classroom to find that the teacher had scribbled on the blackboard a problem for us parents to solve, I can’t pretend to appreciate all of the registers on which these two poems by Ramke are working. But even with my rudimentary knowledge of topology (< Gk topos, a place and logy, study of, logos, word)—which my Webster’s tells me is, in relation to math, the study of those properties of geometric figures that remain unchanged even when under distortion, so long as no surfaces are torn—I can intuit that “Cloud as an Open Set Maps onto the Hillside” (“under which we do and did sit”) plays with notions of nostalgia, time, rupture, continuity, and connectivity in ways that are not merely theoretical but are personal as well, notions that are reinforced by musical clover “chains” of connected and eroded vowels and consonants. The geometrical figure the poem presents—the triangulation of cloud, child, and shadow—is an archetypal one over which floats myths pre- and post-Lapsarian. Finally, the poem is a meditation on “under”—what does it mean to be beneath a cloud or shadow, phenomena that are themselves conjured out of ephemeral conspiracies of elements? Does it mean to be within? And within what? Is childhood, memory, the past measureable, substantial? or is it a dream? “What is under,” Ramke asks at the poem’s conclusion, evoking proofs as well as intuitions, “is it a vision?”
“Hausdorff Spaces” strikes me as an even more deeply personal poem than “Cloud as an Open Set Maps onto the Hillside.” According to Wikipedia, a Hausdorff space (named for Felix Hausdorff, a founder of topology), “is a topological space in which distinct points have disjoint neighbourhoods. . . . It implies the uniqueness of limits of sequences, nets, and filters. Intuitively, the condition is illustrated by the pun that a space is Hausdorff if any two points can be ‘housed off’ from each other by open sets.” Hausdorff spaces sound a lot to me like instances of Keatsian negative capability. They also sound a lot like the condition of being in human relationships.
Ramke’s poem opens with a description so ecstatic that the unnamed antecedent for “it” begs to be love: the experience of falling into it (“assuming survival”), of being in it, of being distinct within it. The poem itself becomes, in such a reading, both a description of that experience—to find oneself “in” love, “to be above yet falling, to be falling yet / to be unafraid, to be unafraid yet to know / reasons for fear, to be secure in knowledge / yet to respect ignorance as a kind of home”—and a kind of wooing through the tropes of topology, a wooing that is both self-conscious and even deeply humorous:
A separation axiom, he said, has nothing
to do with love. Metrization, o love,
turns distance into desire, space into
place without distance. She is there
I am here but there, he explained,
being bounded but not totally bounded.
You had to be there, we said to each other.
Love, after all, made apposite to “metrization” by our narrator, is what “turns distance into desire, space into / place without distance. She is there / I am here but there, he explained, / being bounded but not totally bounded.” Anne Carson, in Eros the Bittersweet, writes about love and math, as well, saying that “the ruse of the triangle is not a trivial mental maneuver. We see in it the radical constitution of desire. . . Triangulation makes both [lovers] present at once by a shift of distance, replacing erotic action with a ruse of heart and language.” The final triangular figure and gesture of Ramke’s poem—
This is not a lecture, he said, it is lunch.
He reached across her hands for wine
to pour for her, for her alone in her neighborhood.
—strikes me as a deeply realized dramatization of the human, poetic dimension of mathematics and of the related, figurative “reach” of Eros.
