“A long time ago, when Mevrouw interviewed me, she asked me about very large numbers. I gave her a slippery answer. I am sure that if I had answered in a straightforward manner, her next request would have been: now tell me something about infinity. That was lucky for me, because at the time I had no thoughts on the matter. I was pretty green. And then, after I went to Cambridge, I remembered a story that my grandmother Katrina (on my mother’s side) told me.

“When Katrina was young she took a job as ship’s cat on a scow operating out of King’s Lynn. Not one of your noble boats but experience plays no favourites. One day she was sitting on the bridge looking out on the water. The scow was somewhere out on The Wash far from land. There was a stiff breeze and the surface was choppy. She could see hundreds of little wavelets. First the wavelets formed and then they collapsed. Above in the sky, seabirds flapped their wings, and far off, very far off on the horizon, another vessel was just barely visible.

“Suddenly Katrina’s eye caught a single wavelet that had just then reflected the sunlight. The wavelet was visible for an instant; then it collapsed and disappeared. And she realized that she had experienced a specific wavelet out of myriads of wavelets that have formed and unformed on the surface of the ocean since the oceans themselves were born. And she realized that although she could assert the existence of that specific wavelet her eye had picked out, and although someone standing beside her might also have experienced it and might bear witness to it, there was no way in which she could make its specificity palpable. The specific had collapsed and had dissolved itself into the general. 

“Katrina told me that when she thought about this transformation she was terrified, and she said her terror was far greater than that of Pascal contemplating the eternal silence of infinite space. The dissolution of the specific, she said, was the death of art.

“I thought about her story over and over again in my own way and what I concluded was this: that infinity must be located between the specific and the general. And I thought moreover that if mathematics is the science of infinity, as some claim it is, its regenerative powers must be located in that gap. And that when mathematics puts forth its definitions and tries to capture infinity in its net, at just that point infinity slips away and is replaced by the finite.

“The word ‘definition’, after all, comes from definio, meaning: I enclose within limits, I fix, I finitize. Once something has been defined, it is like cat’s meat: we may prepare it and feed on it, and we require it to nourish us; but it is dead matter.

“I needed time to think about all this. It troubled me. I went to Lynn and signed on as ship’s cat on a scow, hoping to duplicate my Gran’s career. I wanted to see whether I could experience her feelings. I sat on the bridge and watched the waves break and disappear; and their individual character was eternally lost. And her terror came over me and I knew that I had experienced something without knowing what it was.

“My soul thirsts for that which is and yet cannot be known in its entirety. I have tasted it and have not yet had my fill. When I do, if I do, I shall forget the bitter waves. I shall forget the booming breakers and the harsh, fish-reeking brine. I shall come back to Waterfen St. Willow and be with you. But you mustn’t think to confine me and you mustn’t grieve when I walk away.”

“Ah Pangur Ban. Who can define a cat?”

from Thomas Gray Philosopher Cat, Philip J. Davis, Professor of Applied Mathematics at Brown University

Robert said
Would you ** you do not have permission to see this link **, “Benedictus benedicat” as “Oh, Blessed One, bless the cat!”  

Never. I’m too much of a dog person, but after revisiting Thomas Gray I’m reconsidering and wondering whether everyone shouldn’t be required to have one.

Since I began this thread by spilling my guts and mixing that with some synesthetic music, I’m just gonna make this my vomitorium. My purgatory. (That myth is dispelled here, but like every legend the truth is better than the fiction)

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So this post may be for Stephen, if he’ll have it, because I think I heard RAW chuckle at the synchronicity. I listened to the song late last night and first thing this morning, and decided the above. It’s is about a guy who found his true love, his very soulmate, only to discover that she’d been carrying on all along with somebody else–her brother. Well, he did what any reasonable person would and swam out in the ocean to drown himself. The song is called Weight and the album, Oceanic. Like the term used by Rolland to Freud to describe religious experience, sense of oneness, (ecstatic states, temporal lobe epilepsy, etc.) Freud talked about it in Civilization and its Discontents and elsewhere. All good, then I saw who the record label was–Ipecac Records. Thank you Robert Anton Wilson.

RAW is a fine fellow whose routine can’t appropriately be posted here, so here’s a more innocuous intro to the man, the myth, the legend. (They include a short clip of him if you’re curious at the bottom of the page.) I found him very late, but he was an important confirmation for me (I look for these) that maybe I really was onto something; or maybe my departure from the beaten path, away from Rome, just naturally led to him, whatever naturally means. More likely it’s all of the above and more, lots more.

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And I’ll just post his Cosmic Trigger once more

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“I noticed how doors were closing all around me. Doors that would never be opened again. Everywhere. There was suddenly this very present feeling of time passing. Time running out. I went down to my cellar and brought up old synths that also had seen better days. I crafted sounds on them, ran them through effect racks and circuit bent junk. Exploring new directions. To see if these old hearts still could skip a beat. I’m sure there’s an analogy for hope somewhere in here. We did an album, all of us derelicts together. The distorted sound of what is, what was and what could’ve been. It’s “Grains”.” –Fronas

And ltv2 track of the year, Maltese Cross. I was surprised to see Bon Iver there. Thought they were much bigger, or at least too big for BandCamp.  “I noticed how doors were closing all around me…” Much better than my little Witt caricature of the key and door, and much how Witt sunk me. Did you plan that, or is this a little synchronicity too?

Speaking of old, dead instruments, that’s the ethos behind Dead Can Dance, to show how their “inanimate” instruments live. I’m sure you know them, at least from Baraka, but

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Well there ya go! I knew we were old but I was hoping you were Cindi Lauper. No Farah Fawcett posters on my wall. But I’m afraid I tried to write a new Deuteronomy for Stephan when I ran across an old post of his looking for your Airy Christ here. But I did find it at Poetry Foundation. Now, that is not my cup of tea, but have you read his Lord Say and Seal? That’s something. I’m still reading it.

Lord Say and Seal,

Lord Say and Seal,

Why not for once say and reveal

All the dark thoughts your words go over

To make a pretty bog-hole cover.

I didn’t think Airy scanned very will and thought it was a little plodding. Neither did I know of that translation of Mark upon which he based it, so I may have to have a look. But here, maybe you’ll like this, for your honorary grand-child? (As for the rest, I’m sorry if I misled–the first post was for you, and the rest got away from me.) It’s George MacDonald, and C.S. Lewis said that he had baptized his imagination, and that he’d never written a book but that he didn’t quote him at least once, directly or indirectly.

Where did you come from baby dear?

Out of the everywhere into the here.

Where did you get your eyes so blue?

Out of the sky as I came through…

Have a look. That’s the only bit I memorized but there’s more, and I may have to have a look at it again.

Perish the thought. I would never seek a connection, unless I’d already found it. (God said to Pascale, “You wouldn’t look for me if you hadn’t already found me.”) No, I connected to you with the first post of yours I read, to that sweet young man. And don’t you dare go looking for one with me, okay? But that’s what I see, and it’s no good my trying to argue against it, that “Where two or more are gathered, there I am.” Me, myself, as not this bag of bones, but as relationship. As all of us. It’s just the logical progression from cell to body to colony to ecosystem and biosphere anyway, no? Anyway, thanks for saying hi.