after Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer’s “Love, Like Math” I’m trying to solve for love. I forget. Do I carry the one? I introduced the negative, and got booted from the land of the real into the imaginary. I don’t want the i. I tried some absolute values, but that was not the symmetry I wanted. Next, since we’re all one, I tried modulo 1. That left a big old mushy pile of nothing. Russell was right. Self-reference breaks the whole system. I tried different combinatorial systems. That spun out of control in uncountable ways. The linear algebra transformations collapsed it all to the zero vector, no movement. I persist, even knowing Gödel and Turing. I think the Möbius strip with its one boundary and one surface in an endless loop might hold a clue. The answer must lie somewhere in non-Euclidean geometry where parallel lines are always converging and intersecting. It’s elliptic, some things better left unsaid. The topology of love holds out hope. It can be stretched, bent and compressed but never broken. I know the answer is asymptotic. But some infinities are bigger than others. That’s just a fact.
Fun fact: I actually started a Ph.D. program in mathematics at the same time I started a music magazine in Athens, Georgia. The music won out.
If this resonates, I’d love to hear from you. A comment, a share, or even just a like goes a long way. Writing into the silence is its own practice, but knowing the work lands makes it easier to keep showing up.