Thanks to poetry, X=imagine the possibilities

loading...

I think that I shall never see,

A [polynomial] lovely as a tree.

– Joyce Kilmer

Poets taught me everything I know about math, which explains why I am not too good at balancing my checkbook. My forte is imaginary numbers.

I began my study with e.e. cummings, who, in the introduction to his book “is 5,” cited the poet’s prerogative of enjoying the “purely irresistable truth” that two times two need not always be four. His arithmetic does not work for counting your change, building a house or calculating gas mileage. His poems did, however, antidote my struggles with algebra. Though I had progressed passably through primary-grade arithmetic, barely memorized the multiplication tables to the satisfaction of Miss McCormick, squeaked through long division with Mr. Lynch, ninth-grade algebra was “pushing the envelope.”

E.e.’s imaginary numbers opened another portal. As I slouched furtively in the back row I heard e.e. whisper: “listen: there’s a hell of a good universe next door; let’s go.” A meter became something I could hear in words, a yardstick was measurement embedded in metaphor, and beauty consorted with truth. I went.

Words were playful; numbers austere. The goal in a successful mathematical sentence seemed excruciatingly literal, as when my algebra teacher insisted that an equation must withstand proof. My numbers to the right of the equal sign did not, typically, add up because I was invested in there being a range of possibilities rather than a single outcome. A good equation was what Archibald MacLeish wrote in an early poem: “A poem should be equal to: Not true.”

I studied geometry with Rita Dove, who disguised math as drawing, a language of shapes and proportion, numbers that I could see at work, rising off the blackboard as pyramids, Parthenons or Bauhaus towers. “I prove a theorem and the house expands,” Dove writes, scribing geometry’s palpable figures. Geometric terms seemed transmathematical: “Tangent,” “apex,” “obtuse,” “acute” had literary vigor. But it’s more than that. In “Geometry,” Dove says,

the windows have hinged into butterflies,

sunlight glinting where they’ve intersected.

They are going to some point true and unproven.

Imagination is taking flight. Can numbers do this descriptive work? Until imagined as the alliterative curl of the conch or a fiddlehead’s fetal scroll, a fractal is inanimate. A poem, however, leans to within a fraction’s fraction’s fraction of closing the gap between unequal denominators, only to pull up and abandon the divide, tantalizing with almostness, as when Wallace Stevens spoke of “the nothing that is not there, and the nothing that is” in “The Snow Man.” John Keats heard the “little noiseless noise among the leaves.” Emily Dickinson “dwellt in possibility” such as this. I imagine she too had a problem with quadratic equations.

Measurement is the rapport between the language of numbers and letters. Was Blake measuring in powers of 10 when he spoke of seeing “a world in a grain of sand?” Nadya Aisenberg measures this way:

Speech, step, song.

One rectangle so beautiful

men call it golden,

the Divine Proportion of the Parthenon.

The light years we wait to see the light.

Would Albert Einstein, mathematician supreme, connect with that last line, as in his dactylic ditty E=MC2? Perhaps both cummings and Einstein intimated the same thing: There’s yet another universe, right next door. Under certain circumstances Einstein might even agree with cummings: Two times two is five. At least that’s my theory of poetic relativity.

There’s good authority for interpreting metaphor as a kind of equation that needn’t balance. Robert Frost said metaphor is “the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another,” what he called the “pleasure of ulteriority” to be found in poetry, where the best answer could be a range of possibilities thanks to the shape-shifting multiplication table of words.

Back in algebra class, my teacher refused to see my test answers as my attempt to say one thing in terms of another. He was not tantalized by a range of possibility, only X=3.

I would have thrived on the problems enumerated by Howard Nemerov in “To David, About his Education,”

The world is full of mostly invisible things,

And there is no way but putting the mind’s eye,

Or its nose, in a book, to find them out,

Things like the square root of Everest

Or how many times Byron goes into Texas …

Now these are my kind of ulterior equations. Hence my second year sitting through Algebra I.

Todd R. Nelson is principal of the Adams School in Castine. April is National Poetry Month. There is no National Algebra Month.