Saturday, April 7, 2012

Sudden Insight


Professor Balia Brzozow, whom everyone called simply Zozo, wobbled like a penguin as he reached up to place an epsilon on the blackboard.  But lack of poise more than reach threw him off balance.  He closed his eyes for a second as he slammed against the board and slid down to the floor.  He recovered quickly, but wound up scratching a lightning bolt into the equation.  The class splintered into laughter.  More at this mime than his funny math.  Brzozow regained his composure, adjusted his tie and his notation, then glared around the room in mock anger. But they knew that he was not really angry, he was too intelligent for that, and it only made the whole show funnier.
            When the class was over, he swiveled awkwardly to erase the hour’s worth of calculations, managing to cover himself with chalk dust in the process.  The students squeezed noisily out through the door.  Someone shyly slid a late paper onto his desk; a debate about differentials spilled into the hall; two kids planning to marry kissed.  With all this hoopla, Brzozow completely missed his potential breakthrough…the new lightning bolt symbol he had inadvertently invented.  Had he simply assigned an n-inversion factor to his new symbol, he might have opened up an entirely new calculus of dimensional fractals.      
            Instead the eraser seemed to snicker as it sucked this discovery off the face of the earth forever.
            Going home, Brzozow followed the pathway across the quadrangle on the way back to the bus.  Along the way, the crisp autumn trees evoked tangential probability arrays, bicycle wheels traced invisible motional sine curves, and a lost rubber ball suggested the sad loneliness of Reimann-Christoffel geometry.  This was always a wonderful walk for Brzozow.  It was a time when he could be alone with his thoughts about the patterns and numbers hidden deep inside the cosmos.  Silently pushing across the square, his heels tapping the pavement, he could think of Pythagoras pushing pebbles along the ground with his bony toes, Euclid watching flotsam at the beach, or Leibnitz noting the bundled topology of his cat’s ball of string.  And if he was lucky enough to make it the entire way across without being interrupted by students or colleagues, he might even get to Newton thinking about a transmutational calculus or Napier eating himself sick while doing logarithms in his head.
            This was the best part of his day. 
            Like any mathematician, random rumination was his state of grace.  Thoughts were wishes.  Anything could be uncovered.  And also like most mathematicians, more than anything else he wanted to uncover something big.  Some grand truth about numbers, about life itself.  Some lovely perfect brilliant theory about the gearworks.  But as he got older he realized that this was not to be.  All the conditions of perseverance, insight, luck, timing, or genius would not, it seem, come together.  Not in the time of his lifetime.  And so, instead, he grew to like his students, love his subject, and all in all he was not unhappy in this. 
            Yet still the walk across the campus was like a dream.

            On Flatbush Avenue, he made a comical sort of hopping turn on his right heel to fight the wind and veered forwards on a slight angle.  As luck would have it, a narrow dust tornado had just developed from a perfect Fibonacci of cross currents.  Hitting some dirt with force, it delivered a cloud of motes into his eyes.  And for a brief moment, Balia Brzozow, formerly of the Ukraine and now professor of mathematics at Brooklyn College, was temporarily blinded.
            The effect only lasted for a few seconds. 
            But in that instant Brzozow suddenly had a change of mind.  The world in all its writhing photons was gone.  Completely gone.  In its place, he could now feel the air and all its variations in pressure, tonus, draft, and temperature.  He could feel it on his skin, everywhere in the same degree of contact.  Not over there or there, but always right here, right now.  Eyes closed, he reached out to steady himself and sensed the shifting density in the airspace before him.  He stumbled and touched the cavernous bark of a nearby tree, so sculptural and infolded.  Not yet looking, he still knew that the sun had just ducked behind a cloud by the change in heat on his skin. 
            In an instant, in other words, he immediately understood the idea of active seeing with fingers and skin and body rather than eyes.  And amazingly, the universe was just as rich this way.  Vibration under the feet, the sounds of cars, odor of oak, cool at the back of the neck.  A new world grasped with new organs.  Rather exhilarating, he thought, standing there with his eyes closed.  Revolutionary in fact.  As though he had never shut his lids before.  He had, of course, just never noticed.
            The world suddenly seemed quite different.  Less rigid and more voluptuous.  And this seemed to Brzozow like a new way of knowing, full of possibility.  In fact, it brought into doubt the whole Cartesian business, the entire grid of being along the x,y,z.  Space as a matrix.  Like a breath of fresh air, he suddenly understood the limitations of the merely dimensional, orthogonal, deepfield extension of matter and distance. 
            How unusual, he thought. 
            And now he might have opened his eyes and gone about his business, but chose not to.  He briefly flashed on that lightning bolt from the blackboard and the idea of dimensional fractals.  Could it be, he wondered?  Might there actually be room there for a new mathematics of Tactile Irrationals and Percussive Potential?  That would certainly change things.  And the idea began to morph and form in his mind, astoundingly, in the way that cells soon become a someone.  Yes, he mumbled, it could be.  You might even be able to explore a whole new theory of Haptic Iteration…
            But at that same moment, Bucherman from History appeared and placed a heavy hand on Brzozow’s back.
            “Are you all right Brzozow?  Do you not feel well?”
            “What???  Who?  I…” Brzozow blanched and twitched.
            “You should sit down,” Bucherman said.
            “What?” Brzozow replied, still coming out of his reverie.
            “On the bench over there.   Come, I’ll help you.”
            More like a school principal than a nurse, Bucherman lead him rather forcibly over to the bench.  Against his will, Brzozow had opened his eyes and let the engulfing visual world come back in through the pinholes of his irises.  He felt like those reports he had heard about people near death being dragged back into their lives by zealous doctors.
            After sitting for a while and letting his eyes clear and his mind compose, Brzozow could see and think perfectly well again.  Bucherman, kind but irritating, was trying to make him feel better by telling him about the new Dean and the change in the college policy on out-of-pocket reimbursements, which made no sense at all but was so typical of the bureaucracy, and how the union was fighting it, but probably to no avail.
            And by now the insight in Brzozow’s head, and the math that might explain it, was long, long gone.  When he stood up and took leave of his colleague, he felt vaguely annoyed but had absolutely no idea why.

            At home, safe and sound, Brzozow told his wife Melia about the incident because it was funny.  He did not mention the ideas about a new way of thinking about space as always present because, like a dream on waking, he had completely forgotten about it.  The whole thing in all its wondrous complexity had vanished just like that.
            It was clearly one of those days in which bold change was hovering just beyond the next coincidence.  But he was not at all aware of this.
            “Would you like a cold drink?” Melia asked, largely because she too was from Eastern Europe where a drink of cold water was the first line of defense against any trauma.
            “I’m fine,” he said.
            “Have one anyway,” she said, thinking he was in no position to judge.
            “Thank you,” he said, and took the glass and went to sit at the table with it.
            But there was an unseen piece of boiled carrot on the floor from the night before and Brzozow stepped directly onto it.  It was only a tiny piece, not enough to actually slip on.  But it was big enough to cause him to slightly slide his foot, about a quarter of an inch.  The movement, barely enough to notice, did force him to plop down in the chair at an unintended angle.  Still nothing worth mentioning.  Yet that minor adjustment threw his balance off just enough so that he slammed the glass down on the table a tad too hard.  Water splashed up out of the glass.  A small bead hit him smack in the nostril at the precise moment of an inhale.  Brzozow snorgled, snorted, and coughed and closed his eyes as if to sneeze.
            In that instant he back thinking about the fractals and haptic space and how they applied to the movement of the water in time.  Now motional frames in L-dynamic grids came to mind.  Before you could say neocalculus, if you could say it at all, he was assigning gradient loci to all the variables and thinking how to apply this to a tactile geoform and use a textural differential to incave the results.
            This was big, he thought.
            Very big.
            It changed everything.
            And most of all, it changed what happened next.
            In visual space you could see things coming.  It was all laid out from near to far.  Past, present, future…neat as a pin.  But in tactile space everything that was happening was happening right now.  All around.  That was the implication of his insight.  If he was right, and he knew he was, then this view of the world was wrong.  Above all, time was wrong.  The future was an illusion, a ghost in the photons.  Prediction, expectation, hope and probability, would all have to all be reconsidered, pressed through the filter of his new tangible math.
            Even chance itself was in question here.  Because it too was an artifact of the rational, seeing mind.  What if chance was only the name the impatient gave to a wealth of clues?  All those long shots, near misses, close calls, and chances both good and fat and slim.  What if chance itself was riddled with the bias of first this, then that?  What if all the likelihoodlums were wrong and things in the end really could be known?  Known right now, the way you could feel the pressure of the air and the pull of the center of the earth?  Then all the quantum Willy Nillies, who can never say anything more than maybe and maybe not, would have to bite their tongues!
            Amazing.
            Yes, he thought.  It could be. The numbers suggested it!  And it felt delicious in his mind.  Everything old was new again.  The relativity of time and space, the uncertainty of measurement, the incompleteness of all formal systems.  Einstein, Heisenberg, Godel.  It was all the same dreary story.  We’re not as hoop-de-do as we think.  There are restrictions, limits, chains on what we can know.  Year by year we were getting smaller in the cosmos, until one day our very existence would come into doubt.  How many human beings could you fit on the head of pin…that was the real question.  But this!  This was something grand and great.  This was proof -- real mathematical proof -- that everything could be known.  That existence, this complexity of quantum gravity string vibrations, had a center and that we were it.  Knowing was being and vice versa.  Well…all that could be figured out later.
            And somehow he, Brzozow with the water up his nose sitting in that kitchen on Ocean Avenue in Brooklyn, could see a glimpse of how this might be tackled.  It would combine crucial elements of metric gravitation, elementary dual-resonance, the Lorenz transformations of course, topographic structuralism, formal system paradox, maybe even that vague reference to transcendent fluxions in Newton’s Principia.  It would mean coming up with a new idea of space and time and how they fold around consciousness like an angel being made.  You might almost call it a kind of miracle theory…
            At which point, to be helpful, Melia, a book editor who had worked on Home Remedies and suddenly remembered what to do, slapped him firmly on the back.
            “Huh???” he gasped.
            “You were choking,” she said sweetly.
            “I wasn’t…I was… thinking.”
            “Nonsense darling, you were choking.  Some water up the nose.”
            “No…it was…”
            “You’re fine now,” she decided and went into the bedroom.
             “No, I was thinking…thinking…something.”
            But as quickly as it had come, the something was gone again.  There was just too much all at once to keep intact with open eyes.  And without paper to write on or a blackboard to scrawl on, the whole complex fuss went scattering like the frailest of thoughts in a good stiff wind.
            Melia in the bedroom was preparing for the night.  She began to pull off her dress and girdle and let her skin breathe again.  Brzozow, for his part, sat in the silence of the night kitchen for a while trying to recall what he had been thinking about exactly.  Numbers bounced in his head like bubbles in a glass of seltzer, impossible to pin down.  There were glimmers and glints of a TOE, a theory of everything, but these had become effervescent and momentary.  Nothing he could actually sink his teeth into.  And besides, the TV was on now and there was news about the storm, and the neighbors were fighting, and a plane was flying overhead on its way to Florida, and there was a cat or something in the alley tearing through the garbage. 
            And whatever it was that had enthralled him all day was there no more.
            Brzozow getting up noticed the piece of carrot on the floor.  An accident waiting to happen, he muttered, and he picked it up and dropped it into the trashcan.  He put the glass back in the sink.  Through the doorway he could see Melia putting on her nightgown and the pale skin of her thigh before the curtain of the fabric dropped over it.  She would be warm in the bed tonight and smell of clean carpets.  The mountain of her body would fill the space between his arms. 
            Something to look forward to. 
            And he began to open the buttons of his shirt as he turned off the light and went to bed, never looking back.

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