Finite Infinity

Emily Dickinson rarely left her room or her father's home. Some have speculated that she suffered from Meniere's Disease, an affliction of the inner ear that causes bouts of vertigo and deafness. Some have speculated that I suffer from Meniere's Disease. I'm not so sure about either diagnosis. What drives a person to become a recluse? Is it a disease? I don't believe it is.

The mind and body are linked in such intricate and complicated ways that when a sensitive mind like Dickinson's (and I like to think my own as well) meets the stimuli of day-to-day life, it becomes overwhelmed, which in turn overwhelms the body. The mind is the master of the body. It distracts itself from input with out put. Meeting a stranger fills it with panic and it deflects this feeling by sending pain signals to the back, or interrupting the inner ears symphony of balancing orders. Or it makes the hand reach up to scratch an ear, again and again. Or it makes the whole body turn and run.

The beauty of light through leaves, the pungent stink of a man's cologne, scratch of a shirt tag; it's all too much to process. The everyday is more than some of us can bear, to say nothing of what floods in when a loved one dies. We shrink external stimuli down until it's bearable. Is this a disease? Only when our world becomes so disproportionate to that of other people, the ones called normal.

Dickinson had a rich and full life, in her writing. The written word has a way of filtering and organizing sensation and human interaction. It moves at a comfortable pace for the mind. For this reason, I prefer e-mail or texting to a phone call. Then I know the person has time to respond. I don't need to fret about interrupting them, or filling the awkward silences with my voice. I can craft the note, review it, rearrange it, until it says what I want it to say. On the phone or in person, there is too much to think about. How to get into the conversation. How to get out. Where to look. What to say. When to listen. Maybe direct human contact was more than Dickinson could bear. Is this a disease? I suppose so if it makes the person's life unbearable. But I'm not so sure all people were born for large worlds. Some of us need to stay small. If not for us, then who would notice the details? Who will explore the immensity of the nearby?

Here is Emily Dickinson's poem #1695 of her nearly 1,800 poems.

There is a solitude of space
A solitude of sea
A solitude of death, but these
Society shall be
Compared with that profounder site
The polar privacy
A soul admitted to itself--
Finite infinity.

I heard a Fly buzz--when I died--

I met Emily Dickinson's poetry as a freshman in college in my first English class. There was a guy in the class who never wore shoes and liked to prop his bare feet up on a chair in front of him.  We sat in a loose circle and he usually angled the soles of his feet in my direct line of sight. I tried to pay attention to the teacher, but  concentrated most on not staring at his feet, his dirty calloused snaggily toe-nailed feet. On the day we studied Dickinson, the contrast between the grotesqueness of my view and the spare and clean beauty of her poetry was palpable. Of course we read the poem with the first line:

I heard a Fly buzz--when I died--

It's a freshman English class staple.

 About a week or two into the quarter, the guy asked if he could cook dinner for me. To this day I don't know what signal I sent out that made him notice me.

To this day, I don't really understand Dickinson's poems. I read them sparingly, but always enjoy them. They are like a strange fruit for me. Like a Kiwi.

After the quarter ended, I may not have understood either the poem or the barefoot Casanova, but I knew which of the two with whom I preferred to spend any more time.

Please Look Me in the Eye

So maybe mathematicians don't make the best party planners. We rode our bikes to the festival, the day warm and clear, air like velvet. When we arrived, the first thing we had to do was sign a photo release, then go to another table to get a name tag, a smiley face on the tag revealing our consent to be documented, then we could sign up for events with alluring names like Linguistic Challenge, Solving a Cubic, and Triangle Inequality. No eye contact yet. On the up side, the kids got cool black nylon string bags.

We then needed to enter one of two rooms, both crammed with long tables and people huddled over polyhedrons, tessellations, and graphs. The air in the rooms is stuffy. The man selling books in the back of the room we'd chosen won't look up from his book. He sits like an uncomfortable statue. Still no eye contact.

On the table near the human statue, I found a fat book about mathematics at Berkeley with a tiny postage stamp sized image of Julia Robinson on the cover. She was my teacher for abstract algebra  the year before she won the MacArthur fellowship. Five years of income to free her up to be the genius that she was.  When I read about her winning, I thought that must be the greatest prize in the whole wide world. Naturally, I wanted one. She had begun to solve Hilbert's tenth problem. What could I do?

So far. . .nothing.

Still no eye contact. We left the festival and toodled home on our bikes.

I still like geeks, but wouldn't recommend one to plan a social event beyond perhaps a late night cup of coffee.

Julia Robinson and the Infinite Awesomeness of Mathematics

Today I'm going to a Math Festival. Like a coming out fest for geeks. I use the term affectionately, since I have always been fond of intellectual smarty pants. I love the high foreheads, the furrowed brows, the inability to engage in small talk, the frenetic bursts of laughter at inappropriate moments. Very cool. The festival is named for one of my old professors, Julia Robinson. Her rise to fame was for solving one of David Hilbert's 23 unsolved problems in mathematics. Hilbert had presented 10 of these problems in 1900 at the International Congress of Mathematicians (aka the World Cup of Geeks), later publishing 23 in total for mathematicians of the 20th century to ponder. To date, here's the score:

Solved or disproved: 1, 2, 3, 7, 9, 10, 14, 17, 18, 21
Partially Solved: 5 and 6
Still Being Pondered: 4, 8, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 19, 22

My great grandfather spent most of his life tackling #8.
Julia Robinson got #10 started and it was eventually put to rest in 1970 by Yuri Matiyasevich. It's all explained in his book, Hilbert's Tenth Problem (MIT Press, 1993). I love it that there are books published about one math problem. Can you feel the universe of geeks expanding beyond your wildest dreams? Can you prove that this universe is infinite? If so, you are in that universe.

So what was problem 10?
Question: Are diophantine equations solvable?
Answer: No

Fantastic!

The Inescapable End of Sylvia

Sylvia's perseverance to her craft, the constant submissions going out by post, despite illness, babies to feed, clean, and clothe, and the terrifying passion in her voice,  kept me going at a time when I felt a similar kind of creative urgency and struggle to find a way to write. And yet, in the end she tucked a towel beneath her children's bedroom door and let the stove run unlit until she died. For me the nagging question, the other reason I read and reread her poems, is. . .Why? Why was death the preferred choice for her? How could a mother do such a horrific thing?

I would have rather read her work without the knowledge of her suicide, because it forever warps the experience of the reading. It makes me feel like a gawker at a pile up on the freeway, succumbing to that morbid human urge to study tragedy. Perhaps it serves some instinctual Darwinian Survival of the Fittest purpose. Study the tragic lest it happen to me kind of thing. I'm one of those people who as a child was called sensitive, so I have always tended to sympathize, empathsize, any-kind-of-thize with other people's feelings. And my thought processes go like this: if Sylvia was driven to suicide, won't I be also? Years of training to let reason, and keen observation of people I believe are less sensitive than me, rein in my over-active (though endlessly useful and entertaining) thizing mind  has helped me respond to these kinds of questions with: no, no I will not.

The truth is not all creative busy moms (single or otherwise) commit suicide. In fact very few do. And when we read their poetry or novels, admire their photos, sculptures, paintings, films we don't experience it through a veil of suicide. Sylvia took her own life and forever changed how her art would be perceived. Maybe that was why she did it, but I don't think so. For what it's worth, which is not much to the loved ones she left behind, I think she suffered from a form of mental illness that made suicide a constant and viable option for her. As if her mind just kept suggesting it and eventually she saw some twisted logic in it and killed herself. Clearly from her earlier attempts this choice had been hers for the taking for decades. That's a long time to listen to bad advice, even your own. It must have been exhausting.

Despite this sad veil, her work moved me and revealed a way to make beautiful the expression of anger, which a few years back was essential for my own work. Again I feel the guilt of a stranger at a crash site. Did I really have any business benefiting from Plath's work, considering the struggles she went through to achieve it? I can assuage the guilt a little with the reminder that Plath was desperate to be heard, so listening is not a crime. But I've always had a ready supply of Catholic guilt on hand, even before becoming Catholic, so I still feel bad when I draw inspiration from her. But then writers, and poets in particular, need to write from a position of discomfort, so maybe feeling bad is good? (welcome to the inside of my brain)

What Sylvia Would Have Done

What happened today is I finally had a moment to troll through e-mail and found a rejection notice for an article I had submitted months ago. The good news is I had gotten to enjoy a weekend of blissful ignorance before reading the note. And it was also a rejection with options: 1. Revise the article and be more scholarly next time and the journal may let peers review my piece or 2. Revise it to make the piece shorter and they'll publish it online without peer review. If the journal was a boy that I had just confessed to crushing on, the editor's note was akin to him saying "I like you too, but you can't be my real girl friend in public, however your unruly nature attracts me, so we can fool around on the side."

As if a boy ever says however.

I can't help but think of Sylvia Plath.

My first introduction to Plath was through my sister who had read The Bell Jar when she was a teenager. I could tell there was something dark and alluring about the book for her and that intrigued me, but unlike my eldest sister I wasn't much of a reader as a kid and could tell by the width of the paperback that it wasn't for me. It would be over thirty years before I read The Bell Jar and only after I had read Plath's poetry, her journals, and listened repeatedly to the BBC recorded readings of her work. One needs a fairly deep mix of despair and exaltation to linger a long time with Plath.  I was finishing my MFA manuscript in poetry, had two children under five, was in a tenure mess at work, and writing, being a writer, became as essential as air yet as unattainable as breathing on Everest's  peak. What resonated with me in Plath's work and life was her struggle to find her voice and to have that voice heard.

On the same trip Back East when I found the old Rachel Carson book (1-6-10 post In Rachel Carson Country), I had bought two sets from the series Voice of the Poet, the book/cassette (yes cassette tape) combos that allowed you to hear poets read their work while following along in print. I was feeling the weight of New England's drizzle and gloom, so I picked Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton.  Sexton grew tiring, her voice grinding with smoke and booze, but I memorized every pitch, tenor and rhythm of Plath's poetry. The fever of her desire palpable, the struggle to balance motherhood with the poems clawing to get out. The thin booklet that accompanied the tape included this excerpt from a letter to her mother, October 16, 1962, just two weeks before she made the BBC recordings:

"I must have someone with me for the next two months to mind the babies while I get my health back and try to write. . .I am a writer. . .I am a genius of a writer; I have it in me. I am writing the best poems of my life; they will make my name."

I heard a child cry in the background as she read. Last month I read Wintering by Kate Moses, a novel based on Plath's life around the time she made these recordings. It created a haunting and vibrant image of this struggle.

So back to the rejection. I try to imagine what Sylvia would have done. Plath would have taken the rejected piece and slipped it in a new, clean envelope, neatly written another address on the front, and bundled up her babies in the pram and walked to the post office.