| Apophenia | Closure of the Real Numbers |
| Lune (Part One?) |
Kind of a weird thing to have a page for as someone primarily focused on game development but. I'm writing the poems anyways and I don't like the idea of them not being anywhere and this is my own website so who's going to stop me?
Apophenia
How can we capture the night sky in our pages?
Flatten the stars in space and organize them into patterns,
since its easier to name a constellation than an individual star.
So for years upon eons we’ve made the choice
to define the randomness using the shapes that we see
to ground ourselves against spaces vast.
In truth of course our understanding discards vast
swathes of space, too random to be documented on pages.
We can only record that which we already see,
and what we see immediately resolves itself into patterns.
But it is important to recognize the constellations to be our choice,
the shapes we draw entirely lacking input from the star.
Can a word be said to possess intent any more-so than a star?
While the possible thoughts to put in language are vast,
they could, any of them, be created absent anyone’s choice.
Walk the stacks of the Library of Babel, consider all the pages.
With no inherent meaning, no value if not for the patterns
that no one ever put there, but that all of us still see.
And can more than that be said for anything we see?
Does a word carry more truth within itself than a star?
Information can only exist where we find, or create, patterns
to contain it. To build a structure within the unknowable, vast
spaces we ourselves occupy. A scaffold without which these pages
would carry no meaning, would not reflect my choice.
Structure that is necessary, but should not limit your choice.
As important as having that structure is making sure that you see
it clearly. See the impact it has on the words you commit to your pages.
See that sometimes you can get stuck orbiting around the same star.
Do not forget how many stars are at your disposal, their numbers vast,
outnumbered only by the ways to combine them into patterns.
When you become too tied up in existing patterns,
trapped between convention and the expansive nature of choice,
choose a brand new constellation to help you navigate the vast.
Break free from the old, but neither should you try to see
the entire sky at once, devoid of all connections, star for star.
You will not run out of designs to name before you run out of pages.
Connections we build up using the patterns we see,
we have no other choice to reckon with the distance to a star,
and by giving them names we can wrangle what was vast into our pages.
Lune
the sun is round, too.
the flat sort of round, from our perspective.
marker scribbled into the corner of a page,
ink saturating paper until it tears.
but the moon,
the moon is round like a face is round,
like an egg or a sourdough boule,
it reveals its depth to us.
the sun supplies a distant comfort,
too harsh to survive in any other fashion,
but the moon holds us close.
the hollow in the crescent,
invites me to curl up inside it,
and complete the shape myself.
Closure of the Real Numbers
If you take a number line
or rather the number line
the real number line with all the
infinitely infinite decimal expansions
accordioned up into a string segment
you can hold in your hand
If you take this piece of string
wrap it around your finger
tying it together at the ends to create a loop
you will then have a model for the projective closure of R.
Pinch the knot in your fingers
adjust it to sit at the peak of your knuckle
because this knot represents infinity
rotate it clockwise one full turn, the knot is in the same place
and it represents negative infinity now
and it always did
and the two hold the same position in space
Hold your palm supine now
look for the midpoint of the string
nestled into a seam on your finger
look as long as you like to try and find zero
it exists as a single perfect point, you know it does
but it isn't flashy like the infinities
you might have to trust in the precision of nothing
in the infinitesminal fulcrum of your joints
And with our poles defined, the reals
start pouring like honey out from the origin
saturating the number line with all possible strings of all possible digits
decimal expansions sticking together, inseperable for all finite purposes,
for all concrete purposes
Except of course that we all use numbers every day
and you're holing them all right there in your hand
its just that they bleed together if you try to hold them all at once
In this way the whole is not more
than the sum of its parts
but another beast altogether.
