My Response To a Critic
I would like to address a comment made in reference to the piece “Peano’s String; A History of Spiritual Stories”(displayed above) … the following (text in green) is a copy of a comment from my blog entry “New Work Accepted At The Bridges Show In Leeuwarden Netherlands Aug 2008”:
This is a strange place. Im all for maths, dont get me wrong. Anyone who's any good at maths needs to make it part of themself but democrats? Abraham? maths is made a cliche with these comparisons. Everything can be expressed in maths but some things shouldnt. Just make a billboard with euler's formula
My response:
I appreciate you giving me some feedback to my blog and I would love to engage you in discourse on any concerns that you may have. I am certainly not going to imply that I am always correct in my assumptions of anything. Furthermore I consider myself a student.
I want to note that I may not defend mathematical poems made by others so if you wish to criticize the axiomatic poem concerning Barack Obama and the democrats you may wish to address your concerns to its author. I also wish to make this same disclaimer concerning any mathematical poetry posted on this blog that is not authored by me. However, I will be happy to address any concerns or criticism involving my work. My Job at this blog is to promote interest in mathematical poetry not criticize it. Yet, I may someday express criticism of someones work if I feel “the discipline” of mathematical poetry is being subverted.
To get to your concerns let’s look at the term cliché and what Wikipedia has to say about it:
A cliché (from French, pronounced [klɪ'ʃe]) is a phrase, expression, or idea that has been overused to the point of losing its intended force or novelty, especially when at some time it was considered distinctively forceful or novel. The term is most likely to be used in a negative context.
It seems that you have applied this term ‘cliché’ to my axiomatic poem titled, “Peano’s String; A History of Spiritual Stories”. So I can only assume that there is something about this mathematical poem that you would consider overused. It is hard to imagine that you may be referring to mathematical poetry in general since there is so little of it. What is it that is overused here? Is your concern related to my references to biblical history? Are you feeling that I have taken biblical references out of context in jest? I can only say that while I can see how one may find this mathematical poem humorous, the root of it can be taken very serious. Maybe, what you may really be trying to say, is that mathematical poetry is aesthetically trivial. This may be is a little more difficult for me to defend due to my belief that just because I find something beautiful I can never assume that anyone else would find it such. However, I do find mathematical poetry extremely beautiful especially in its use of dual aesthetics. My fear is that you, or anyone else for that matter, will discard this entire proposition and never really answer the following questions.
2. What is the difference between connotation and denotation and how do they apply to the language of mathematics?
3. When looking at the structure of a mathematical equation how does that structure relate to other phenomena that can be described with that same mathematical structure?
4. Are the commonalities between identical mathematical structures purely linguistic? Or are they physical?... Or maybe spiritual? Could there be something such as archetypical equations?
5. What are the differences between the aesthetics of mathematics and the aesthetics of poetry or art? How can those differences be delineated when analyzing a mathematical poem?
6. How does mathematical poetry relate to the history of art, poetry and applied mathematics? Can mathematical poetry be considered a legitimate field of applied mathematics?
And now let’s address this mathematical poem in particular:
7. What is the relationship of Natural numbers to linear historical events?
8. What do the descendents of Abraham have to do with current cultural events especially ones that concern the military of the United States of America? Who are the children of Abraham and what is the historical and spiritual relationship that they share.
9. How are cultural stories passed from generation to generation?
10. How are mytho-spiritual (religious) stories created? How does deities and deification come to be? What is the source of the ‘so called’ divine inspirations that create works of poetry and art? And what is their relationship to this piece of art in particular.
11. What is the relationship of cats in mytho-spiritual literature? What is the meaning of cat when applied to a human being? What is the meaning of a cat when applied to a God?
12. When looking at the proofs using these axioms what can be said poetically from the proofs.
13. What are the proofs that can be created from Peano’s axioms?
14. How do questions 7 through 13 relate to questions 1 through 6?
I am not going to discount that you may provide an argument to the idea that my work is cliché and trivial but I would hope you address the latter questions within your argument.
Thanks!
Kaz
