sustainable delusion

by alexis clancy

“It’s a great affliction, and what do I want? I pursue a dream, I want the impossible. Other painters paint a bridge, a house, a boat. They paint the bridge, the house, the boat and are done… I want to paint the air in which the bridge, the house, the boat are to be found – the beauty of the atmosphere around them, and this is nothing less than impossible. Ah, if only I was content with the possible!”
Claude Monet

“The creation and destruction of harmonic and ‘statistical’ tensions is essential to the maintenance of compositional drama. Any composition (or improvisation) which remains consonant and ‘regular’ throughout is, for me, equivalent to watching a movie with only ‘good guys’ in it, or eating cottage cheese.”
Frank Zappa

Ever since I can remember, I always wanted to be a mathematician… I just didn’t always know it… But in my 17th year, my father showed me the derivation of Euler’s equation – “The Most Beautiful Equation in Mathematics” (see attached image) – and I saw sequences of numbers, shapes and spirits dancing around each other to infinity and back, back to a whole. I thought it the most exquisite thought to be thought and at that very instance I signed up. I wanted more of this stuff.

14 years on, I look back on my life as a (sometimes errant) mathematician and with a keen eye revisit the terms of my Faustian contract. When on devotes one’s self to the abstract dark arts of mathematics and her symbols, on makes certain sacrifices, but, frankly, I’m not bothered enough to go into this at all. What this article is about is delusion. The delusion that I did not sign up for. I am so buried to the armpits in delusion that I cannot see what else sustains my work but also sustains all other works of mathematics. But, then again, I’m deluded.

All of my work to date centers on a vision of a splitting Mobius and there being a connection to Fermat’s Last Theorem. I imposed my will on this as being some vision, some delusion, that was not of me, not of anybody else, so could be nothing but the truth. And with willfulness I examine this relationship between one sided twisted surfaces and our concept of number and mathematics in general. I have been working this delusion for 12 years now to the point that it is in my every breath. It is my health. It sustains me. And the initial vision lasted less then a second. (I love knowing what that’s like, to do this, to commit to a vision).

In terms of delusion being almost a dirty word in endeavour, I thought Einstein was clear. I thought Picasso was clear. It’s all (this life) relative and it’s all a cubist delusion.

In terms of the two quotes that open this article, I chose these two contributors in view of their indefatigable invention and seemingly inexhaustible productivity. In my reflection regarding their respective theses, I see them as being “incomplete” and as a result of this incompleteness, these theses mimic the dynamic, creative evolutionary dynamics of the universe. They surf the “Pilot Wave” – the guiding wave of the universe (according to some). While the quote from Monet is obvious and his back catalogue speaks voluminously for itself, Zappa’s thesis is a little more obscure in that, to me, it seem like a political expression of the First Amendment to the US Constitution – it was his right as an American to continually push musical expression to its absolute limit every time rendering that Constitution a dynamic, as opposed to a static, document. Progress cannot happen without deviation and he stepped on all norms, even his own, never ceasing until, riddled with cancer, he recorded eight twelfths of “The Celtic Harp” with the Chieftains where he afforded himself a 3000 year return and would weep listening to the playback of his own contribution.

For so long in my own work on Fermat, I felt I was this close (picture index finger approaching thumb in near touching as near touching can be). I still feel that I am this close, but now I have a better understanding of the inner infinities that exist between my thumb and finger. And now I don’t want to close this circle because I understand that this is not how it is. I will cast nets into these oceans about me, not bags, knowing that the holes in a net are as important as the fabric. I have embraced the incompleteness of my thesis not only for the sake of necessity, but from the point of permitting dynamism and evolution in my work. I breathe in, I breathe out. Onwards and upwards.

We are all deluded, in my view, but maybe deluded is as deluded does. But my view is my view and we are all deluded, but some people make delusions and some others have delusion thrust upon them. I made mine. A delusion is only a delusion at a certain point in time and space. How can newness be with out having been borne of dream or vision? Delusions of grandeur yield to grandeur…

I think being a mathematician is a bit like being a superhero.

There is an old condensed milk factory near my house that girders my path townways with high masoned stone walls – a corridor of power. It reminds me of the corridors in the Uffizi in Florence. It makes me feel like one of the Medici. One of the good ones.

There you go.

published 8 April 08  /  1 comment(s) with 0 new

 

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