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Of my understanding and, for lack of a better word, theory of nothing it had been said, as it was said of Hilbert, Das ist nicht Mathematik, das ist Theologie. Axioms, postulates, theorems, and proofs bored me into senselessness. [...]
it's helpful to know a little bit of german!
“Does she have a name?” I asked.
This question relaxed him. “I call her Audrey. My wife hates her.” Peterman stared through the windshield. “She hates her, but she wants her. Everyone wants Audrey.”
I let my unspoken question hang in the air.
“Divorce,” he said. “Avoid it if you can.”
I dreamed of empty sets. I had two null sets in front of me, so to speak. One set contained real apples that were not fruits and the other contained married bachelors. Trigo argued in his usual calm way that the sets were equal, stating the obvious truth that neither had any elements and therefore held the same number of elements. I argued that the sets could not possibly be equal because what one set lacked was not the same as what the other set lacked.
“Are you saying, my dear dog Trigo, that a married bachelor is equivalent to an apple that is not a fruit?”
“Yes, that is exactly what I am saying,” said Trigo.
“That’s my BMW right there.” She pointed toward a small, dark blue convertible parked beside bright green Audrey. “It’s got an automatic transmission. It’s much easier to drive and it’s only ten years old as opposed to that forty-year-old piece of Italian bullshit. It has low miles. I drive it to my office and back. That’s it, to Pawtucket and back. I’m like that little old lady from Pasadena. And like my BIPDIP husband, it’s never even been out of the state, not even to Boston.”
“BIPDIP?”
“Born in Providence, died in Providence. We actually honeymooned in Newport. I hate him so much.” She returned her attention to me. “I’ll sell you my car for twenty-five and give you a driving lesson for free."
I wandered back through campus toward home, contemplating very briefly Zorn’s lemma, stopping because it was not only boring, depending as it did on the trivial ring having the multiplicative unit one, but also incomprehensible. I didn’t understand a word of it, a symbol of it, a function of it, especially a function of it. What was the damn thing for? That thinking sent me spiraling the way I always did, wondering what I was doing with my finite, but unknown, number of days of life, realizing that I was a fraud, that I could talk to my colleagues for hours about things I simply didn’t understand, that I could fill a board with a proof that might make them ooh and aah, but had no meaning, no truth, no purpose. And the more wrong the noodling was, the more impressed they were. I was a charlatan. I knew nothing. But given that was my chosen topic, I was a successful fraud, a real, fake expert, an expert fake, a fake with real expertise, an ostensive definition of my subject, an object lesson for myself, a pure construction, and so, because irony is the air I breathe, a real-world example of Zorn’s lemma applied.
“DaMarcus’s sugar cookies are especially good,” Sill told me. “And much enjoyed by the crew.”
“Thank you, sir,” DeMarcus said. “Will that be all?”
Dream. Trigo had six legs and looked rather frightening. He moved around our kitchen at home like an insect, enjoying himself, looking at one paw and then another, but ignoring his left front.
“Where did you get all those?” I asked.
“The leg store,” he said. “They were having a special.”
“Why did you buy so many?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean isn’t four the standard number for a dog?”
“What do you mean standard number?” he asked.
“Dogs have four legs.”
“I’m a dog and I had one leg. Are you saying I was supposed to have four?”
I reviewed all of my plans and they were perfect. I was trying to find some comfort in even a vacuous truth. I had no plans. So, conversely, I reviewed all of my plans and they were bad. Also vacuously true. All of my weapons were loaded. All of my allies were ready. None of my proofs of the fifth postulate were invalid. Truth after truth, albeit vacuous. And they did me no good. I needed to get past Gloria. I decided to try talking to her.
I WILL BEGIN WITH DIMENSIONS. As one should. I had a mathematician friend tell me once, perhaps twice, that dimension is concerned with the constituent structure of all space and its relation to time. I did not understand this statement and still I do not, in spite of its undeniable, obvious poetic charm. He also tried to tell me that the dimensions of an object are independent of the space in which that object is embedded. It’s not clear to me that even he understood what he was saying, though he seemed quite taken with the idea. What I do understand is that my canvas is twelve feet high and twenty-one feet and three inches across. I cannot explain the three inches, but can say that they are crucial to the work. It is nailed to a wall that is twenty feet tall and thirty-five feet across. The opposite wall is the same and the adjacent walls are but fifteen feet wide. And so the square footage of the space is five hundred twenty-five. The volume of the building space is ten thousand five hundred cubic feet. I am six feet tall and weigh one hundred and ninety-two pounds. I cannot explain the two pounds. I prefer that numbers be written out as words.
amazing opening
She was lying. I felt like an old fool just talking to her, though I had no designs. I would have been less of a cliché if I had had some designs. I would sound like less of one now if I admitted to having had designs, but I was what I was. As much as it pained me to admit, in a moment of reducing myself to an artistic expression, I resigned myself to a kind of Greenbergian complaint about surrealism, my present cliché being just that, surrealistic, that the picture fails because of an appeal to the anecdotal. An equally painful admission was that I believed, as much as I did not want to, that the medium was everything. Canvas and paint, that’s all there was, all there is. The medium there, in that museum, of my cliché, was two bodies. And sad as it made me, and excited as well, I knew that the two bodies would find each other. It wasn’t male fantasy; I was never confident enough for that. It was artistic prescience, if that makes any sense. Even if it doesn’t, that’s what it was.