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  • The Sunday Poem: Modus Ponens

    Hours Categories The Sunday Poem
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    This week’s poem is a meditation on good and evil and faith and logic via Principia Mathematica, based on the news this week that some genes for violent antisocial behavior have been identified.

    It turns out that up to one percent of the population may have these genes. But they do not always express, because nurture and life circumstances are just as important in whether or not the person’s  actually going to turn out antisocial, or dare I say it, evil. And yet, we have so often ascribed these behaviors, throughout history, to the Devil, or to other supernatural causes.

    I ended up linking this to the notion that religion exists in our mental space in a position analogous to Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, which in its broadest layman interpretation states that a system cannot prove its own consistency; wasn’t there something religious, in the end, in Russell and Whitehead’s belief in complete systems, in the ability of logic to put everything into order?

    OK, so either you come to this blog because it sometimes leaps from game design to poems linking genetics, theology, and mathematics in rhyming hexameter — or you are wondering what the hell (no pun intended) I am on about. Shrug. Here’s the poem either way, annotated for your (in)convenience. Read More “The Sunday Poem: Modus Ponens”

  • The Sunday Poem: Apples

    Hours Categories The Sunday Poem
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    In Latin, the words for “apple” and for “evil” are similar in the singular (malus—apple, malum—evil) and identical in the plural (mala).

    – Wikipedia

    This apple from Tajikistan gave birth to all the fruit:
    The red ones, gold ones, tart ones, green and russet hues.

    Each branch was mated to a branch carried over miles
    And honeybees deployed in ranks to stoke the woody fires.

    The names themselves are everywheres: from Fuji to Orléans,
    Grannies, Coxes, McIntoshes and countless other brands,

    Which carry in each half-cut star and in their very style
    The memory of Kazakh slopes where first they grew in wild.

    The blossoms spread, pink and pale verging on the blue,
    Until we had the legends: the gold ones Hera grew;

    The one that Eris tossed to Paris, causing wars in Troy;
    Immortal orchards grown in eddas, Idun’s deathless joy;

    A snow white princess poisoned; Atalanta’s race;
    Johnny and all those orchards over which he traipsed;

    The tree of knowledge, good and evil, our original sin.
    This is quite a burden for fruit to bear within.

    We have made the apple ours, and on it grafted history,
    And yet the breed runs on, profusions to a tree,

    This fruit humanity resents, but loves and needs.
    Every apple carries still inside those bitter seeds.

  • The Sunday Poem: Building the Globe

    Hours Categories The Sunday Poem

    We heft the oak beams, one two three, each count
    A sturdy truss; smooth hewn and splintered, blunt
    And heavy, painted gaily marbled, dun
    And costumeless. By numbers shall we know
    Their place, when Southwark greets our lumber load;
    The Theatre is no more, and soon we’ll have a Globe.
    In Shoreditch now there stands a hole, on lease-
    Land Burbage didn’t own. And past the trees,
    By open fields, his Men will have a Streete-
    Built O, wherein proud Oberon will prance
    And Lear cry out his woe; where faery dance
    For groundlings’ sake, and Puck plays out his pranks.
    We’ll sift the straw and lay it straight on top,
    And paint anew the spangled sky aloft
    Above proscenium’s boards. We’ll stop
    The crowd with good stout rails, so high-pitch boys
    Can stain their lips and flounce their tails, and raise
    A ruckus to the skies, the center of our noise.
    But first, we must dismantle, first we take
    Apart. If all the world’s a stage and planks
    Are how it’s made, then for our Good Lord’s sake
    I hope he spent his seven days as well,
    Assembling worlds in beams of thirty ells,
    A Shakespere for his script, Queen Bess, and all
    A-toiling midst the sound of London’s bells.

    Annotations: Read More “The Sunday Poem: Building the Globe”

  • The Sunday Poem: Peace

    Hours Categories The Sunday Poem
    Comments 7 Comments

    Peace shouldn’t be quiet, clouds soft and pliant,
    A mellow sky scene in blue.
    Peace should be blaring, a jazz band past caring,
    A squabble of children and you.
    The clangor of pots, your eyes full of spots,
    Buttercups growing in dew.
    Peace is invention, it’s sustained attention,
    It’s chemistry going kaboom.
    It’s racing of go karts and artichoke hearts
    And farming in Kalamazoo.

    It’s silence as well, but the silence of bells
    The moment they still for a few;
    An aftershock sound that echoes around
    And gives way to rush and to hue.
    It’s not smug inertia, safe from what hurts ya;
    Pain is what gives us the glue.
    It’s temperate intemperance, all quantum events,
    Mosquitoes buzzing canoes.
    A whole raucous party, that’s peace’s priority:
    Space to be scattered and true.