Stan Kelly-Bootle(off-list): A real AGONY is the
GULF between REAL mathematics and the layperson's (e.g.,VN and BB) dabbling with
mathematical WORDS.
Maths co-opts everyday words like PROOF, EXIST, REAL,
COMPLEX, SPACE, DIMENSION, SYMMETRY, CURVE, ADD, RING, FIELD, SET, NUMBER,
INFINITY, SPIRAL*, GROUP, ... and refines their USAGE in directions that
really require some years of serious immersion to appreciate. This is
NOT elitism. Mathematics is NOT the answer to ALL problems. In fact, it's a RARE
domain that can PROVE its own LIMITATIONS! Furthermore, the greatest
mathematicians DISAGREE, often violently, over its foundations and its
connections with 'REALITY'.
JM: I think I understand your point about
"spirals" (if turning outwards, inwards, downwards or ascending** as in
Hopkins' use of the word "rung").
It all depends on who is riding them like those angels
who ascend and descend Jacob's ladder. There's no garanteed
evolutionary growth, and the same applies to "revolution."
In ADA I find Nabokov rallying against Blavatsky and the
gnostics, when he uses the term "revolution" without considering
any definite "outward/inward" direction: "...statistics shows that the Great, and to some Intolerable, Revelation
caused more insanity in the world than even an over-preoccupation with religion
had in medieval times.Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution. Sick minds
identified the notion of a Terra planet with that of another world and this
‘Other World’ got confused not only with the ‘Next World’ but with the Real
World in us and beyond us. Our enchanters, our demons, are noble
iridescent creatures with translucent talons and mightily beating wings; but in
the eighteen-sixties the New Believers urged one to imagine a sphere where our
splendid friends had been utterly degraded, had become nothing but vicious
monsters, disgusting devils, with the black scrota of carnivora and the fangs of
serpents, revilers and tormentors of female souls; while on the opposite side of
the cosmic lane a rainbow mist of angelic spirits, inhabitants of sweet Terra,
restored all the stalest but still potent myths of old creeds, with
rearrangement for melodeon of all the cacophonies of all the divinities and
divines ever spawned in the marshes of this our sufficient
world."
(I remember that someone in the N-List once related Nabokv and the
Gnostics, perhaps through Baudelaire.).
Anyway, later on
Van adds "...Nothing prevents mankind as such from having no
future at all — if for example our genus evolves by imperceptible (this is the
ramp of my argument) degrees a novo-sapiens species or another subgenus
altogether, which will enjoy other varieties of being and dreaming, beyond man’s
notion of Time. Man, in that sense, will never die, because there may never be a
taxonomical point in his evolutionary progress that could be determined as the
last stage of man in the cline turning him into Neohomo, or some horrible,
throbbing slime..."
No spirals, rings, no bumpy ladders here, but the equally
suggestive choice of "ramps" and "clines, repetition or the moment in
which a circle... "ceases to be vicious" (SM,
275).***
...........................................................................................................................
*
You can write parametric equations f(x, y, t) = 0 for curves that START out
at ?infinity? and come spiralling ?down? to the origin (maybe never quite
getting there ...) Spirals that meet the vague VN- Hegel ?model? happen to
start at the origin and ?wondrously? spiral outwards! (SKB)
** - "the rainbow spiral in a glass marble" (SM, 152, ch.7) [JM]