1. There's a story that Descartes, who died of early mornings,
fashioned for himself a
model of a woman: his
daughter, who had died in young adulthood (trans-
lation of morning), out of
wood and pinions.
This was old-fashioned, his ontogeny reca-
pitulating hers -- think of
hair in a ring --, his
capturing her but failing to bring her to
life, lacking the
vital fright of e-
lectricity. A disordered pair, the
man and those moveable
parts, so clearly the
least of his arts, that moveable beast, so
portable, the terror of
unfinished speech, the
unfinished tower of her standing proud and
lewd, the rouged and
painted flower of her cheek.
2. Évariste Galois died of a gunshot
wound after dawn. He had
written all night, the
candle-light and flicker of thoughts -- their
trickle like candle-
wax -- in the heat of
loving and having no time, and the wick: in the
center of a page, he had
written: "une femme", a
woman who blushed like the gunpowder dawn, her
rosy fingers to
him, and then gone: "une
femme", encircled by orders and indices,
what would become set
theory. In the margins:
"I have not enough time." This is where God
doesn't -- needn't or
can't -- come in. This
young man, barely past boy, the tower un-
finished of him, the
fading flower of his cheek.
(Edited 8 October 2009, begun 23 September 2009. The story goes that Galois committed to paper everything he could of his prodigious mathematical imagination that night, knowing it might well be his last; set theory would have been invented eventually, but not in the same blaze of glory. I have Descartes' story on no good authority, but am amazed by the image of the master geographer and crypto-religious philosopher rattling around a drafty castle, his daughter's creepy effigy rattling around alongside him.)
evocative and suggestive!
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