Huzzah, not much English to worry about then...but then realised I had to settle down to the learner's viewpoint and do the sums so as to identify any problems.
It was very hard not to imagine I was doing this at my old grammar school desk, amidst a pinging of rulers and clacking desklids, reading that Spanner Sat Ere enchained for 2 1/2 hours and wondering whether to spend my dinner money on food or 3 Number Six from the lady at the sweetshop who apparently understood the stresses of being 13.
Of course in those days(as I realise attack is the best form of defence), all we had were slide rules and our heads: given that the latter of these was stuffed with porn, Deep Purple, Hendrix and how to wear a badge with Fred Trueman on it without incurring lines, it's a wonder there was any space left to contemplate the hermetic arcana of the School Maths Project. We didn't have calculators until the 4th year...er, that'll be Year 10 in new money...and then it was only Thommo, but he was always messing about with batteries and crap while real men played guitar by slorming the stylus repeatedly over the beginning of Focus At The Rainbow in order to learn Jan Akkerman's opening widdles. I just didn't get Thommo(nor anyone else) until 4 years later when I realised that the shouting, terrifying Scottish bloke who fell over down our road and stank of scotch was his dad. And it's only now my heart bleeds for him.
Maths. What's that all about then? When on earth am I going to even wish to know the volume of a prism? Hm?
The area of a football pitch...the volume of a house: maybe: but, I ask you, how often will sorting out the volume of an extruded shape make my life any more bearable? Algebra is sort of rescued by having some kind of order or symmetry..or rather a catharsis when one has found out what x is.
Thing is, what has bloody x done to be so popular? x is always having to be found, or worked out, or made allowances for; x is a spoilt and overused monitor of school books, always top of sports, ingratiating itself with teachers, never swearing and always being a self-righteous bastard. Discuss.
Given that every other value, your y and your a, b and c, do this and that, get upside down and over 1, or involved with pi, and squaring itself up to something and cubing something else...it's always smarmy bloody x that has to be rescued, found and given a nice double underline before smoothing its forelock, giving the bastard Horlicks, saying "well done boy" to it, before sending it upstairs. And what it does up there, ruddy and smug, is its own business, but we all know really. I hate x.
True, one gets a kind of satisfaction from its completion. Putting it in the same company as going to the bog, bashing one's head against the tiled wall of the school shower block and childbirth. And I'm sure that's what childbirth must be like.
Yep, still crazy after all these years, maths is still up there in the top 100 most boring and pointless things to do with your time...and probably sharing its position with watching a plank warp.
A definition then: Maths is like a blind man whistling in the dark on a journey to nowhere. Discuss. And what a soulless, sighing journey, like Dante's nether regions of the inferno without the amusing company or things to point at; or the pilgrimage of the Canterbury Tales after everyone got bored listening to each other's coprophiliac stories, and they've pissed off, leaving a dead fire and last year's pewter medal of Thomas a Becket, priced at 4 groats too bloody dear.....Given that all the pilgrims had 1 medal of Thomas a Becket at 4 groats, what would be the resultant value of the medals, given that the rate of depreciation is 0.3 groat per bubonic infection, with infections happening with a probability of 2 in 5 on a fish day? Yeahright. And why not convert the groats to silver pennies that have their edges clipped once a fortnight? I mean! Thud goes the desklid. Right, put your chairs back; finish for homework....
And yet: Avogadro...Leonardo...the genius polyglots of the renaissance, hanging and flying and soaring in a holistic learningfest before science, art and nature were pigeonholed as such just so the common and bureaucratic mortal could keep track of them: maths to them was a language, a mystery, a knowing... a way of seeing intimations of immortality in the fractal curves of spiralling water, snail shells and tornados...
And again the earlier Islamic explorers of the inner and outer worlds, seeing hidden fires in metallurgy, mathematics, chemistry..indeed, our very words "chemistry" and "alchemy" coming from the same root al- kemi....and algebra seen as named after its magisterial 12th century practitioner Al Jibbar...
The "golden ratio", the Vitruvian man...mathematical curves and fractals spiralling out like filaments of light against a universe of dark and superstition.....
Maybe at the end of these snaking trails into the dark there will be not God, but man staring back into a void that is so pitch dark as to be a perfect mirror of the one clever enough to get there, the abomination that is desolation....or will even the algorithmical perfection and genius of the temple of Jerusalem merely only ever be grasped as a holographic and unreal image, a metaphor given by God and no longer inhabited by Him?
And will we step inside the vast filigreed perfection, still whistling, checking the clean cupboards and the perfect stairs, as time slips from the hills with the stars going out like fireflies in a camp-fire, thinking we've made it...only to find in the final chirrupping dusk, that we missed the call from Him to say that He'd like to meet us somewhere more local...and that while we were regaling ourselves for a long journey, He'd been there at the back door for ages, waiting for us to open the door...?
The following poem by me(who else) might or might not have anything to do with the above.
Well, actually, nor might the first bit.
Discuss.
In Three Weeks
In three weeks
The bluebells went from promise to tatty-grey edges
The clematis a future joy to a flower that flowered years ago
And inside
The book fills the space to stop others from leaning off the shelf
The names of all creation forgotten
On some far plain a Spring has come
The traveller's foot a memory of a bruised petal
From here the mountain is somewhere in the mist
No laughter in the sun from where you see its
difference
I came across the fields, dry ground, blasting storms
Standing before the door in Spring
Three keys for three doors, three doors with the handles inside
I cannot stay long in the shadow while the barley grows those few fields from here
I called for you, called for you
Saw you through the dirtied window as you flitted back to inner rooms
of dustsheets and silent clocks
Come now
The keys are in the doors and see
Push from the inside and they will open
For I cannot enter without invitation
And seasons since
I have called for you
called for you
I have prowled and knocked like the wind at windows and doors
have always heard your fearsteps
Walk with me; the harvest comes
And I cannot stay long in the shadow
The bluebells went from promise to tatty-grey edges
The clematis a future joy to a flower that flowered years ago
And inside
The book fills the space to stop others from leaning off the shelf
The names of all creation forgotten
On some far plain a Spring has come
The traveller's foot a memory of a bruised petal
From here the mountain is somewhere in the mist
No laughter in the sun from where you see its
difference
I came across the fields, dry ground, blasting storms
Standing before the door in Spring
Three keys for three doors, three doors with the handles inside
I cannot stay long in the shadow while the barley grows those few fields from here
I called for you, called for you
Saw you through the dirtied window as you flitted back to inner rooms
of dustsheets and silent clocks
Come now
The keys are in the doors and see
Push from the inside and they will open
For I cannot enter without invitation
And seasons since
I have called for you
called for you
I have prowled and knocked like the wind at windows and doors
have always heard your fearsteps
Walk with me; the harvest comes
And I cannot stay long in the shadow
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