lets imagine a mathematician that we construct not from human society according to the present dominant model but words poets and politicians tortuously create alternative realities from their desires and also shouldnt we whatever we are make mathematicians from ours? for arent our desires arithmetic and by entering them and listening to the hidden voices of numbers whisper not the truth but truths of their desires we return to seeking opennesses toward the numbers of which we are comprised and while not ours somehow possess us?
as we manufacture a biography for our odd and even friend we notice its preeminent trait is a kind of nonexistence we find difficult to properly classify it might have a rare disease maybe even if were fortunate one not yet invented it might belong to those books about nonbeing in which nonbeing fails it might have been diagnosed with any of those endless pathologies routinely being created by established experts to justify themselves and suppress spirit but its not this attribute that primarily interests us as the crux of a matter is rarely found in preeminence but shades where few go to escape the glare of names and so we find our linguistic creature of number lounging under a sycomore tree with a bunch of leadmunching phoebastria immutabilis smoking whatever you wish to put in its mouth and brooding on the personalities of numbers through the poetic functions of their names
its name though number in its names shifty might be
and in its mind strings like lets not attempt to unite with the godhead in the manner of the mystics of old but zero with the zerohead and death toos a number
its devoted a universe of nights to studying the masters of math and knows they cancel one another like a fine equation for isnt a mathematician like a poet a maker of patterns and isnt mathematics the art of giving the same name to different things while giving different names to the same thing and cant we say as truthfully as truth is said its the science of skillful operations with concepts and rules invented just for the purpose of skillful operations and would we be wrong to postulate it like any core human quest is a subject in which we never know what were talking about nor whether what were saying is true and to have faith that the more games we study the better a subspecialty of fiction a mythological and social construct a dispensability and body of falsehoods not talking about anything real and a mathematician a blind person in a dark room looking for a black cat who isnt there?
our hyperspherical collegiality applies the ancient science of nymhematology to number the res ors roes ozes and os in zero that o of no beginning or end at its end curving to meet an end of a beginning that z forming an oz wærloga of empty illusion thaumaturge of destiny and mind the one we fear to consult but consult we must in times of greatest duress for if we neglect this duty it comes unbidden and this unentreated agitation might be history but hardly wisdom
zero exists most fully among the numbers and ones a radiant nothing
it sees the no in one the ive in five neins in nines it bumbles toward the creation of a logic in which two and two make six or nineteen not in the manner of despots or avatars of dereliction to justify subjugation but for the failure thats a multitude of freedoms
i walk into the valley of number and fear no counting
for thy gaffe and bawd are with me
knowing that two to be two too must be nottwo
and what it is is most explicitly not itself
while what its not manifests infinitely
and