Opening Of The Line
1
as a clearing of trees
(is to [=])
messages from deep space;
I proceed as if through
a column of fog—
which is to say, by forgetting
my way back
2
pausing in a glade, an indeterminate
point along the line,
caesura—
the echoes having not yet returned:
how far does my voice travel from myself
& how to calculate the velocity
of the responding utterance?
3
Georg Cantor in a footnote to remarks delivered at a meeting of the Gesellschaft
Deutscher Naturforscher und Aerzte, September 1883, on the existence of actual infinities:
“Apart from the journey which strives to be carried out in the imagination [Phantasie] or in dreams, I say that a solid ground and base as well as a smooth path are absolutely necessary for secure traveling or wandering, a path which never breaks off, but one which must be and remain passable wherever the journey leads.”
4
advancing, through stone & night,
brush & storm, camphor & burn;
leaf-mouthed, I am myself unfound
among the gloom-technicians,
plotting strange coordinates in
the dark, late. Transmitting our
location to you now; please advise.
*Quoted by Joseph Warren Dauben in Georg Cantor: His Mathematics and Philosophy of the Infinite
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 127.
