On the Mathematical Principles of Love

By Gerard McGorian

This is a short book. It will be even shorter, as it happens, than Goethes The Sorrows of Young Werther, and I am writing it, for you, in at least the same spirit as he wrote that for you: And you, good soul who suffer as he did, draw comfort from his sorrows; let this little book be your friend, when by fate or through your own faultyou can find no more intimate companion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 30, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543446050

Gerard McGorian

Gerard McGorian was born in Liverpool in 1960. He was educated at Yale, the University of Illinois, and Universidad Centroamericana (Managua). For the last thirty years he has lived, successively, in the United States, Nicaragua, Germany, England, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, and the Philippines. He is a member of the Academy of American Poets.

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Copyright © 2017 by Gerard McGorian.

ISBN:                   Softcover                         978-1-5434-4604-3

                            eBook                               978-1-5434-4605-0

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Rev. date: 08/24/2017

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CONTENTS

I: ALGEBRA

II: GEOMETRY

III: TRIGONOMETRY

IV: ADVANCED ALGEBRA & PRE-CALCULUS

THE CALCULUS

ON THE MATHEMATICAL PRINCIPLES OF LOVE

BUENOS AIRES SUITE (2006)

MANILA SUITE (2017)

For Peter

Auch ich in Arkadien

and for

Pablo Armando Fernández

En el alma de tus ojos encontré de nuevo el corazón de mi voz

PREFACE

Time presses forward,

The spiral turns,

People are born and die,

History happens, and seems to happen.

At the end of the chain of time,

Freed from fetters, from money,

At the end of its wild spiral,

Love twists into eternity.

From Life and Death

by Hanuš Hachenberg

The Greeks came, those innocent children of the plague.

From Ligeras ganas de introducir pasmado

by Osvaldo Lamborghini

I read that what is most abstract in poetry is most concrete in mathematics, and what is most abstract in mathematics is most concrete in poetry. He also wrote that mathematics deals with relations, and poetry deals with qualities. But a sphere, for example, results when we can see the relations holding between the qualities.

Mathematics is the science of relations as such.

Love is the absence of a science of relations as such.

Poetry sometimes attempts to describe, and to create, this absence.

Poetry sometimes attempts to deal with the qualities of absence, which are love.

A sphere is a round body whose surface is at all points equidistant from the center:

x² + y² + z² = r²

Such unfabled truths, as this equation, have a remarkably sedative effect on mathematicians; none whatsoever on lovers.

This is a short book. It will be even shorter, as it happens, than Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, and I am writing it, for you, in at least the same spirit as he wrote that, for you: And you, good soul who suffer as he did, draw comfort from his sorrows; let this little book be your friend, when by fate – or through your own fault – you can find no more intimate companion.

When you can find no more intimate companion than a book.

The citations which introduce this preface are from the works of two dead poets. Hanuš Hachenberg was born in Prague (city of Kafka, Rilke, Werfel) on July 12, 1929. He was no more than 13 years old when he wrote the poem Life and Death, a title typically precocious, we might think, for a young poet, until we take into account the fact that he wrote it in the Terezin Concentration Camp, to which he had been deported and to which a total of around 15,000 other children under the age of 15 would be deported before the end of the war. Of those, about 100 would return. He was murdered in Auschwitz, probably on December 18, 1944. The uncertainty of the date of his horrific death is a distinction he shares with another great Jewish poet, Osip Mandelstam, who died sometime towards the end of the same month in 1938 in a Soviet gulag. It would surely be an irony even to their murderers that the perpetual anonymity into which they tried to cast both these poets has been totally vanquished, at least in part, by the very dates uncertain of their deaths.

Osvaldo Lamborghini was born in Buenos Aires on April 12, 1940 and died in Barcelona on November 18, 1985. He published three books of poems during his lifetime. César Aira has compiled and edited his Poemas 1969-1985 but as yet, and unfortunately, there are no translations of his work into English.

These two poets met their untimely deaths as victims of both the mathematics of hate and of love: the calculuses employed to ensure the ungodly efficiency of the Nazi genocide will remain the preeminent symbols of human degradation until the last generation of us expires; and the insouciance with which powerful governments greeted the onslaught of the human immunodeficiency virus in the early 1980s is, yes, alleviated by the knowledge that the virus was and continues to be spread by the metaphorical and literal double helix of our instinctive biological need to penetrate and be penetrated by the other, and our human need to love and be loved. Who among us is to say when those needs fuse identities, or do not?

There can be little doubt that the young, German-speaking Jewish poet from Prague never read Yeats, and less doubt that the anglophile Lamborghini had. Yet in reading Hachenberg’s Life and Death, who of us will not immediately recall The Second Coming, written more than twenty years earlier. The spirals and gyres of both poems, their shared conviction that things are falling apart, bemoan the absence of a system that will hold things together, while at the same time setting in poetic stone the devastating fear that collapse and disintegration are truly ineluctable.

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Through his ineffably beautiful eyes – through his incomprehensibly condemned eyes - the boy Hanuš Hachenberg reminds us that even when nothing matters anymore, even when we see ourselves almost exterminated, the art of love, whose own art is poetry, is our