A mathematical geography.
Ritterbusch, Dale
If there is a proper beginning for this perhaps it was math class,
algebra or geometry, it doesn't matter, he was good at both. There
was a mystery solved in the answer to any difficult problem. Sometimes
he had forgotten a particular method, something studied months before,
and its loss prevented the solution; in a moment of acute recovery he
recalled the necessary principle, like a memory from early childhood,
and the answer was there on the page a moment later. There was precision
in the satisfaction of wonder. Later, but six months in, he waited in
Kuwait and on an evening when everything was squared away, he looked
across the border into the sands of Iraq and knew in a visceral sense
that this was it--something deterministic, expansive as all history, lay
ahead, and he could feel it, the geometry of this world in all the
axioms and postulates he knew, blood-born as the landscape curved with
Euclidean regularity. There was reason in the looming punch to his gut,
but he had always known something, someday, would be unsolvable: a swirl
of sand rose like an apparition calling, then disappeared in the latent
glow of the sun.
Three years and two tours later he enrolled in college algebra,
took a course in solid geometry confident he'd recover what was
left behind, like battlefield detritus, souvenirs and scrap to be dug up
years later when the landscape shifted a compass point or two,
circumference purely referential and definitely not fixed. Time to move
on he had said. But the quizzes proved harder than before--not the first
or second problem, but those that came after, his mind focused on
splattered points of light, the flash of a door bashed in, the cries and
the cowering, defiance in their powerless eyes. Even the relative
silence of the classroom annoyed him and prevented any transference of
the equation to any recognizable system of symbolic logic. Lost in
X's and Y's, nothing made sense. What he knew one moment was
lost in the next. At night his wife said he wasn't the same as
before. He dozed off fitful, edgy, as if unprepared for his next exam.
He felt pulled in multiple directions, unable, even helpless, to resist,
drawn as if by wind or water flowing through a disquieting sphere
towards a belief as powerful and true as some mathematical proof arising
from some barely sentient terrain, a belief that somehow a system based
on an orderly construct consistent with his experience--mathematics and
his tours meshed and unified--would become visible in the insistent
recalling of figures appearing and reappearing in the swirling sand;
apparitions or not they were there like fractals or winding numbers or
multiple infinities on a plane where all lines always intersect. In this
non-Euclidean geography this was a given, an axiom with all the truth
and sanctity of an explosive charge, a souvenir chunk of C-4 he always
fingered in his pocket when only the irrational made sense.
A frequent contributor to WLA, Dale Ritterbusch is the author of
two collections of poetry, Lessons Learned and Far From the Temple of
Heaven.
