Mystic’s Math

Posted on 2023-04-18 by Mellow Curmudgeon

Simple shapes
sing silent songs
for those who listen.

Best known today for his theorem about right triangles, the ancient mystic Pythagoras was also big on numbers. How do they relate to each other in pure math? How might they help explain the natural world? How does changing the length of a lyre string affect its pitch? Pythagoras and friends took the first tentative steps toward understanding the physics of music.

While many haiku poets don’t count syllables, those that do often abide by rules that Pythagoras would have liked. In the traditional 5-7-5 form, the total number of syllables is prime (as are 5 and 7). Likewise in the shorter 3-5-3 form. Prime numbers were a big deal to ancient mathematicians. They are still a big deal for encrypting credit card numbers in e-commerce.

Pythagoras would have liked the syllable counts 3-4-5 in this post’s haiku for a different reason. They form the smallest Pythagorean triple. (A right triangle could have sides that are 3, 4, and 5 units long.) While most triples like this are too big or lopsided for 3-line poems, somebody might use 6-8-10.

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(reblog), haiku, photography

Emptiness Revisited

Posted on 2019-04-272020-12-19 by Mellow Curmudgeon

Empty talk and empty bowls elicit different responses.

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Carpe Diem Weekend Meditation #81
Poetry Archive (5) loneliness or emptiness

Choose a haiku, tanka or other form of Japanese poetry from your archive and share it with us all. Tell us why you have chosen that poem … and create a new poem inspired on your choice.

A short sequence of 3-5-3 haiku dealt with emptiness for a challenge in another series. I like the way the first haiku sets up the second one, so the whole sequence is my archive choice. Can I write a new poem for the current challenge? Yes, and there is a reason to put it before the archive choice. The new poem is a 5-7-5 haiku:

Not Alone
|Lonely in the crowd
|and weary of empty talk,
|I seek solitude.

cartoon people in the crowd

Here and There in 3-5-3

empty-bowl_840x704

Emptiness Here
|Empty bowl
|atop microwave,
|just for looks.

Emptiness There
|Empty bowl,
|heavy with nothing.
|Hunger pangs.

I give to several charities that help hungry people in many places with a mix of short-term and long-term efforts. In particular, my next gift to CARE will be matched 5X. The matching grant offer on CARE.org/match will expire 2019-05-25. (A popup on CARE.org has another match that expires sooner, on 04-30.) If U can give more than whatever U may have already given to charities like CARE this year, now is a good time.

haiku, quote, riff

Riff of a Quote from Calliope Writing

Posted on 2017-03-062018-06-06 by Mellow Curmudgeon

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The recent Blogoquent Competition calling for a description of life in a single sentence was won by Katrina, whose concise and eloquent entry posted in Calliope Writing struck me as being much like a haiku. Hmmm. One can indeed get a decent haiku by simply adding obbligato line breaks to the winning sentence:

Haiku Draft #1
|Life is a journey
|in which nothing is permanent and
|everything is precious.

While I do not freak out because this haiku breaks the 5-7-5 Rule and lacks a clear fragment/phrase boundary, I believe that rule violations need better reasons than

That’s what popped into my head.

The competition is over. We are free to use 2 sentences now. A better haiku emerges:

Haiku Draft #2
|Life is a journey.
|No things are permanent and
|all things are precious.

Hmmm. Do I have an image to illustrate this post? I do, and it suggests another tweak:

outflow-closeup_ObjRem

Happy Heraclitus
|Life flows and splashes.
|No things are permanent and
|all things are precious.

haiku, humor, philosophy

Games, Beauty, and Overreach

Posted on 2015-07-292021-05-05 by Mellow Curmudgeon

The list of games is long and diverse (peekaboo; scrabble; solitaire; …). What do all those “games” have in common? In defiance of centuries of tradition dating back to Plato and Aristotle, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein proposed a radical answer in the 20-th century: not much.

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As readers of my previous post may have guessed, obeying the 5-7-5 Rule has become something of a game for me. When I began writing this post, I had written about 50 haiku, all of them (5-7-5)-compliant. I hoped to extend my streak to at least 56 because Joe DiMaggio’s epic hitting streak lasted for 56 consecutive baseball games in 1941.

Wait a minute. My (5-7-5)-compliance is a game; DiMaggio’s profession was the game of baseball. The list of games is long and diverse (peekaboo; scrabble; solitaire; …). What do all those “games” have in common? In defiance of centuries of tradition dating back to Plato and Aristotle, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein proposed a radical answer in the 20-th century:

Zilch.

(We can leave some wiggle room for something bland and inconsequential about amusing activities, often but not necessarily competitive.) Looking long and hard at the word “game” in all its sprawling diversity, Wittgenstein observed that there are many is-a-lot-like relationships among games, such as

Hockey is a lot like soccer.

To a nonfan like me, hockey and lacrosse and soccer are all essentially the same game, with obvious minor differences. Remove the goalie and U get basketball. Football is somewhat like such games and also somewhat like baseball. Card games are like each other in various ways. One may well be able to get from one game to another by several is-a-lot-like steps, but is-a-lot-like relationships are not transitive. After more than a few of such steps, it is no surprise if nothing worth fussing about is shared.

Wittgenstein did not stop with games. Philosophers have often sought to find and formulate what is common to all the activities or things that may rightly be called “good” or “beautiful” (or whatever uplifting adjective U want), with the presumption that something nontrivial and enlightening might be said. Tho Wittgenstein did not actually prove that quest to be hopeless, he did show that the burden of proof is heavier on somebody who thinks

What is beauty?

makes sense than on somebody who just says

I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it.

Images of beautiful people and places abound. Sculptors create beautiful objects; composers write beautiful music. In math, a beautiful proof of the Pythagorean Theorem was created by replacing the usual picture (of 3 squares glued to the sides of 1 triangle) with a picture of 4 copies of the same triangle, arranged to form 2 squares:

(a+b)²
=
4 · ( ½ · a · b) + c²

Intellectually, I agree with Wittgenstein. Pachelbel’s canon and the 2-squares proof are both beautiful, we already knew that, and philosophy has nothing to add. I just want to remark that the urge to understand the world in terms of general principles works rather well when science encourages sobriety, by testing predictions about little things before trusting grandiose pronouncements about big things.

Emotionally, I sense something more likable than mere hubris in those who overreach, something akin to the spirit of people in New Orleans who tough out hurricanes or return after them.

This is Not Apollo 13
|Is failure an option?
|No, it is a given.
|But we will still try.

No Pots of Gold
|Seek ends of rainbows.
|You will not find them? Okay.
|The quest is enough.

haiku, humor

On Rules: Moral Hazard; 5-7-5; …

Posted on 2015-07-172019-07-23 by Mellow Curmudgeon

A discussion of the Moral Hazard Rule could bog down in controversy. So I will discuss something simpler and less important by itself, but good for illustrating the vital difference between respecting a rule and worshiping it.

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The difference between respecting a rule and worshiping it can be vital, as with economists’ Moral Hazard Rule against bailouts and the like. A discussion of the Moral Hazard Rule could bog down in controversy over who is to blame for a mess, who is suffering, who has a hidden agenda, and so on. So I will discuss something simpler and less important by itself, but good for illustrating that vital difference. Please remember that difference the next time U hear somebody who worships a rule arguing with somebody who ignores it. Maybe each of them is partly right and partly wrong.

The 5-7-5 Rule says that a haiku is a 3-line poem in blank verse, where the lines have syllable counts of 5, 7, and 5. Tho he was razzed intensely at the time, Bill Clinton had a point when he fussed about what “is” means. Does the rule say how the word “haiku” is (or should be) used? By whom? Does the rule specify the essence of haikuness? My own attitude is both traditional and pragmatic, more nuanced than I can express in 3 lines.

I first encountered the 5-7-5 Rule as a junior in college, back when students used typewriters and people with scholarly aspirations kept bibliographic info on 3×5 cards. (Yes, that long ago.) A friend was interested in Japanese culture, but not so interested as to learn the language. He was enthusiastic about some short Japanese poems that, as translated into English, were limp and vague. Poetry is notoriously difficult to translate, and my friend explained that these translations had the special burden of being translations of haiku, using the 5-7-5 Rule to define a word that was new to me. My friend said he was settling for bad poems in English that began as good ones in Japanese, and that people cannot write haiku in English anyway, in part because we do not have Japanese calligraphy. I took the purported impossibility as a challenge.

After some scribbling and counting, I put a 3×5 card in my typewriter, banged on a few keys, and silently handed the card to my friend.

The card had 3 lines:
|Haiku written on
|a typewriter: ultimate
|incongruity.

We shared a laugh and I kept the card.

In the course of about 50 years, I eventually wrote about 50 haiku, all conforming to the 5-7-5 Rule. While thinking about ways I might publish some of my haiku, I did some web browsing and found many haiku that I liked, including

I barely noticed the violation of 5-7-5 and did not mind it at all. Some time later, Lew Gardner sent me a handout from the haiku class he teaches, with examples that included Just friends: … and

Now the violation of 5-7-5 is integral to the imagery!

Anybody who gripes about the foregoing violations of 5-7-5 is just being churlish. Anybody who is oblivious to 5-7-5 is missing much of the fun in a successful translation of one of Basho Matsuo’s haiku:

I needed strict observance of 5-7-5 to prove a point long ago, but the 5-5-5 of my last borrowing from Lew’s handout is close enough to support a funnier joke with a haiku that refers to itself. I salute whoever topped my first effort with the classic

Far from being hidebound about tradition, I often write on oddball topics, always provide titles, and sometimes write 3 lines that would be unintelligible w/o stage setting by the title. But I also honor tradition with a serious effort at abiding by 5-7-5. So far, I have almost always been happier with the result (of all the heating and hammering that effort entailed) than with the looser early version that I brought to my wordsmith’s forge.

Abiding by 5-7-5 has been helpful to me; I recommend giving it a try. The precision of 5-7-5 is also appealing, and I deeply appreciate the importance of precise definitions in math. I also know that poetry ain’t math.

Who Miscounted?
|This so-called “haiku”
|ignores five-seven-five, so
|it’s not a haiku.