091818 perpetual exhaustion millie turning off the shower the air conditioner running even though it’s cold outside none of this matters sidewalks the cracks between the slabs of concrete speaking volumes about another age i watched this video last night about a mathematical proof and algorithms that showed that every positive integer is the sum of three palindromes and how to figure out which three they are--the guy said the proof and algorithms were a paper forty pages long. i guess that’s like the mathematician’s equivalent of writing a novel? somehow it seems more substantial, though. novels are just the organized output of sustained dreams. mathematics actually has a spine to it, an extrinsically organized reality, don’t you think? maybe for a novel to be “good” it has to be mathematically sound somehow? but still, what are the criteria? palindromic numbers are palindromic numbers no matter what year it is. if “the dinosaurs” had been able to figure out that proof, it would have or at least could have been the same proof. but their novels needn’t have resembled ours at all. right? or am i missing something? is numbers a representation of something timeless and truly actually literally universal? but so then what’s language? a way to talk about experience? a lubricant for the linkages between nodal points of consciousness? it just seems so messy, so arbitrary. doesn’t mathematics exist whether we monkeys are aware of it or not? isn’t mathematics not “about” people? but if it’s not, then why do we care about it? is “writing” really just a fancy kind of perfume? ask a few questions that “make you think” and then trail off... there’s no particular place to go with it. it just is. it’s essentially bird poop; a beautiful purple blotch on someone’s windshield. you can point to it and say you “made” it, but again, it’s just the byproduct of your mastication and respiration. it’s just a fossil. an artifact of the chance occurrence of your momentary existence, your snapshot of a combination of energies (that can eventually be described precisely with mathematics) that you think of as you. other people around you care a little bit, for a little while, and then that combination is gone. unless you take a snapshot. so writing is photography? it’s massage therapy? it’s a multidimensional extension of sex and other instinctual acts? It’s fully human, while mathematics seems to be fully alien. what mathematicians write down, their “novels” seems to be a communication between the monkeys and something infinitely more vast. What actual “novels” seem to be is communication between the monkeys and... the monkeys. It’s painted with symphonic tones that we understand as something bigger, but that’s because it’s linking US together with... the multidimensional experience of being US. There’s no *there* there. It’s just here. I don’t know. This doesn’t feel fully true. Maybe my conception of what writing, fiction, novels, etc is is limited. Maybe just because *I* can’t do it or see it doesn’t mean it can’t be done or seen. But I’m kind of feeling like, oh, like that lady said in that article that I read a few days after 9/11--she said she was feeling, what was it, like a luxury item? Compared to the firefighters and all the people who were doing concretely real, urgent, physical, definable work. And she was some kind of artist. Like a fluffy white pampered cat that the people love but also have to take care of--the cat that they would immediately sacrifice if it was a choice between the cat and their children. Mathematics seems like our children and writing seems like our cat to me this morning. But I also kind of suspect that mathematics is a lot of people’s not only cat but kind of feral cat. They’re not only disinterested, they’d just as soon drown it in a sack. Because they’re afraid of it. They’re afraid it carries diseases. They’re afraid it’ll get them kicked out of their apartments. They’re afraid of its tall narrow pupils, its alien face, staring at them, knowing, knowing something all too well about them, something that it’ll never reveal. Silent, staring, elusive, aloof, beautiful. Impossible to understand. So they write about it instead.