PATAPHYSICS-THE-POETICS-OF-AN-IMAGINARY- SCIENCE_C_Bok

'~arinetti writes: "[m]y love of precision[ . . . ]
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has naturally given me a taste for numbers, which live and
breathe on the paper like living beings in our new numerical
sensibilitv" (1991:llO).
Algebra provides a mode1 for
grammatical innovations--for example, "it would have needed
at least an entire page of description to render this vast
and complex battle horizon had 1 not found this[ ...] lyric
equation:
'horizon = sharp bore of the sun +5 triangular
shadows (1 kilometer wide) +3 lozenges of rosy light +5
fragments of hills +30 columns of smoke +23 flames'" (110).
'~athemat icians have f requently recognized that
wherever mathema must explicate its own axiomatic paradoxes,
it must abandon itself 'pataphysically to the imaginary
solutions of its own antonym--poiesis:
consider, for
example, the paradoxes of Aristotle (as seen in the stories
by Carroll about Wonderland), the paradoxes of Lobachevsky
(as seen in the stories by Abbott about Flatland) , the
paradoxes of G6del (as seen in the stories by Hofstadter
about Escherland), and the paradoxes of Mandelbrot (as seen
in the stories by Pickover about Lat&&carfia).