The device I'm using to write this down and send it to the world is (so I'm told) fundamentally based on the work of a man who taught himself high-end algebra. He used that notation as the foundation for his discoveries in the world of symbolic logic.
What George Boole found out was that (recalling my logic class -- the good one -- again) things don't have to actually exist to work in a syllogism. (If I recall correctly,) Western medieval commentators on Aristotle apparently assumed existence of the objects in a syllogism -- a conceptual mistake righted by Boole's work.
My point here (yes, I have one) is that when poets begin to use logic, we have to extend that conceptual framework out even further than Boole did. Love has its logic, irony its rules, anguish its regulations -- and we have to discover them. For ourselves. And then find words to fit them -- sometimes whether those words exist or not.
No comments:
Post a Comment