I Tumble For Pi Poem by Denis Mair

I think that any art that starts my mental juices flowing is probably in resonance with some kind of source-realm. People like me are tyrannized by a totalizing tendency, so our understanding of the source-realm gets clothed in dogma or ideology. But I recognize the authenticity of art that vibrates from the source-realm and doesn't pin it down.

I was rescued from pinning down the source-realm because I tumbled for the transcendental number Pi. I think that Pi's interplay with its cousins is determinative: the truth-realm of eternal mathematical objects will not allow the void to be infertile. At the same time, the interplay of energy and transcendental numbers gives rise to open-ended processes: they are allowed to have their own inner vistas and histories.

Actually Pi and its cousins are a placeholder for what I don't know and can't know about everything undergirding the life-world. They stand for the universal dispensation that holds the substrate of life in a fertile balance. But that is only part of the story, because the source-realm presumably implies a telos. It is strange that eternal mathematical objects would be party to establishing a telos.

Pi is not just the ratio of diameter to circumference, it is also the ratio of energy levels between higher and lower electron orbits in atoms (see research by Tamar Friedmann and Carl Hagan) . That means when energized electrons in chlorophyll are ready to jump to the next higher orbit, Pi sets the bar for how big a jump they have to make. That means the harvesting of energy by a leaf depends on crossing a threshold set by Pi. Pi is also found in Maxwell's equations that tell us about radio waves. Since Pi and its cousins are part of the source-realm that preoccupies me so much, I think that realm is probably too mysterious for theistic Creationists to explain in a few sentences. I 'tumbled' for Pi, but I lack a mathematical mind...so a would-be theist becomes a wanderer of the cosmos.'

What did Keats say about wanting to be capable '...of being in uncertainties, mysteries and doubts, without any irritable reaching...' Well, I tend to reach for that big, overarching, remote source—a realm where energy and transcendental numbers and fundamental laws mesh.

My irritable reaching cannot really be for the 'Absolute', because I think ideas of the 'Absolute' are fatuous, unless there is some kind of vision or narrative of how corporeality is achieved out of it. What are some steps in the process of mist wreathing up from the Formless? What is the laminar flow, the density gradient, the local transduction of patterns in that mist? What kind of whorls generate and expand the early points of coalescence? So I am doubly bedeviled, not just by the source-realm, but by the question about things bubbling up from the source-realm.

As for me, there can be no tumbling for an 'Intelligent Designer, ' because I already tumbled down the long chain of Pi. Despite my non-mathematical brain, I am amazed by Pi and think that it (along with other eternal mathematical objects) must be part of the mix at the source-realm. So traditional theistic Creationism seems quaint to me. Proponents of 'intelligent design' treat their position as an explanation, but for me, to infer a designer simply redoubles the mystery. It is hard to conceive of how a transcendent cause could work with components subject to natural law. What would be the nature of the interface between them? So my 'irritable reaching' is fated to be homeless, like an eternal wanderer of the cosmos, always wanting to imagine myself peeling onion layers leading to a central dynamo that I cannot reach. And so the eternal rootless wanderer turns desultory, peeling back a few onion layers here and there.

If Pi is present in the energy ratio between electron shells, then it must be practically everywhere in the brain, because the brain's function is all about crossing certain thresholds of excitation. Pi sets the fundamental threshold. When an electron is about to jump but is not quite ready to jump, then its entire field-state factors into the outcome. So an information-rich field decides whether or not an electron can cross the bar that Pi sets. In pure copper wiring, the bar is crossed in a standardized way—a predictable and standardized jumping of electrons. In the brain the jump depends on stochastic processes, and such processes imply other kinds of information. The criticality of a stochastic process is elaborately managed and channeled for energy transfer (see Nick Lane) , so you have a tendency toward elaboration of structure. When you go up a couple of tiers, there are other thresholds that decide whether or not excitation will make its leap, and the leap may take the form of firing at a synapse instead of jumping to a higher electron orbit. At this higher tier there are neurons, which are big looms of organized criticality where impingements from many dendrites are buffered and tallied. The threshold for firing is decided by calculations. So Pi has been left behind, but the theme of criticality managed by structure persists. Maybe that's one way that we can feel the eternal transcendental nature of Pi under-girding us.