Mobius trip

This latest bout with word/play (I'm not sure yet who won) was provoked by a passing disgruntled thought: is anybody out there actually reading my other blog, or am I putting all these earnest ideas into the Current for no reason? I know, it's mostly just ideas. But some of them do connect to tangible and relevant actions. Then I turned the thought back on myself: do these ideas really have anything to do with me? Can I have or claim any kind of attachment to them, when I'm barely playing a walk-on role in the human race right now?

My goal was to have these two blogs, one for the inner/creating/feeling world, and one for the outer/doing/change-effecting one. But, not for the first time, engagement with the social-political realm (apart from the most basic, necessary work like food rescue) just feels like the ego seeking a soapbox. And, living apart at present from a community, I'm really not doing that much. This page is presuming to have and to share these fascinating divergent sides of me, but maybe, in fact, I've only got one side to speak of: the inside.

Thinking of one-sided entities brought Mobius strips to mind, and I looked the term up online (if it's on wikipedia, it's the truth, right? Ha.). What follows is partly a wikipedia found-poem. Probably too I should cite a much earlier influence, and thank Neil Peart for tuning me in, with many a Rush lyric, to all the wonderfully analogous elements of humanity and science. An influence further nurtured by five years' work in the field of artificial intelligence research and computer language processing, surrounded by geeky geniuses and their excellent wordplaying abilities. So, this might not be my final answer, if there is one, but it's an effort to settle the internal argument – am I really doing anything here that matters? - at least for the moment...

And, on that note of seeking and significance: happy First Day of Aquarius!

Just one initiating twist

creates uncategoried shape

with one true edge

one boundary – though paper-thin -

one persevering surface

one open pathway returning

to beginning with no borders crossed

with all the effort we expend

to define, improve, identify, and differentiate

does any making, turning or intent

manifest a truly expanded state...

with all the soul I test and tend

resisting always unexamined word and deed

do my best turns of phrase, of thought, of seeing

have really any offering to this world's need?

wikipedia describes a Mobius strip

as “a non-orientable surface”

by which is meant a figure

that cannot be repositioned

to appear its own mirror image

in fact, wiki further affirms

that the shape may be considered

“the source of all non-orientability.”

(Hard words for us lopsided self-reflective shapes

still seeking our trajectory on this plane)

However, the figure gains high praise

for its many practical applications

“A device called a Mobius resistor

is an electronic circuit element which has

the property of canceling its own inductive reactance.”

(Certainly a tendency that I would like to cancel

and someday reroute those wary generalizing energies

toward more productive, less reactionary use of power)

And this:

“The Mobius strip is the configuration space

of two unordered points on a circle.

Consequently, in music theory,

the space of all two note chords

known as dyads

takes the shape of a Mobius strip.”

(I cannot begin to fathom this

but the effort is a joyful dance through imagination)

The expositions continue and

the links are nearly limitless

and let us not begin even to click on

compact resonators

helical magnetism

high transition temperatures or

inductionless resistance

charged particles (it reads)

caught in earth's magnetic field

can move on a Mobius band

(it's all one Everything, always here, right?)

Yes! See:

“the Universal Recycling Symbol

is a form of Mobius strip”

all this rich data

embodies just a moment's idle theory:

all my efforts to grow and to acquire depth

still seem to leave me flat, one-sided

and unevenly reflective

but that one side's the inner side

and at the least it knows its source and inclination

though I may traverse it at ant-speed

with no attachment to point of arrival

despite the wish of ego and ideals for

clear and tangible accomplishment

there may not be an outer plane here

I only really know this one developable surface

rejoined at the center and wound around infinity