So I thought I would cross the bridge to write a poem.  It was hard.  The unadorned volumes of e.e cummings, the gilded spines of W. H. Auden’s Collection, the frayed fabric of Rainer Maria Rilke’s works on my bookshelves stood patiently as if to reassure me but failed to impart any help. It was like gazing at the  glass cases in  a Parisian pâtisserie.  I can first admire then devour those delectable concoctions with aclarity and pleasure but can never make them, no matter how many Jacques Pepin’s cookbooks are strewn in my kitchen.  Truly the sensation I get when reading certain poems are physical.  I  remember writing to my English professor to explain that I could appreciate but could not create some years ago.  Alas, it is still true. I know full well that there are no equations that, when properly applied, would produce a poem.   Rhythms and meters are recourses but using them, or not, effectively requires something elusive.  I did try. My logical mind took over as soon as I put down one sentence and insisted that it had to be, well, logical. Unfortunately it was also stilted.  I had wanted to reach back to collect the shivers that ran through me as I read Emily Dickinson’s “A Certain Slant of Light” and saved it in another poem.  However, that desire itself is not born of logic so why apply logic to fulfill it?   For this reader, what makes poetry compelling is the perception of its uncertainty and the elements of surprises as the words turn.  Paradoxically, some poems  also offer the certainty of the beauty evoked by the images they convey. Consider the following lines.

I will arise and go now,
And go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there,
Of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there,
A hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade

W. B. Yeats

I can always count on the melancholy pleasure evokes by reading that poem even when I am uncertain why it is so.   At the same time, I can always count on the certainty that when a block of VHDL code simulates without errors and passes timing, its synthesized version will function correctly.  But is it truly a certainty? Perhaps not always. In fact, uncertainty is not only abound in poetry, but also in science and engineering.  The Heisenberg uncertainty principle states that at any point in time,  pairs of properties of a particle can not be known exactly – for example, the more precise its momentum is known, the more uncertain its position is.  In other words, “When you say that the electron acts as a wave, then the wave is the quantum mechanical wavefunction and it is therefore related to the probability of finding the electron at any point in space. A perfect sine wave for the electron wave spreads that probability throughout all of space, and the “position” of the electron is completely uncertain.”

I appreciate the irony of finding the word inescapable during this brief excursion into the realm of quantum physics.  There is an air of human resignation in this word that makes me feel a kinship to all engineers and poets.  The desire — more than that, the need to be certain must be the driving force in much of engineering work.  And yet, the measured acceptance of uncertainty is also a necessity. The duality of such realization accentuates my enjoyment of these stanzas from Mariane Moore’s Nevertheless.

The weak overcomes its
menace, the strong over-
comes itself. What is there

like fortitude! What sap
went through that little thread
to make the cherry red!

Acknowledgement: Information and waveforms describing the Heisenberg principle was from this site:  http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/Hbase/uncer.html#c2

If I could see intangible things in colors, Wednesday would be green, time would be pulsing silver, the letter A a crisp yellow.  In an earlier paper I went so far as declaring that “regret appears purple, yearning taupe, denial blue …”  But that was last year and the writing did serve its purpose.  Tonight I am thinking about violet and how a phrase about a dusky violet unfurling its petals that has lain dormant since high school reappeared in my mind as I read these lines of Neruda

Oh love, oh mad light-beam, threat of violet,

you visit me, and climb, by your cool stairway

the tower that time has crowned with mist,

the ashen walls of an enclosed heart.

Towers and caves appear frequently in Neruda’s poetry, often figuratively for the many chambers of that mysterious and volatile organ. In another poem, XXII, of the Stones of the Sky collection, he wrote

I entered the amethyst grotto:

I left my blood among purple thorns:

I changed skin, wine, outlook”:

ever since. Violets hurt me.

One can come up with several scenarios explaining the last sentence if the desire to analyze persists.  At this moment, I am thankful that the image of violets growing in the amethyst grotto delights my senses especially the hardness of the quartz and the softness of the flowers suffusing with the sweet scent in the gentle  gloaming inside the grotto.   As it is late on a Saturday night, I ask your indulgence on  my wanton use of adjectives. I did warn you that I fall for words easily, a handicap at times especially when writing technical documents.  But there are other compensations.

In engineering, colors are used to describe other intangible and invisible entities such as noise.   Electrically speaking, noise is a random signal.  Its power distribution in the frequency spectrum is classified in colors: white noise has a flat frequency, pink noise is flat in log space, red noise is inversely proportional to frequency and azure noise’s power increases with increasing frequency.  It is a pleasure to come across the word azure in this context.  Noise is perhaps absent in Neruda’s grotto, saved for the soft whisper of violet petals  falling from Persephone’s gathered skirt as she ran in vain away from the Prince of the Underworld.

Leaning over the fallen monkshood, the daphne stiffens. It is early December but winter is already entrenched in my garden. The earth smells sharp with the scent of inevitability as I gather the rose hips and remember how lush the summer was. I have many rose shrubs but no trees. Perhaps that’s why the five poplars that marched up the hill toward a cottage in Dingle of long ago are still on my mind. But the lack of trees notwithstanding, I ought to be more content because there are many kinds of trees, not least are the clock trees in my other world of ASIC design. Not everyone gets to synthesize such intricate trees except we ASIC engineers. A dubious pleasure, you may beg to differ, if you are familiar with that perilous realm fraught with forbidden windows that send unwary signals into abject oscillation. I suppose that it is easy to be flippant now because the havoc that large clock skews could wreak on an ASIC is temporarily a thing of the past. Why is it that everywhere I turn, I see the impact of time? Why not turn the table? Why not consider the baring of their branches a way for the poplars to consume time? Yet, would it be better not to resist but to learn the rhythm of time to get some peace? There are many things to learn.   Ask Louise Bogan.

Knowledge

Now that I know
How passion warms little
Of flesh in the mould,
And treasure is brittle,–

I’ll lie here and learn
How, over their ground
Trees make a long shadow
And a light sound.

Louise Bogan

I can’t very comfortably lie down on this frigid piece of earth now.  But if I could, would I be able to hear Persephone pacing the grand halls of the underworld?  Would I be able to see Demeter’s tears like a waterfall glistening in the moonlight?

If you have a choice between experiencing a perfect moment and having an everlasting memory of such moment but never actually experiencing it, which one would you choose? There was a time when I would choose the former, like Hans Christian Andersen’s little match girl, for a brief moment of warmth before the eternal oblivion. Now it is the latter, perhaps because of a desire to relive certain moments that become real again upon recollection. Moreover, the selective recollection can be done at will.

In my line of work, memory is actually tangible, semiconductor memory, that is.  From the early days of Texas Instruments’s series 51 that offered a few hundred bits of memory to the multi gigabit devices of today, the amount of memory that can be stored in a small space is amazing, if you would just let yourself to be amazed. To put things in perspectives, the size of all six volumes of Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is 200 mega bytes, a mere fraction of what can be stored in a 16 giga bytes NAND flash device whose die size is 20 mm X 13 mm.  Conventional non volatile memory is built with transistors.  In the not too-far-off future, the fourth fundamental element, the memristor, can be used in building persistent memory devices with higher density and consume less power.  Unlike the resistor, the memristor retains its last value when there is no current flow through it.  It too has memory.

Of course it is not always good to be able to retain so much memory.  Not because of nothing that Dali painted the persistence of memory so eloquently and eerily.  Sometimes it is a blessing to forget.  To use the words of Emily Dickinson:

To flee from memory
Had we the Wings
Many would fly
Inured to slower things
Birds with surprise
Would scan the cowering Van
Of men escaping
From the mind of man

Emily Dickinson

It takes a copious amount of self-delusion to filter out the unwanted memory and to add beauty to the wanted. Is it total honesty? No, but the dappled shade added later to block out the falling branch provides a needed contrast to make the leafy lane appear a lot greener, a lot more pleasant to revisit this November evening.  What about “To thine own self be true”?  Such hard choices.

The integral sign reminds me of the salt water taffy machines in the  sweet shops of the Oregon coastal towns we  visited during the summers of my girlhood. I remember pressing my nose against the glass partition to watch  the machine pulled the strands of candy in a mesmerizing pattern over and over,  stretching them into almost living things – supple and touchable.  As I look back, those summers appear pleasantly long and unfocused like the desultory walks along the beaches, trading taffy flavors and seashells with my sisters.   The fact that a mathematical sign can invoke such nostalgia made me reach out for an old textbook tonight.  Full of equations yellowed out with highlighters by my former self, it patiently repeats to  me that the Volterra series has the ability to capture the effects of memory.  Differing from the Taylor series that approximates the response of a non-linear system such that the output is solely dependent on the inputs at a particular time, the Volterra series calculates the output using the inputs at all other times.  Specifically, it is a series of infinite sums of multidimensional convolutional integrals and can be used to calculate the intermodulation effect of audio signals.

The integral of rational functions can also be used to calculate the drag force effect on the free fall of a sky diver.  But this fact was of no use to John Gillespie Magee whose parachute failed to open one summer day in 1941.  But how he had lived!

High Flight

by John Gillespie Magee, Jr.

Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,

And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth

Of sun-split clouds…and done a hundred things

You have not dreamed of…wheeled and soared and swung

High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,

I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung

My eager craft through footless halls of air.

Up, up, the long, delirious burning blue

I’ve topped the windswept heights with easy grace

Where never lark, nor even eagle flew.

And while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod

The high untrespassed sanctity of space…

…put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

John was nineteen when he died.  It was a farmer who saw him falling from the plane. The same force must have acted upon Icarus of the Grecian myth, another boy who fell out of the sky.  W. H. Auden offers some commentaries on how  these tragedies were perceived and interpreted by arts.

Musee des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters; how well, they understood

Its human position; how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

For the miraculous birth, there always must be

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

On a pond at the edge of the wood:

They never forgot

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse