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Michael LevanPoet’s Guide to Ada Lovelace, First Computer Programmer
Say you’re the daughter to a famous poet, man who birthed Don Juan on paper as thin as a layer of skin, that blows over with slightest breeze. Say your dream of being a physician is a century-and-some too soon, though because your mother wants you to be rational—unlike your father who walked out on both of you-- your mathematics are encouraged. Then one genteel dinner party, you eavesdrop Mr. Babbage’s ideas for a calculating engine that not only could foresee but could act on that insight, touching you in ways that pique your heart, your head, the universality of his ideas appreciated by no one but you. Say you’re his Enchantress of Numbers, figures bending to your will as you write him notes, programs which seek to calculate sequences of Bernoulli numbers, jealous critics trying to take away from a woman all credit. Say you are too preoccupied with madness—your father’s only gift, your mother accuses—your mind that will turn against you, if only you could create a calculus of the nervous system measuring how the brain gives rise to thought, nerves to feeling, though in the end your math does nothing to stem your gambling, your uterus which fails you, leaves you laying next to your father, forever. But say your name becomes its own code, its own language governments use to defend themselves, their secrets, is that the only fair way for you to be remembered? Poet's Guide to Alien Hand Syndrome
One hand washes the other,
then gives up, decides to unbutton your shirt, grab a breast, wake you up from dead sleep as it wraps its fingers around your thin throat, anything to make itself known as its own person who answers to no one, especially not you. It’s easy to see the humor, to toss out the old line: What we have here is a failure to communicate, forgetting how your body fails the hand, never letting it know it’s always been a valued member of the pack, so to speak. Communication is the silver bullet to every problem you’ve had, so try again to keep your hand occupied and appreciated. If you can’t talk to it, then how could you ever hold on to your one true love who’s always worked to close the distance between you? Poet's Guide to Swarm BehaviorIf only you could be locked
in a bank vault, the world destroyed around you, no one else alive when you find your way out, all the books you’ve ever wanted left to keep you company-- You saw this on a show once and refused to accept the man couldn’t have found another pair of glasses, that his woeful That’s not fair was anything but a cry to keep solitude close, not a plea to ask another soul to emerge over horizon, one weak moment believing he couldn’t rely on himself. Because you want to think that is your natural state too, since people make your life more difficult than need be. Because if people needed people there’d be a name like starlings’ murmurations, hives of bees, plankton blooms and herds of cows, lions’ prides, alligators’ congregations. A group of people falls short, as does a crowd pushing its way through one door when Fire! echoes theater walls, as does family. You are the lone wolf among all the lone wolves, nothing more important than the way you work alone. |
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