La Vague Journal - KELLY KRUMRIE

KELLY KRUMRIE

constellation / caroline herschel

cement / emmy noether

‘She had the faculty of visualizing remote, very complex connections without resorting to concrete examples.’¹

‘She began
investigating
the structure
of the noncommutative algebras,
their representations
by linear
transformations,
and their application
to the study of commutative number fields
and their arithmetics.’²

                                          ‘The history of twentieth-century images
                                         in particle physics is the history of a field
                                    whose interests have moved away from what
                                                                  can be shown in pictures:
                                                                     away from resemblance
                                                                           and representation,
                                                                          and into many other
                                                                          kinds of images that
                                                             are ultimately mathematical.
                                                The real complexity of these images
                                             is the complexity of leaving the image
                                   and finding meanings that the image can no
                                                                               longer contain.’³

____________________________________________________________________________________

I have a distant picture in mind. It is aggregate.

Algebra restores a bone’s fracture—joins lime with quarried rock. Quarry squares concrete the structure below a house. Outside fields are remote. This image leaves another quadrant. Coordinate field, the plane surface troweled smooth. A particle like a grain is not what I tracked but what is a number field what is a set. Let the concrete set. A bone set. A bone’s parts counted amassed as gravel.

These are unchangeable only seeable once I’ve applied the glue.

wallpaper / sofia kovalevskaya

[In] the image’s original context as astrophysics, each frame has a particular purpose that works against the inevitable aporia caused by the limits of the instrumentation and analysis. In this case the first panel is something known, the second is something dubious, and the third is an experiment designed to simulate the second.¹

1.

“By happy accident the [wallpaper] used for this first covering consisted of sheets of Ostrogradsky’s lithographed lectures on the differential and the integral calculus, bought by my father in his youth.
These sheets, spotted over with strange incomprehensible formulae, soon attracted my attention. I remember how, in my childhood, I passed whole hours before that mysterious wall,
trying to decipher even a single phrase, and to discover the order in which the sheets ought to follow each other. By dint of prolonged daily scrutiny, the external aspect of many among these formulae was fairly engraved on my memory, and even the text left a deep trace on my brain, although at the moment of reading it was incomprehensible to me.”²

2.

a surface that is patterned—a linear approximation
the sense of which I could not understand³
I could not understand yet
what matters in looking at them is
in the value of varying wall⁴

integral touch engraves
my brain, a whole forming,
a stone calculus lining

3.

the station empty⁵
my bags
heavy

this weight counter to
his

my tissue paper
my tissue’s folds
greater⁶

¹ Image and text: Elkins, James. Six Stories from the End of Representation. Stanford UP, 2008, pp. 83-84.
² Sofia Kovalevskaya qtd. in Osen, Lynn M. Women in Mathematics. MIT Press, 1974, p. 120. This text names her “Sonya Corvin-Krukovsky Kovalevsky.”
³ “...the quadrature of the circle, about the asymptotes which the curve always approaches without ever attaining them, and about many other things of the same sort—
  the sense of which I could not of course but which acted on my inspiration.” (Kovalevskaya qtd. in Osen, pp. 119-120)
⁴ “What matters in looking at them is the process of losing meaning and trying in vain to recover it.” (Elkins, p. 43)
  “The paint, and the painting, aren’t simply there. They fade into the weave of the canvas: they aren’t solid enough to be properly seen.” (Elkins, p. 46)
  “...a surface that is patterned without referent.” (Elkins, p. 70)
  O.E.D. entry for “differential”: Mathematics. Originally: a notional infinitesimally small change in the value of a varying quantity. In later use chiefly: the product
  of the derivative of a given function and an independent variable, representing a linear approximation of small changes in the value of a function.
⁵ “[She] found herself caught in the middle of the night at cold, deserted stations where she was forced to struggle alone with her heavy luggage. Bone tired and
   frozen, she simply made too many demands on her already diminished energies...” (Osen, p. 137). She died a few days later.
⁶ “[Her] brain, which had been preserved in alcohol, was weighed and compared to the weight of Hermann von Helmholtz’s brain. Professor Gustaf Retzius wrote
  an elaborate account of this procedure and estimated that if the body weights of these two eminent people were considered, the relative amount of brain tissue
   was greater in the woman than in the man. This statement brought to ignominious failure yet another attempt to show that man’s brain was superior to that
   of woman.” (Osen, p. 138)

Kelly Krumrie's prose, poetry, and reviews are forthcoming from or appear in Black Warrior Review, Burning House Press, Full Stop, and elsewhere (links at www.kellykrumrie.com). She is a PhD student in Creative Writing / Literature at the University of Denver and holds an MFA from the University of San Francisco. She is currently the Prose Editor at Denver Quarterly.