¹

When I seek, I look, look, look …. – Benoit Mandelbroit.

The Mandebrot set is not an invention of the human mind: it was a discovery. Like Mount Everest, the Mandelbrot set was just there. – Sir Roger Penrose.

C’est l’infini dans le fini – Baudelaire.

I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of science and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition. In science you want to say something that nobody knew before, in words which everyone can understand. In poetry you are bound to say…. something that everyone knows already in words that nobody can understand. – Paul M Dirac.²

… the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science …. – Wordsworth, of poetry.

An eye, a camera, binoculars, an easel, an equation?

A cauliflower blossoms microscopically into smaller
and smaller florets, a coastline magnified unearths shore
within shore.
                              A mirror is sometimes a rabid dog, 
a glockenspiel tinkling insight, a simulacrum of a past.
One memory fertilises another. 

                                                                 At school ‘un crack’,
‘un taupin’.  Where some saw runes stuttered across the page,
hazed by miscreant radicals that altered meaning, he tweaked
the co-ordinates of the triple integral and opened the slumbering sphere
like a water lily. The prize was his.                                                       
                                                                 Keppler sensed the planets
defer elliptically when they turn their orbits back toward the sun,
became the young student’s comet.
  
                                                                 First aeronautics, but no reef 
or strip to earth his interest. Then, on a visit with his uncle,
a treatise rescued from a wastepaper bin, English words piled
into a histogram: those used most formed lofty citadels,
the barely uttered plunged into a weeping trail begging for larynx
or glottis─rank and frequency made cousins.  He intuited
such shapes in unforeseen places: islands in an archipelago,
the populations of cities, income and wealth ….. a dissertation
of his own, a career that bequeathed him the parenthood
of the “tails” he found undocked everywhere he looked.      
     
Hallowed Harvard, he noticed in a corridor a blackboard chalked
with cotton prices–his word clusters morphed into a new theory
of finance.  After the attestation of a century’s evidence, the old model, 
one of smoothness borrowed from the physics of gas, ruptured
by the discontinuities he discovered–risks lurking in the vapour─
familial patterns from years to months to days. 
                                                                                But those princes
would not grant him a mantle until years later.

In an IBM laboratory unshaded by academic towers,
when research was its own forge, problems
he could not visualise, wood and trees interchangeable,
bramble upon thicket, one’s branch another’s trunk.
The swirl he observed settled into passing predictability
but a replacement stability percolated all the while
beneath the glassy surface, ready to assert itself.
He sketched, painted, lit, exploded and scaled them
with a supercomputer, discovered spirals, curlicues,
beetles and seahorses weft by tendrils and filaments;
descending like Dante into the higher fractals of their being
he saw them reproduced: piccolo to flute, soprano to tenor.
At first he suspected machine malfunction, but looked
again and again and found them set indissolubly.
                          
                                                                                His thesis:
we are beholden to what we see (if only fleetingly)─the comet
moves on; his legacy burns in the metered sky like Keppler.