2/5/13
17. The Unsophisticated Religion Of Immaterial Mathematics
Written and Illustrated by
Tiffany Osedra Miller
17. The Unsophisticated Religion Of Immaterial Mathematics
Written and Illustrated by
Tiffany Osedra Miller
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Goatwaterstrip
Tiffany Osedra Miller
Copyright 2013
all rights reserved.
Tiffany Osedra Miller
Copyright 2013
all rights reserved.
May I speak the truth? Like many fathers of my time who yearned for sons that their wives would never produce, though I loved my daughters, I did not think too highly of them, when I thought of them at all.
In the early years of fatherhood, I regarded my two daughters as nothing more than pretty, little brown things – giggly ornamentations swinging and dangling from my big hand on our walks to the store, the church, the library and the beach. My daughters were silly, needy, daft, tiresome, emotional things. Still, as a father I loved them and protected them as fate naturally condemned me to. Do you love us, Daddy? They’d ask. And I would respond with a tone devoid of emotion, that I loved them both more than anything in the world. In truth, I professed to love them more than I did because I felt guilty for truly, not loving them much at all. They weren’t sons. And their mother had left me. And, though my daughters frequently filled our house with their infinite, high-pitched, grating laughter, their imaginative, heathen storytelling nonsense they inherited from their mother, and though they often knocked me to the ground with their desperate overtures of affection – “I love you Daddy! We love you Daddy! Daddy, I love you more!” – I felt utterly alone.
You see, I’m a thinking man. Born into an insufferable poverty I will not speak about, except to say that the poverty I, and the people around me, endured was the result of a gross miscalculation committed by unethical arithmetic aristocrats, filthy rich wankers, and those sons of bitches called imperialists. This error in numbers culminated in a profoundly uneven distribution of wealth. I was compelled to work my way up out of the slums and become a lettered mathematician to ensure that those kinds of miscalculations never happened again. The mathematics I learned, however, were taught in schools created by the same imperial mathematicians who impoverished so many through their insipid equations, their deliberately fractioned totals, their mass divisions. Yet, I started to see the world as they did simply because they had a power I longed for. It was in those schools that I came up with a most regrettable piece of math, which would turn into its own gross miscalculation: One strong, intelligent son minus one deceased wife, is worth more than two strange, silly daughters. Though I managed to reach the topmost echelon of the lower middle class (thank you, thank you) and had long left my humble beginnings behind, in hindsight I can confidently say in these years I now speak of with shame, that there was never a time when I, or anyone else I knew besides myself, had become poorer in imagination.
On what I at the time believed was an unnecessary leave from work imposed on me by a higher-up in order to grieve the loss of my wife and convalesce, I, a thinking man, a lettered mathematician, was forced to spend more time alone with my two young, motherless daughters. Their mother’s death had made them wilder and even sillier except at night when it was time for them to settle down and go to bed and I would pull a book off their cluttered bookshelf and begin to read the two little Grievers a story.
On one such occasion, I had fallen asleep in the middle of reading them a neat little tale which began at the beginning, stoically marched towards the middle, then finished logically at the end. When I woke up, for a moment, I couldn’t see anything and, stricken with fear, I called out their names in the darkness: "Alyssa Diane! Brunhilda Cassandra!" But the two, weird snot-nosed pickney had already materialized in front of me insisting that I don’t read them anymore boring stories and most of all cease addressing them by their government names, but instead call them, the two of them together (that’s one plus one equals two, Daddy), Night Dreams. Night Dreams! To emphasize their nonsense, my two little daughters, knocked the perfectly fine book off my lap onto the floor, then pushed me through a doorway I hadn’t noticed into what, they assured me, would be a much better story, a story, they said we, as a family, all needed rather than wanted. An ancient kind of story, disregarded by sophisticated, logical modern man, yet containing a truer mathematics, replete with symbols arranged in narrative patterns that explode into a poetry known as Night Dreams. I refused at first, thinking, I, like they, was going mad, until through this doorway, beyond solid matter and the comfort of calculated time, I encountered the silhouette of their beautiful mother, holding the hand of our strong, intelligent son.
In the early years of fatherhood, I regarded my two daughters as nothing more than pretty, little brown things – giggly ornamentations swinging and dangling from my big hand on our walks to the store, the church, the library and the beach. My daughters were silly, needy, daft, tiresome, emotional things. Still, as a father I loved them and protected them as fate naturally condemned me to. Do you love us, Daddy? They’d ask. And I would respond with a tone devoid of emotion, that I loved them both more than anything in the world. In truth, I professed to love them more than I did because I felt guilty for truly, not loving them much at all. They weren’t sons. And their mother had left me. And, though my daughters frequently filled our house with their infinite, high-pitched, grating laughter, their imaginative, heathen storytelling nonsense they inherited from their mother, and though they often knocked me to the ground with their desperate overtures of affection – “I love you Daddy! We love you Daddy! Daddy, I love you more!” – I felt utterly alone.
You see, I’m a thinking man. Born into an insufferable poverty I will not speak about, except to say that the poverty I, and the people around me, endured was the result of a gross miscalculation committed by unethical arithmetic aristocrats, filthy rich wankers, and those sons of bitches called imperialists. This error in numbers culminated in a profoundly uneven distribution of wealth. I was compelled to work my way up out of the slums and become a lettered mathematician to ensure that those kinds of miscalculations never happened again. The mathematics I learned, however, were taught in schools created by the same imperial mathematicians who impoverished so many through their insipid equations, their deliberately fractioned totals, their mass divisions. Yet, I started to see the world as they did simply because they had a power I longed for. It was in those schools that I came up with a most regrettable piece of math, which would turn into its own gross miscalculation: One strong, intelligent son minus one deceased wife, is worth more than two strange, silly daughters. Though I managed to reach the topmost echelon of the lower middle class (thank you, thank you) and had long left my humble beginnings behind, in hindsight I can confidently say in these years I now speak of with shame, that there was never a time when I, or anyone else I knew besides myself, had become poorer in imagination.
On what I at the time believed was an unnecessary leave from work imposed on me by a higher-up in order to grieve the loss of my wife and convalesce, I, a thinking man, a lettered mathematician, was forced to spend more time alone with my two young, motherless daughters. Their mother’s death had made them wilder and even sillier except at night when it was time for them to settle down and go to bed and I would pull a book off their cluttered bookshelf and begin to read the two little Grievers a story.
On one such occasion, I had fallen asleep in the middle of reading them a neat little tale which began at the beginning, stoically marched towards the middle, then finished logically at the end. When I woke up, for a moment, I couldn’t see anything and, stricken with fear, I called out their names in the darkness: "Alyssa Diane! Brunhilda Cassandra!" But the two, weird snot-nosed pickney had already materialized in front of me insisting that I don’t read them anymore boring stories and most of all cease addressing them by their government names, but instead call them, the two of them together (that’s one plus one equals two, Daddy), Night Dreams. Night Dreams! To emphasize their nonsense, my two little daughters, knocked the perfectly fine book off my lap onto the floor, then pushed me through a doorway I hadn’t noticed into what, they assured me, would be a much better story, a story, they said we, as a family, all needed rather than wanted. An ancient kind of story, disregarded by sophisticated, logical modern man, yet containing a truer mathematics, replete with symbols arranged in narrative patterns that explode into a poetry known as Night Dreams. I refused at first, thinking, I, like they, was going mad, until through this doorway, beyond solid matter and the comfort of calculated time, I encountered the silhouette of their beautiful mother, holding the hand of our strong, intelligent son.
