Something or Nothing -- Thinking about Zero

     The site of the 2019 Bridges Math-Arts conference has been announced  -- it will meet in Linz, Austria next July.  This link leads to the archives of the 2018 and earlier conferences.  Each recent year a poetry reading (coordinated by Sarah Glaz) has been part of the Bridges activities -- and this year a poetry anthology also was compiled.  Here is a poem by Canadian poet Alice Major that was featured both in this year's reading and in the anthology  -- a poem that also appears, along with other math and science poems, in Major's latest collection, Welcome to the Anthropocene. (University of Alberta Press, 2018).  Major's poem examines death and, as it does so, explores various meanings of zero.

Zero divided by zero     by Alice Major

There is no right answer.

The trains of logic crash, annihilate

certainty. Zero is just as good an answer

as one. Nothingness or loneliness.

There is no right answer.    

The woman, Godelieve,

books an appointment to annihilate

herself.  An Antwerp euthanasia clinic.

A life too long, a brain too hurt.

Nothing is her answer.

The pastor sets himself on fire

in a Texas parking lot, annihilated

by grief for a world that cannot learn

kindness. He’s tried everything else

finds no other answer.

“Mental illness” – that’s one label

for the call to self-annihilation.

But is martyrdom, immolation,

never the sanest path, the kindest thing?

There is no right answer.

Zero divided by zero.

The past’s black hole annihilated,

divided by the null of future.

Suicide’s paradox: relief unfelt

by those who choose its answer.

Black holes are where

God divides by zero. Annihilated

light. All our singular arrangements

of matter reduced to one

undefinable answer.

My sister holds a vial

of danger, matter that could annihilate

her, but – divided into increments –

may let her sleep, let her breathe.

But there is no answer

for the anguish that strangles her,

for the losses that seem to annihilate

her past, divide her from a future

worth living. The vial’s round mouth

seems an answer.

Saint Godelieve, “God’s Love,” annihilated

by a cruel husband. Now God seems void

divided by a vacuum. Sometimes a thought

flares – Would it be easier to let her go?

Then the answer

No! My sister, oh my sister,

you terrify me. If you annihilate

this pain, then you divide us utterly.

You cannot be both zero and one.

There is no right answer.