Zero sum

DG Herring

Nietzsche wants his god to dance and Dante has creation smile:
modes of speaking that I am shut off from. Seven slots in my brain
aren’t enough for the gestures I make towards meaning.

Here I go, à tâtons, like that tortoise - if gnarly, testudinate paws 
can have feeling - Achilles sprints past, snickers, ‘Infinite sums!’, 
and I’m stymied. It’s not just that maths is vee hard. It’s all speaking. 

Getting past Q, under serene Mrs Ramsay’s feminine gaze, 
is a doozy. So, now that six slots are taken with trips to the lighthouse 
and tiptoe-pod, tentative turtles, I find I’m devoting the seventh,

and last, to ponder why poet and proto-biologist, unmasker of un-
truths, Francesco Redi, cut off the head of a fresh-water turtle. 
Was it the logical next step after seeing how long they could function 

when he had excised their brains? They lived on for months! Slow and
steady. Do his notebooks refer to them dancing? Was that overbite smiling 
or rictus?  Things might work better this way. Cut out the middle-man: 

thought. Cavorting, we’d chortle our way to the grave. No more letter R.
Take a cue from old Danziger, turtle-mouth Schopenhauer. Return 
to the cognition-free, primal zone that we knew and will know, ever ours,

were it not for the inconvenience, per Cioran, of being born. Cut out 
the mid-woman: life. No ego waving its hands at some thinginess 
out there; no more to and fro; one slot de trop for this flow. Leaving

Achilles to flail in my wake, I’ll giggle and jig: the limit to aim for is zero.

The Science

'Zero Sum' is a meditation on scientific, philosophical and literary investigations into thought and language. It asks how normal human experience can have access to the noumenal or mystical realm and seeks the answer in modes of thinking that bypass language. The poem considers: the mathematical paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise and its ultimate resolution in the discovery of infinite sums that converge on infinity or zero; Samuel Beckett's search (in works like Worstward Ho) for the best (worst) way to reduce language to its minimum (short of silence); Nietzsche’s use of dance as a metaphor for a higher form of communication; and, scientist Francesco Redi’s C17th investigations into the locus of thought by experiments to find out what happens when a tortoise’s brain is removed.  The poem suggests that, because language frames and limits our access to the natural world, if we were able to dance and smile like a mystic, (or like a brain-free tortoise), and thus find the place where language tends to zero, we might lose our sense of self (as suggested by the Latin reading of my title - I am zero) and reconnect with the primal zone sought by Schopenhauer.

The Poet

DG Herring's work has appeared in South Poetry Magazine, Dreich, Nangle’s The Occasional Poetry Magazine, Splonk and New Isles Press Issue 2. His work is forthcoming in Poetry Salzburg Review 41, Stand Magazine and Orbis. His chapbook, The Sheliand, is published by Dithering Chaps. David's work interrogates identity and deep history, art and iconoclasm, the source and the telos of words.

Next poem: And by speaking in tongues I mean this by Sarah Amsler