Two poems from At the Dimensional Border
In our battle to be rational, we posit,
based on three points, a plane, and say it extends
— not knowing whether the universe is finite
or infinite — indefinitely. Heady
with the notions the brain entertains, the liberties
it takes. The brain with our lightweight priceless belongings
suitable for starting a home, a world
packed in the suitcase of our cranium.
As far and farther than the eye can see,
the plane extends, with no transcendence or end,
and the crafty stick-figure Odysseus who long
ago set off to battle foes in a fabulous
Ilium … will he ever arrive at the war, or home?
The stick-figure soldier with stick submachine gun shooting
lethal lines across the plane of a page
frozen in a never-ending battle will never
remember he was drawn by the hand of a child
who pencilled him in as indispensable and
disposable — a fragment of the adult
he wasn’t or one of a platoon of saviors
whose fate he could play with? If I, looking now,
at that child, could draw an imaginary line
from me to him and down to that infantryman,
the scarring graphite might fade to a ceasefire,
the paper re-embracing the bitter traces
back into the white weave of genesis.
Using Euclid’s Elements as “metaphorical guide”, Philip Fried began writing his 19-poem series, At the Dimensional Border, while experiencing what he describes as “the flattening effect” of the Covid-19 pandemic. The New York-based writer and editor also drew on memories of reading, as a teenager, Flatlands: a Romance of Many Dimensions a novella published by Edwin A Abbot in 1884, expressing in a rather subterranean manner the schoolmaster-writer’s ambition to satirise Victorian culture. I’ve chosen two poems from Fried’s series (not adjacent in the original text) which illuminate from different angles various further border-crossings in the primary landscape of “the border between the second and third dimensions”.
The definition of “plane” as “a flat surface that extends into infinity” is a useful entry into the first poem. Our “battle to be rational”, it suggests, is undermined if we inhabitants of the universe don’t know if the latter is finite or infinite. It’s significant that the attainment of rationality is seen as a “battle”: the poem moves along its own plane from the perfect poise of geometry to the human brain, “heady” with “the notions” that it entertains and, implicitly, is entertained by. The impudence and zest of “taking liberties” will land the poem in a mythical dimension, but first there’s a touching portrayal of our organic set of possibilities and limitations: “the brain with our lightweight priceless belongings / suitable for starting a home, a world / packed in the suitcase of our cranium.”
Like all the poems in the series, this is a 13-line, “not-quite-sonnet” but signals the form it echoes with a stanza break and a nicely positioned “turn” after the eighth. line. The traveller on the journey suggested earlier turns out to be Odysseus, now a two-dimensional “crafty stick-figure”, in contrast to the imagined three-dimensional plenitude of the “fabulous Ilium” but the direction of his travel is uncertain. Playing on the contradictory word-marriage of “end” with “transcendence” as, earlier, on “finite” and “indefinitely,” Fried questions if the traveller’s destinations – “war” or “home” – will ever be attainable.
The second poem traces the line back from its speaker to the pencil drawing of “the stick-figure soldier” he made as a child. The soldier, whose image is somehow frighteningly life-like as he shoots “lethal lines across the plane of a page”, is only a “fragment” from the child’s possible adulthood. He doesn’t belong, either, to the child’s “platoon of saviors” – toy figures, perhaps, of the comic-book heroes he writes about elsewhere, such as Wolverine and Batman. The soldier is revisited only for the speaker to consider the possibility of bringing about his extinction. The turn is elegantly registered, as in the previous poem, this time with a shift between uncertainties, from the interrogative to the subjunctive. If the adult now could draw “an imaginary line” to the child and then to the infantryman, it seems that the latter could be erased altogether, transformed from the “indispensable” to the “disposable”. This seems to suggest a radical re-imagination of masculinity that surpasses “ceasefire” and leads to a delicately but insistently rhymed possibility of disappearance and re-creation, “the paper re-embracing the bitter traces / back into the white weave of genesis.”
This poem is a particularly fine example of Fried’s ability to render large events on a small scale and reveal their significance in the granular detail. Read as anti-war writing, it evokes the limits of what might be called war’s moral two-dimensionalism. And it recalls the opening poem of the series, in which the “stick-figure philosopher” understands, in a “vision / of apocalypse” which includes “a mass migration upending hereness and thereness”, that “the faceless are the foundation we need not explain.”
You can read the complete series of poems in the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, an innovative publication that includes fiction and poetry alongside discussion about maths. The sequence will form the final section of Fried’s new collection, untethered voices, forthcoming from Salmon Press.