What the Wasp Said

On a bright spring day, the ancient building housing the English and Logic Departments begins to slowly collapse on itself, trapping McMann (an inept English professor) and Lucy Curt (a logician) in the office they share. As the Fibonacci repetitions of the building’s brickwork slowly peel away, McMann seizes the moment to tell Lucy stories about skunks, stories whose recurrent pattern finally leads to the unrecognized connection between a “message” burned into his ear by a wasp and the orderly universe for which he cannot find a language. At last, he looks up only to see Lucy descending a ladder, a sort of escape down Wittgenstein’s Ladder that leaves his language unheard

Our Lady, Queen of Undecidable Propositions

Boundary systems take many forms: personal, historical, mathematical, and in the case of an elderly Jesuit and a young mathematician, a struggle to identify the larger boundary that both connects them and provides their separate identities. Their ragged conversation is couched in a pastiche of historical, popular, and personal notions of mathematics; however their language is simultaneously natural and mathematical so that it points to the irremediable gaps that the multitude of our languages attempt to solve. Father McMann pages through his list of such incommensurables: female/male, young/old, parabola/limit, rational/surd and “all the other 88 asynchronies that plagued his dreams like a badly tuned piano.” Like the gap between Adam’s outstretched finger and the finger of the creator on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, these “gaps” are what motivate us, perplex us, and which lead to very strange arguments about the re-presentational nature of any language — mathematical or natural — between literary scholars and their mathematical friends

Jesus and the Walnuts

In “Jesus & the Walnuts,” a hapless English professor invokes fragments of mathematical thought to integrate his hunger for a knowable world with his affection for the logician with whom he shares an office. While “not even wrong” and horribly clumsy, his aspirations are iterations of the drive for order and meaning that are shared across disciplinary knowledge . . . and the hungers of the heart