Saying Goodbye to You

and Goodmorning to the Sun

Today, math blew my mind. It was so pretty sitting on my white sheet of paper, and I thought about its visual aesthetics, then about its purity in expressing the universe. Humans are currently capable of expressing just about anything they want in mathematical notation, but I wonder if there is a more efficient, currently undiscovered symbol language.

I had a lengthy argument over the weekend about the limitations of the written word or its verbal counterparts. The kid I was talking to is a secondary ed English major who claims words are only as limited as the human mind. While a nice little phrase, I can make up any number of words describing my most intimate feelings, but there will be no way to define that word in a way that someone else will definitively understand.

Simply put, there are emotionally charged sounds humans are incapable of making, which is partially where music comes in, though that is also limited in its subjectivity. If I were smart enough, I could write a poem more beautifully in math than I could in the written word. If I spoke with all painful inflection and tone, that can be expressed as a series of sound waves. That style of reading doesn't come across when the words are simply black on white.