Math in Literature – Eugenio Montejo

I realize that it may seem that most of my waking thoughts are concerned with numbers and equations.  While this is true for my desire to understand and explain everything around me, I do enjoy many other things other than making spreadsheets and coming up with equations.  Included in my many other passions is writing and reading poetry.  This blog will be about one of my favorite poems – “La Tierra Giro para Acercarnos” – or “The Earth Turned to Bring Us Closer”.  It was written by Eugenio Montejo, and was even mentioned in the movie “21 Grams.”  Here it is:

The earth turned to bring us closer,
it spun on itself and within us,
and finally joined us together in this dream
as written in the Symposium.
Nights passed by, snowfalls and solstices;
time passed in minutes and millennia.
An ox cart that was on its way to Nineveh
arrived in Nebraska.
A rooster was singing some distance from the world,
in one of the thousand pre–lives of our fathers.
The earth was spinning with its music
carrying us on board;
it didn’t stop turning a single moment
as if so much love, so much that’s miraculous
was only an adagio written long ago
in the Symposium’s score.

Now, my interpretation of this poem has to do with (as always) the mathematical side of this, and it has always been why this poem has stuck in my mind over the years.  I see it being written about someone who has found the love of their life – suggested by “The earth was spinning with its music carrying us on board.”  He or she is looking back in amazement and the infinitely many things that had to happen in a certain way for their love to be realized suggested by “An ox cart that was on its way to Nineveh arrived in Nebraska” and “A rooster was singing some distance from the world, in one of the thousand pre–lives of our fathers.”  It is almost that the these future events had to have been written a long time ago to ensure such a beautiful outcome – “as if so much love, so much that’s miraculous was only an adagio written long ago in the Symposium’s score.”

But the mathematical side that really makes this special to me is that I realize that so many events had to happen in just the right way to allow me and my future wife to meet and fall in love.  If you really consider how many variables would have to be exactly right to ensure that I would meet this girl at the right time in history, it is truly mind boggling.  Now consider the amount of wars, famines, large disasters, small accidents that must have happened over the course of the last couple thousand of years.  They all had to occur with the proper outcome in order for her and I to be born at the proper times and places and to then meet at sometime in the future.  I love that thought, and therefore this poem.  Let me know your thoughts.  CD