The November (Patterns) issue of Moss Piglet's been out for several weeks, so I thought I'd share all the work I submitted and discuss my thoughts on each one.
(Click on the links for more information as to what Moss Piglet is and how to subscribe).
I submitted three works:
- A Building of Sorts
- Undulations
- In Search of an einstein (Published)
A Building of Sorts
In smokestack shadow by steel rail fallow sprawls an eyesore sight
a building of sorts, ramshackle and coarse, hidden from ready light
Inside lurks a bar, sclerosis scar, decrepit watering hole
Shrug off your cares or nurse your despairs along with other souls
Filled to the gills with people who will every moonless night
enter the stage, drink swill, and engage with enervating delight
Like a Broadway show we all know where the cast slowly changes
but the action inside is fixed like the tide and never rearranges
The corner by the bathroom sty hosts the scripted drunk
Slurs his words, spills his drinks, smells hauntingly of skunk
He’s known as Cal, Our Churlish Pal, a character with multiple faces
They fill the role, all grim and droll, and come from many places
While waiting for another pour and its ever-flowing foam
Cal’s wife arrives and begins to strive to get the drunkard home
The bar sets odds which favour the sod who never scores a win
The losers all buy and winners they vie for the closest glass of sin
In the corner booth the patrons couth become a chattering crowd
Opinions unsound orated around become more shrilly loud
Watch the beginner become the winner and not be erudite
The best is considered the viewpoint delivered with volume’s greatest might
And what’s more through the door on the stroke of one
(no hair askew, so fresh and new, each incredibly so young)
a brand new face, so out of place, fresh talent for the scene
who may come back repeatedly more grayishly than green
There’s more besides who come inside all throughout the night
They come to drink and dance and drink and sing and drink and fight
It’s like they’ve ripped from published script directions for their role
Played perfectly yet accolade-free the only apparent goal
At time of close they collect their woes and shuffle out the door
I reset the space, put all in its place, so she’s ready to host once more
I grumble and grouse and to myself overbearingly complain
of dealing with stenches and miserable wretches and unbearable sticky stains
I could sell the dump to some ignorant chump as part of a sweetheart deal
in spite of her look as an opium nook, present her as a steal
Or my back could turn and I could spurn, as if she’d never existed
and ignore the allure to steadfastly endure that’s perpetually persisted
And then I crack before the shack in all her rickety glory
Remembering each night in better light the overarching story
Who else, I think, can serve the drink in only the way I can
and keep up her looks and update the books? Me, her loyal fan
The rise of the Sun, another night done, the end of my duty day
I’ll head to my bed and sleep like the dead until light has passed away
With those who’re new and the veterans too who come to play here still
I’ll play out my role but there’s one thing I know is I do so with free will
This poem was a piece that kept on insisting on being tweaked and edited and fine-tuned. Two weeks of lots of small changes finally produced this - and I think the results were well worth it! It went from having a few lines here and there with internal rhyme to having every line with internal rhyme in. I didn't realize at the time what a difference it would make but it just reads so much better with them.
Another aspect I enjoy is the use of words that sound like one thing but actually mean something else. The word "enervating" sounds very much like "energizing" but they are, in fact, opposites - energizing means the energy goes up but enervating means the energy goes down. It fits in nicely with the implied feel that somehow the bar is for the dead or perhaps the damned.
Undulations
Grey steely clouds relent from lashing sea
Wind-blown spray coats with salty brine
Oceanic undulations tossed the sloop mercilessly
Warm streaming rays calm restless rhythms
Where a watery grave seemed certain
It floats twixt watery depths and clearing skies
Ensconced, safely held deep within
She sleeps desperately, recovering
Gentle undulations the only movement
Limbs akimbo, exhaustedly thrown, unmoving
Where Death had prowled the deck hungrily
The Sandman stands guard at her bedside
The rise and fall of looming walls of water
Arrivals and departures of meteorologic events
Tossings and turnings of hapless watercraft
All part of an undulating Whole
Time’s Great Wheel inexorably spinning
The half-drowned figure allowed to wake
This poem arose from a freeXpressions prompt. I wanted to have each stanza look at a different version of undulations, of risings and fallings. And with the repeated rhythms, it seemed a good fit for Patterns.
In Search of an Einstein
In the world of mathematics, there are a lot of unsolved questions. Most of them are quite complex to express, much less understand. For example, one of the most famous unsolved questions, the Riemann hypothesis, runs like this:
The Riemann zeta function has its zeros only at the negative even integers and complex numbers with real part 1/2. True or false?
To a non-mathematician, it sounds like pure gibberish.
But there was one question that until November 2022 was unsolved but could be expressed in understandable terms:
I want to tile my bathroom. But I think squares and rectangles and all that are boring because it’s the same pattern over and over again. I want a single shape (it can rotate or whatever, but not overlap other tiles and not have gaps filled in with grout or other makeshift bits) because I don’t want to have to buy multiple shapes and end up with leftovers. And I want that one shape to completely tile the wall with a pattern that never repeats no matter how big my wall is. Can I get something like that?
In mathematician-speak, you’re looking for seamless aperiodic tiling - that is, tiling that creates a pattern which never repeats. And I do mean “never”. If you designed the bathroom wall to be the size of the Milky Way Galaxy, the pattern would still never repeat.
It was known that you could use two shapes to achieve the aperiodic look (found in 1974 by physicist Roger Penrose), but it was an unanswered question as to whether you could manage it with a single shape. In fact, the shape was so elusive that it garnered its own name - the “einstein tile” (“einstein” not coming from the famous physicist but instead from the German language: “ein Stein” meaning “one stone”). Many mathematicians simply gave up and moved on, figuring the shape simply did not exist.
But it’s now known that the answer is yes, the einstein tile does does exist. And, in fact, there’s more than one.
The first einstein shape was discovered by David Smith, a retired printing technician and self-described “shape hobbyist”. After years of playing with shapes inside a piece of software (the PolyForm Puzzle Solver) and then cutting shapes out of paper with promising candidates, he found one that looked likely. And despite what you might expect a shape like this to be - some sort of super-fiddly, highly-complicated, intricate shape requiring exacting manufacturing wizardry, it’s a 13-sided shape (composed of eight kite shapes that come together) dubbed “the hat” (because it resembles a top hat).
Smith contacted computer scientist Craig Kaplan, who along with software developer Joseph Samuel Myers and mathematician Chaim Goodman-Strauss, began proving “the hat” was an einstein. During that process, they discovered that they could change the lengths of the sides and still create a seamless infinite aperiodic tile. This meant that Smith had found not just a single einstein shape but an entire class of shapes. And within that class is an infinite number of individual einstein shapes.
What does all this mean? Aside from the possibilities within materials science, engineering, and countless other fields, the most important thing (or at least as it relates to the original question) is this - you and your neighbour can have uniquely tiled aperiodic bathroom tiling using einstein shapes (even if the store only sells one shape of tile).
References:
Bischoff, M 2023, ‘Newfound Mathematical ‘Einstein’ Shape Creates a Never-Repeating Pattern’, Scientific American, 10 April, accessed September 2024, <https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/newfound-mathematical-einstein-shape-creates-a-never-repeating-pattern/>
Shields, J 2024, ‘The 'Einstein' Tile: Mathematicians Find a Shape That Never Repeats’, How Stuff Works.com, 16 April, accessed September 2024, <https://science.howstuffworks.com>
Shavit, J 2023, ‘‘Einstein Shape’: This holy grail of tiles will revolutionize material science’, Brighter Side of News, 8 April, accessed September 2024, <https://www.thebrighterside.news/post/einstein-shape-this-holy-grail-of-tiles-will-revolutionize-material-science/>
‘Riemann hypothesis’, Wikipedia, 4 September 2024, accessed September 2024, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_hypothesis>
‘The Hat and the Spectre’, National Museum of Mathematics, accessed September 2024, <https://momath.org/the-hat/>
This is my first narrative non-fiction. It was fun researching and then finding a way to present what could be an extraordinarily dry bit of news and have it be fun. I hope I succeeded!
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