Dear J.B.: Imaginary Answers to Symbolic Questions

Your use of a Möbius strip is elegant, likely very true, and utterly unprovable.  At least I hope so. It reminds me (figuratively and literally), of the concept of infinity.  We both know what infinity is, and also we actually don’t.  We know its representation, and we can even use it mathematically, as we can with pi or e.  But we could never fully know it, which is why we have symbolic representation, because in a sense we’d rather show it exists through a mathematical proof.  Then all of a sudden, it’s a plain as day.

I’m very much reminded of mathematician Kurt Gödel and his theorems of incompleteness. In a (har har) nutshell, there will always be unanswerable questions, because the system (axioms) you use to produce those answers, will never be complete, never airtight.

I mean, imagine you are one of these ants on this Möbius strip.  You never see the other side, even when you eventually get there, which means you don’t even know you’re going around a never ending loop.  Even if you were to knowingly experience it spatially:

• half the time you going downhill, and half the time you’re going uphill.
• half the time you’re banking left, and half the time you’re banking right.

That almost sounds like the worse advice I ever got (Well sir, you win some & you lose some).  It’s almost infuriating, the idea that you know you’re in a loop and yet you can’t explain it.  But it drives you to think that you can. To me, not being able to prove it feels like a kind of trauma. You have to separate your sensation and your representation in order to arrive back at sum of zero.  It’s as if in order to understand the Möbius, we are told that we have to take a pair of scissors, cut the strip, and untwist it.  Yet, the act of cutting and partial inversion IS the trauma! Somehow we would go through with it anyway to satisfy our curiosity, because we’ve given in to the seductive idea that we can actually grasp it.  In doing so, we’ve transformed something knowable and unexplainable, into something that we think will pass as knowable because it’s now fully explainable.  We’ve turned out imaginary trauma to a real one.  But we don’t have to.

So really, to kind of sum up, I don’t know what’s worse:

• (The idea that) I’ll never truly know anything I can’t explain 
• OR (The idea that) anything I can explain isn’t really true.  

And yet, when I replace the ‘or’ with an ‘and’, somehow I feel infinitely better!

L.K.