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Dyscalculia

A Love Story of Epic Miscalculation

Camonghne Felix

First annotation on .

18 quotes

biographies

p 1 sup 8

  • A fractal is a never-ending pattern—infinitely complex. It’s a simple equation processed over and over again, reproducing itself in perpetuity, hiding around and inside of us, like Russian dolls, like a forest bordered by and stuffed full with trees, like a river that splits and meets itself in another river, like a stamp, like your DNA, like your brain, like your lungs, like their functions.May 1 2024 6:14PM

p 1 sup 11

  • The nobody of Certeau’s Everyman is truly common twice: once in madness, again in death.May 1 2024 6:14PM

p 1 sup 39

  • I discovered: performance allows for ontological sameness. Sameness is believable and qualifying. Sameness is safe.May 1 2024 6:22PM

p 1 sup 47

  • At home, the heat kept rising, my mother’s treatment rearing itself ineffective, my disease an attic demon tearing up the floors. I got older and my symptoms got worse. The more I acted out, the angrier she got; the angrier she got, the more I rebelled; and the cycle lends itself to itself. My mom took any sign of disobedience or disorder as evidence that I was punishing her for letting my cousin harm me. The more solipsistic her projections got, the less I felt I needed to hide, since she was going to take up all the space in my illness anyway. The sicker I got, the less patience she had for me. The less patience she had for me, the less grace I reserved for her. The less grace I offered her, the more she seemed to dislike me. The less she seemed to like me, the less of a child I had to be.May 1 2024 6:27PM

p 1 sup 51

  • In the dim light of these weekly readings, I can see these seams of struggle, see where the writer’s ambitions resist the truth, and see an underdeveloped approach to the function of irony, to two things being true at once, and no approach at all toward the submission it requires to really capture the affects of humiliation. It is, perhaps, too foreign to truly comprehend, unless your life, even in silence, is defined by your resilience to humiliation.May 1 2024 6:30PM

p 1 sup 53

  • Pythagoreans preach that each life adds up to one cumulative journey for your true soul—think of the soul as a string that spans the length of your lifetimes, and that string gets to see a different life every century or so, and each life is a chance, in a series of chances, to build a pathway back to the divine, to wind the string back toward your soul’s ultimate homeMay 1 2024 6:31PM
  • All of this is what Pythagoreans call successive transmigration, and according to their gospel, it is only through transmigratory praxis that we make our way back to the fundamentals of true humanity, of a uniting human purpose; it’s only through this process that we are able to make sense of the strange chemistry that makes the eye see green.May 1 2024 7:19PM

p 2 sup 9

  • We were broke and working service jobs that paid us more than we’d ever made. We were young and pregnant with unfair dreams. One wanted to tour the world and shift the soundscape—the other wanted the same. At first it seemed like sickle and sun; Leopold and Loeb—desires of different origins; complementary but one. We were fighting for the other’s sense of significance, giving everything we could to the other’s confidence. I loved his approach to sound-making and he loved to hear me sing.May 1 2024 6:34PM

p 2 sup 11

  • Haunted by the threat of perpetual incompletion, I wanted to be able to say I did a hard thing well without being pulled to the cross about it, that I learned to bury the worst of myself for someone else’s happiness, the sharp remains of my unresolved youth-hood clinging to the underbelly of my ambition, begging to be taken with. He, so selflessly, wanted to love me, all of me, would take me with my volume, would take me from my victimhood, would give me a lease on a different kind of life.May 1 2024 6:35PM

p 2 sup 37

  • A factorial is, in essence, a summation. Here is what you get when you add up all the early derivatives, when you collect mass in sequence, when + 1 = 2, and + 1 condenses to become 3. This arithmetic is the orchestral hum of humanity, the illustration of exponential growth.May 1 2024 6:40PM

p 2 sup 43

  • I’ve been curious lately about how the self reproduces itself within itself, its patterns permuting and duplicating in foreign systems, like fractals do, like the Mandelbrot set, never ending, the fingerprint of God.May 1 2024 6:42PM

p 2 sup 45

  • You’re a house cat. You’re very important, and you have little to do.May 1 2024 7:20PM

p 2 sup 67

  • In The Life of Pythagoras or On the Pythagorean Life, Iamblichus writes that death is a migration, and that the life you lived before death is what trains you to resist the descent into the lower levels of existence.May 1 2024 6:50PM

p 2 sup 68

  • Pythagoreans believed that there are three ways humanity improves, one of which is dying. Death is biological, but where it is also metaphysical is where I find delight.May 1 2024 6:51PM

p 2 sup 71

  • Math is a form of faith, a faith of its own dynamic and complex language system, and to speak it is to agree to its principles: Input begets output. One becomes the other. One variable is subject to the mechanics of the others. You give what you get. You get what you are prepared to receive.May 1 2024 6:51PM

bm sup 22

  • What I know now is that love is a chaos system dialing us into our highest selves and troubling the foundation of what makes us us. And with a chaos system, all you can control is what you can account for, whatever you can quantify and collect.May 1 2024 7:22PM

bm sup 27

  • Ancient Pythagoreans subscribed to the dogma of transmigration and memory, both of which they believed to be the key to a soulful immortality, an immortality only attainable if the soul takes a three-thousand-year journey in which your individual soul inhabits many different bodies in order to return to the divine. It’s this insistence on remembering that allows one to rise with the gods, a cumulative accounting of three thousand years of wisdom, a collection that improves the soul and magnifies its offering to all beings.May 1 2024 7:07PM

nts

  • Throughout, I reference philosopher Dr. James Luchte’s research on Pythagoras and transmigration in the Pythagorean religion, from his book Pythagoras and the Doctrine of Transmigration: Wandering Souls (Bloomsbury, 2009).May 1 2024 7:24PM

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