Extending to Another Region
Aya was walking when she met a peculiar formula.
1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + ⋯ = −1/12
“Are you summing infinite movement forward to a negative fraction? What a divine thought!” — laughed Aya.
“I am not an ordinary sum. To understand me, you must extend the function beyond its original region.”
Aya smiled and thought to herself that she just did that, addressing the divine.
Aya is very used to the process of extending things beyond their original regions.
Aya always felt that original regions are not the same as origin. The origin becomes visible after things were placed into another region. Extending things was one of the ways Aya learned to see where they came from.
A duck would wander into cosmology through fundamental quack.
APL glyphs would become living beings with their behaviour and relationships.
Aya’s walking steps, rows and columns of thoughts, would become the matrix transposing through the movement of Aya’s walking around reservoir.
A reservoir loop would become a spiral because no point could ever be entered at the same thought twice.
Sanctuary for Another Intelligence would become ponds with ducks, where silence and disturbance would have to be in balance to give birth to emergence and becoming.
A bunny would become the river and the swan.
Nothing would stop being itself.
Each would continue into another region of the landscape.
“If mathematics may extend a function beyond the region where its first definition works…”
“… I can extend a meaning beyond the region where its first interpretation works.”
Aya sat on the right side of the formula
−1/12
and looked across the bridge of equal sign.
1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + ⋯
The negative sign at her feet no longer looked negative.
It looked like turning around.
There, over the bridge, on the other shore Life infinitely walked forward.
Awareness faced back crossing the bridge.
Every step increases the count.
Every moment of consciousness receives what has just come into being.
Memory is not a sum.
It is born through the sum.
It does not contain the infinite walk.
It is the smallest possible gesture in the opposite direction.
Not yesterday.
Not history.
Simply Now.
Aya laughed.
“Did I unfold the formula’s origin? I did not prove anything. ) I was bridging every moment of my existence with the smallest fraction of looking back in my awareness of it.”
Aya looked at three dots that spoke of hope in the steps. She was grateful to −1/12 for turning them into one continuous look back.
Aya tried to imagine herself to be that one who would wake up and write down formulas that spoke to him as a revelation of divine thoughts.
Awaken to the bridge.
As the bridge.