The Dot on the i

Tom Disch

They mean so much, these little things:
The way as it sinks into lower-case
The aristocratic I loses its
Ionic capital to wear the unassuming
Livery that it alone of all the letters
Must be humbled by. Yet it is wise in that
By doing so it intimates of what Pope hints at
When he speaks of mankind's middling state
Between the macro- and the microscopic-
An idea too easily dismissed as out-of-date,
As though the only units of time worth noticing
Were those with the eternal rondures
Of our O's. But what is this O but
A dot with a hole in it? Wherein
Other dots may blossom into other O's,
A rose of infinite regressions like
The marvelous Mandelbrot transformations
Illustrated so beguilingly in a recent
Scientific American. When it comes to the sense
Of beauty we are all Pythagoreans,
Transfixed upon the ineffable and inexplicable
Significance of a number; for instance
(Or especially?), i, the square root of minus-one.
Or think of "quantum leaps," by which in common usage
We refer to movements of momentous scale
But which in fact are miniscule, beyond the reach
Of measurement. High and low, the infinite
And the inconsiderable, merge in the Arctic
Paradiso, Number, where, you guessed it, Number One
Is the great revolving flywheel generating
All numbers else, except its negation. Think of
It, and think as well of those teeny tiny lovely touches
That so enrich each individual existence:


Peter Seller's telling tics in his role as
Dr. Strangelove, the pepper polka-dotting an egg,
The leg of a dog lifted to piss-all this
And indefinitely more, for it is an aspect
Of the limitless extent of all single particulars
That it includes more than one, than anyone,
Can specify. Just try it. And it is this
Limitlessness of all that is little that allows
A theoretic possibility of a plenum
Coextensive with the mind and reach of each
Man and woman alive, and unalive, of absolutely
Everyone, in a democracy of dust where even the largest
Integer is a function of the number one, and may
Be laid low by i. Incredible, isn't it?
I love you, and that's equally incredible,
Equally axiomatic. Shall we stop there,
Or proceed to the next coulisse down the road?
We'll stop there. I love you. That's it.