Freewrite on the word resonance by Brenna Judith Baker

If we were instruments, you and I would be two peaks on a sound wave born from the same string.
Since that night when we sat of the floor, knees cracking, laughs breathing, pencils scratching, I’ve known our hearts were synchronized to the same rhythm.
We are two hollow bodies in space singing together, matching one another pitch for pitch through every movement of the symphony:
A chorus of gestures filling the space, bending the silence, and twisting the air into reverberating rings of emotion.
I feel sunbursts and gravity when I think of you.
I see myself in you.
We resonate.

Freewrite on the word Displacement by Alia Ghafur

Who is rowing this boat and why?
I was displaced from my
mothers womb and will be displaced
when i die

Freewrite on the words Resonance and Dissonance by Alexandra Michel

Resonance and dissonance,

Balance between the two.
Yin and yang,
light and dark,
the harmony created by two opposing forces.
The beauty of synchronous sound interrupted by the surprise of a
clash.
Waves crashing,
periods of time where the water is still. Silent.
Dormant falls the air at sunrise, when the sun begins to calm the winds of a rough night at sea.
Yet that rough sea triggers something laying asleep during the day.
--It is not during the calm, but on a stormy night in the shadows that this power begins to form within. A stirring inside begins to awaken a new day in the darkest hour.
It releases in the dissonance of the waves crashing and splashes up on the clean sand--
But, without the peace after the storm, I would not make meaning of the splash; it would just be a mess.
As the waves settle again, that eruption stays active in mind, giving strength to move forward.
Enjoying the day of sun, darkness will soon come again welcoming the inevitable clash that is yet to come.
This cycle of tighten and release is ever present in every living thing.
It is both what fuels us and uses us up.
It is a continuum. A force that never sleeps.
Though the waves lie dormant in the bright sunlight, the winds will stir and dissonance will come of resonance.
Still, the dissonance must run its course; posing questions and challenging every silence.
Stirring. Awakening. Living. Breathing. Fighting. and letting go...
The cycle has no mind.
These opposites exist within each other.
They keep us moving on.

"Right after the big bang, particles of matter and particles of antimatter annihilated each other. But for every billion pairs of particles, there is one extra particle of matter. That tiny imbalance accounts for the existence of poetry, that is, the existence of the observed universe.

A poem is a neutrino—mainly nothing—it has no mass and can pass through the earth undetected." ...From Mary Ruelfe's Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lecture

Freewrite on the word Displacement by Erika Refsland

Displacement: the amount by which an object is moved from its original position

Source

On my desk there is an orange. It's a bit bulgy, not particularly round, ashamed of its expulsion from spherehood. Despite its misshapen quality, it is bright and smooth and I would really like to eat it, but I am waiting for a friend to pick me up for lunch.

I can smell it, though. Those little pouches of orange juice are calling me, so I pick it up. It's ripe in my hands. I roll it around in my palms, and only start to peel it when I hear the hum-pop of my friend's beat up old Pinto in the driveway.

I set the orange back down on my desk, but not exactly where it was before.

Now displacement cares not for how long I held the orange, nor how hard I contemplated eating it. It's a much more direct concept than that. Displacement only wants to know the distance between where the orange sat while I lusted after it, and where I reluctantly set it when I replaced it to the desk.

Now suppose there is a family. Misshapen, over-ripe, and maybe a bit bitter, it sits. Whether huddled tight or fractured, it is nonetheless a single object, a unit of relational complexity.

It's sitting there, and then a hand comes and grabs it, a hungry hand. The family is inarguably no longer where it once stood. Suppose the hand rolls the family around, tears into its skin. For some time the family is out of control, misused.

Now the hand places it back, this time exactly where it had been sitting before. What is the displacement?

Freewrite on the word Displacment by Emily Searle-White

                                                    

Displacement.

Dis-pla-cement.

Dis means un, means de, means not – means no longer. Displacement.

Pla – means fish in Thai – fish and water. Water is displaced – by hands, spoons, boats and bodies. Water is displaced.

Cement. Not something that is often displaced. If it is displaced, it is broken.

Source

People are displaced. Their displacement can be measured by miles, but it also can’t. Can concepts be displaced, or are they removed or changed? Evolving ideas shift the meaning of words gradually with every utterance – after a time, concepts may be displaced, but not the way people are.

A displaced person is still who they are. But as soon as they are where they are and know why, they are changed.

A stone drops into water, the water opens up. It actually cannot resist, gravity pulls the stone down and the water yields and for a second, there’s a valley on the surface. Then the rush out is replaced by the pull in and from all sides, ripples come together. They crash. They move apart again. Then back together. Each time smaller. Has the surface of the water risen infinitesimally by the volume of water displaced by the stone? Intuition nods but my eyes can’t see it. In a bowl, perhaps, but not in the Atlantic. My eyes would not notice if a plane sunk in the Atlantic if they did not see it falling.

What is the name for that which takes the place of something that was displaced?

Goldfish, Tidy Households, and Math

The question is posed all the time:

What, exactly, do mathematicians do all day?

Different people give different answers, the most common being simply, "research," as though that term were enough to explicitly indicate math work. But what is research?

In his hilarious (and a little tragic) answer to this question, Yasha Berchenko-Kogen provides an accessible description of life as a graduate mathematics student and, eventually, as a mathematician.

Source

To discover answer and learn more about a "Tool that Does Suck Dust," check out his response here. 

If you've ever been in love

and perhaps it's felt like

a synchronous gravitational relationship of two celestial bodies (moons) that orbit a third (as a planet) which can be expressed as a simple ratio of their orbital periods

And if you've ever had your heart broken

and perhaps it felt like

a tension or clash resulting from the combination of two disharmonious or unsuitable elements

In any case we're meeting Monday nights 6 -8pm in 140 Vera Long.  New members are always welcome

Even if falling in and out of love isn't really your thing

Member Bios

Member bios, topic description, and some prose are up in the "Member bios" section!

Definitely provide feedback and comments are welcome!