Kari

Singularity by Margaret Tait is a poem, six lines long and each line short. It bravely addresses that complex thing of being an ‘I’, the basic prerequisite of self-referentiality: ‘To be I’ ‘I’ is flanked by propositions, when it arrives it is a modest disappointment in single letter form. Merely an I for your eye. Tait’s ‘I’ is lonely, the single figure amidst the letter-clusters forming words. The I is how we are born, and how we die, as a single figure, which may, at some time have been part of a pair. The ‘I’ may have joined with an ‘f’ or ‘n’ forming temporary, monogomous conjunctions. In Tait’s treatment inhabiting the ‘I’ is a terrifying imposition, a demand for us to stand up straight, take responsibility for our subjective, creative excesses. There is no respite for the poet, who must be the ‘I’ all the time ‘in the middle’. Who wrote this? I did.

---

‘Singularity’ is a poem by Margaret Tait. It is a short, modest piece, paired down to its bare semantic bones. It was originally published in 1959 in an anthology titled ‘Origins and Elements’. In the moment of being born we become an ‘I’, it is our origin as conscious beings, and also an element which increasingly possesses us. In mathematical terms singularity is defined as:

‘A point at which the derivative does not exist for a given function but every neighborhood of which contains points for which the derivative exists.’

In the poem ‘I’ or self-referential being, is the ‘singular given function’. Tait, then works with rigorous, scientific intuition through how we might exist as singular, subjective, implicated, derivative,  macro-micro, sequential, tangled beings, as single selves, single cells, with and without, each other. Pages of notes, scribbled investigations on subjective consciousness are distilled, finally presented for us the readers as a six-line equation.