DOCTOR DOGWIT’S HYPNOPOLYGONIA ARTIST’S STATEMENT

Part of this book describes dreams I experienced intermittently during the years the United States was at war with Vietnam.

I was 4F, blessed with hypertension, scoliosis and sorted among the intellectually gifted. Others fought while I sampled math, philosophy and art history classes. A million and a half died in Vietnam while I went from my senior year of college to the year I became a tenured professor.

Some of my friends had bad tours of duty. I had bad dreams – liminal nightmares where complex visual geometric manifestations converged with my conflicted emotions. The memory of those nights of abstract chaos, tangential to space and time, is irretrievable and forever beyond my waking comprehension.

I felt anger, guilt and grief about the war. I smoked dope, argued aesthetics and debated hypotheticals. I experienced fear and loathing over politics, anxiety over civil rights, confusion about the sexual revolution - and some of it was my personal life.

This book also recounts the life of Hippasus of Metapontum, a member of the Pythagorean school. The Pythagoreans believed that through numbers, the universe and all its secrets could be revealed and understood. But they were insular, narrow-minded, superstitious and intolerant.

Hippasus is credited with, and remembered for, his discovery of incommensurable magnitudes which marked the beginning of the study of irrational numbers. He helped develop the foundations of modern mathematics by which cosmologists continue to theorize about matter, energy, time and space.

Hippasus’ mathematics were inconsistent with Pythagorean dogma. His revelations threatened their convictions. He may have disclosed secret teachings to the outside world - a betrayal of their code. The mystery surrounding his execution in the Gulf of Tarentum raises questions in my mind about the personal price we each pay for realizing our truth.

Hypnopolygonia is about dreaming and drowning - about consequences. -Publisher