Checking the Arithmetic - Dave Stringer

If life were a cool calculation

Where all of the numbers compute

Then one could sum all of creation

And reduce it all down to the root

But my mind is a multiplication

Of chance and illusion and doubt:

I’m confused and impatient

A fool at foundation

I never will figure it out

Am I just a mutation with a curious urge?

An endless vexation, a mistake that recurs?

A singular statistic, a product of the dice?

Checking the arithmetic, it’s not quite right…

I questioned a mathematician:

My life is uncertain and strange

Tell me what of the human condition

Can the priesthood of science explain?

She said: life is a state of transition

A pattern of chaos and change:

Of loss and division

And love insufficient

To answer the problem of pain

Am I just a tangle of jumping nerves

Or a point on a line describing a curve

I’m baffled beyond logic

And searching for insight

Checking the arithmetic and it’s not quite right…

If I only know what I am feeling

And can’t prove the world outside

Then standing or kneeling

Or staring at the ceiling

You’ve gotta have faith as your guide

The world of sensation

Is a puzzling equation

A persistent hallucination

So you’ve gotta have faith as your eye…

Am I just an ache in a painful world

Dreaming awake in a reciprocal blur

Flickering in physics' cinema of sight?

Checking the arithmetic, it’s not quite right…