Informed Consent | For Kurt Godel
by Dr. Lloyd Jacobs
Yes, but you must wager,
it is not optional - Pascal
The day after the diagnosis he spent
calculating odds ratios, parsing unruly time
into intervals like the rings
in a slice of tree, into strobe frozen
events and assigning likelihoods and values.
In a solipsistic mind, he built,
as the age demanded (that we sing),
scenarios and models of a future long or short,
built on utility functions and probabilities,
until he knew exactly what he didn’t know
from Markov chains and Bayesian constructs,
what was best represented by a fifty-fifty throw
and that a die is constrained
to fall on one of six faces. He remembered
how the lot fell upon Jonah.
The analysis required the assignment
of numbers to a complex life:
a fluid market portfolio was easy
the expectations of colleagues more difficult
a daughter and sons slow to mature, painful
but most of all, tacitly accepted by his wife,
a decade of joy with a young lover.
On the third day he despaired at the wild
fluctuations which plagued his work.
He concluded there must be hidden variables,
unknowables, affecting his results.
He fitted to the lacunae arbitrary constants
after the manner of Planck and Einstein.
Then it came to him: there may be terms
he could only fear. He came to see fates and furies
at the interstices of every equation.
Every conclusion was manifestly absurd.
It was the week before he died
Raymond’s wife called. She was terse:
He wants to see you, was all she said.
I need you to finish greasing
the wide hay rake. The big wheels
are done, it’s the casters I left for later.
He paused to riffle among the files
of his mind for things left incomplete,
machine repairs or secret loves,
things unfinished that might linger
to reproach or jeer at life’s extremity.
One more thing, he said.
A long handled shovel, against the North
wall of the barn, it’s in the rain.
Dr Lloyd Jacobs is President Emeritus of the University of Toledo, he has published 3 collections of poetry, previously he was a professor of vascular surgery at the University of Michigan.
