Ada's Apotheosis

From one of the Ada Lovelace profiles...

"Her life was an apotheosis of struggle between emotion and reason, subjectivism and objectivism, poetics and mathematics, ill health and bursts of energy."

Struggle?

I challenge this characterization. Life exists in the tension between emotion and reason, subjectivism and objectivism, poetics and mathematics, ill health and bursts of energy! To believe otherwise is to buy into a narrative that forbids contradictions. That only exists in myth.

And even more...what a wonderful way to see the world! Full of logic, confounded by chaos.

Being able to see that the creation of systems is a human created, arbitrary activity that can encompass literally anything that can be assigned a rational value...perhaps that awareness arises from the acknowledgement of this life tension. It certainly requires a mind that accepts disconnections and contradictions without refuting them.

Ada came into the conversation when Suheir and I were discussing the potential for a poetry game - What would that be? What would it look like? And since the real act of poetry is a surgical truth-telling, and that's awfully hard to set up as a game, could you instead create a database (perhaps crowd-sourced) of values assigned to words that would generate "points" when combined? Would order and grammar and specificity matter, or would abstract or random orderings have the same interpretive value?

???