On the sermons of Tyrone Williams
A lay preacher, as well as the distinguished poet, critic, and English professor I had known him to be, Tyrone had delivered the sermons at the Winton Community Free Methodist Church in Cincinnati, where he worshipped from 1987, when he began teaching full time at Xavier, until he took his position as a distinguished chair in the English Department at Buffalo in Spring 2022.
Six months after Tyrone Williams died from cancer at age seventy on March 11, 2024, I accessed the texts of seventeen sermons he had composed and that were now housed in the “Theological, 2001-2021” section of his archive at SUNY Buffalo.
'Fractal Poetics': A rose is a leaf is a rose is a leaf
Before Benoit Mandelbrot’s fractal mathematics and Gertrude Stein’s roses, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote about a primal plant, “Urpflanze,” which was constructed as a leaf within a leaf within a leaf. I wonder if his Platonic vision for this plant, from which all other plants supposedly derived, was an early imagining of fractal mathematics and response to fractal forms in the natural world (coast lines, human migration patterns, Romanesco broccoli). Visual depictions of fractals have no beginnings or endings in time, no inside or outside in space, and self-similarity and repetition occur at all discernible scales. To my eye, these aspects of visual fractals are pleasing. I am also dissatisfied by the undeviating periodicity of fractals.