A Lion's Teeth — Andrew Crompton

What are we to make of GSB's story telling and poetry? An appreciation of his non-mathematical writing is offered chiefly based on a study of two versions of his late work 'A Lion's Teeth', ('Löwenzähne'). The two copies are physically different: the first is unmarked and as published; the second was marked by the author himself to strike out many passages. The differences suggest that even when writing fairy stories he was engaged in speculative philosophy, in this case I speculate, to do with the limits of what is expressible. His method of re-entering and defacing his own work to create uncertainty is a device used by several modern artists. It confronts Wittgenstein's idea that, in order to be able to draw a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable: in other words he attempts to think the unthinkable by crossing out what he describes as 'offensive to Western readers, and at best embarrassing-', and in so doing he indicates a limit to our world.

Reader at the University of Liverpool School of Architecture

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