Algebra of the Anxious Mind: Kazmier Maslanka’s Pandemic Meditation
By Alberto Indiana
In Pandemic Meditation (2020), Kazmier Maslanka, the Zen practitioner turned poetic mathematician, confronts the anguish of a world on pause through the elegant rigidity of a proportional equation. This mathematical visual poem—constructed in the form of a/b = c/d—might seem at first like an austere formulation, yet it unfolds into a densely layered cognitive event: a poetic mapping of torment, meditation, and death. If George Lakoff and Mark Turner’s cognitive theory of metaphor teaches us that poetry is thought made tangible through conceptual mappings, then Pandemic Meditation is a Rosetta Stone of poetic cognition rendered in the stark grammar of mathematics.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Maslanka found himself wrestling with meditation—the very tool meant to soothe his disquiet. Thoughts, he recalls, flooded in with the relentless cadence of breaking news, a cognitive onslaught that turned each breath into a confrontation with mortality. In response, he didn’t write a confessional poem in the traditional sense. He composed a similar triangles poem—a form that pairs mathematical precision with metaphoric imagination. Its poetic core lies not in sentiment, but in structure.
And that structure mirrors the man himself. Maslanka is not a poet who wears his emotions on his sleeve. An aerospace engineer by training and a sculptor by education, he channels his inner world through forms of balance, proportion, and conceptual rigor. His years of Zen practice have imbued him with a certain detachment—one that does not repress suffering but seeks to frame it, to find its dimensions, its angle of repose. He is not interested in catharsis; he is interested in equilibrium. Pandemic Meditation is, in many ways, a confession told with a straight spine and an open equation.
Maslanka’s personality emerges between the lines, in the precise calibration of metaphor to image, in the subtle Buddhist irony of creating a poem about non-attachment while carefully designing its every visual and lexical detail. The very act of creating this poem was, as he admits, a moment of witnessing—the artist observing his own inner chaos as if watching both the news and a horror movie at once. His voice is not that of the lamenting poet but of the meditator who has momentarily slipped from clarity and is now reassembling insight from fragments of anxiety, geometry, and death.
1. Extension of Conventional Metaphor
At the heart of the poem lies the equation:
Here, Maslanka subtly extends the conventional metaphor THE MIND IS THE BODY—one of the deep structures Lakoff and Johnson explored in Metaphors We Live By. The mind becomes a shouting jury, a devouring vulture cloud, or, inversely, a still presence free of entanglement. Through proportionality, Maslanka performs algebra on emotion, letting one cognitive domain solve for another.
2. Image-Mapping
In cognitive terms, an image-metaphor is a mapping between two rich mental images based on shared form or structure. In Pandemic Meditation, the dominant image is that of encircling—expressed in the 13 vultures, the mirrored letters of the anagram eleven plus two = twelve plus one, and the roundness of the concentric visual design. Circles become containers of anxiety, death, and paradox. This circularity is not merely visual but conceptual—it becomes the schema through which anxiety loops endlessly, dragging the soul with it.
The “shouting match” among 13 anxieties is not only a metaphor for cognitive overload; it is visually echoed in the chaos of the artwork, where skeletons, ravens, and symbolic death elements swirl in concentric disorder. The Buddhist “monkey mind,” a concept Maslanka alludes to, becomes mapped onto a literal monkey leaping in the visual field—another image-metaphor that grounds the abstraction of distraction in the figuration of motion.
3. Generic-Level Metaphor
The genius of the similar triangles form is that it mathematically encodes the GENERIC IS SPECIFIC metaphor—a conceptual structure in which a single proportional schema generates endless poetic meanings. Each variable—be it Non-Attached Mind or Corporeal Body—can assume infinite values. As one term grows in magnitude, its proportional counterpart must diminish. When Anxiety becomes infinite, Non-Attachment must approach zero. This is not only algebra—it is Zen.
As such, Pandemic Meditation becomes a living koan: an equation with no single answer, but countless poetic consequences. This quality places Maslanka’s work squarely within Lakoff and Turner’s field guide to poetic metaphor. Rather than merely illustrating metaphorical thought, it enacts it—demonstrating that a mathematical visual poem can be more than metaphor-aware; it can be metaphor-generative.
Similar Triangles Poems as Poetic Form
Skeptics might ask: can a proportional equation truly count as poetry? To answer this, we must return to the structure of metaphor itself. Poetry, according to cognitive linguistics, is not defined by rhyme or rhythm but by novel mappings between conceptual domains. Maslanka’s “similar triangles” poems function precisely in this way, treating abstract emotional or spiritual content as variables in a structured cognitive model. They are not puzzles to be solved but domains to be cross-mapped, solved for meaning instead of number.
This proportional structure—so fundamental in geometry—becomes metaphorical when populated with domains like “soul,” “anxiety,” or “non-attachment.” The similarity of triangles becomes a scaffold for cognitive symmetry. One side of the equation mirrors the other not just mathematically, but semantically. In this way, Maslanka’s poetic form harnesses what Lakoff and Turner call image-schematic reasoning, offering a platform on which the poetic imagination can move freely across the equation.
Conclusion
Pandemic Meditation is not a poem about the pandemic; it is a poem structured by the pandemic mind. It models a mind turned against itself—encircled by its own symbols, yet still seeking balance in the calm clarity of proportion. In doing so, Maslanka gives us more than a poetic artifact; he offers a cognitive instrument. His similar triangles poems do not merely illustrate poetic metaphor—they embody it.
In a time defined by crisis and abstraction, Maslanka’s Pandemic Meditation stands as a quiet act of formal resistance: a reminder that even anxiety can be mapped, even death can be equated, and that within chaos, symmetry waits.