I'M WRITING too many of these 'disaster' paragraphs -- but it's scarcely my fault. And now New Orleans joins the tsunami and 9/11 on a list of tragedies that can only make 'sense' (if then) on long historic or geologic time-frames. But we can't live in that time-scale. Man lives on the scale of next breath, measured in minutes: of next food and drink, measured in at most days. How we propose to mesh that with a scale of 3 to 4 months till the power comes back on in a major American city is mind-boggling. And where Art -- especially an abstract and mathematically based Art like this -- comes in, is quite properly not even part of the discussion. And yet what are we without it? A larger type of ant, perhaps, and all in all one not likely to survive as long as the older and smaller varieties.