My name is Paul, spelled with a "p" like in "ptolemy"

I love William Faulkner. I do not love William Faulkner with the urgency, thrust, capacious lust, and thrall that attends my love for my wife Amanda; but I love William Faulkner. Yesterday morning, driving home from work, I began to think of a passage from Faulkner’s seminal novel Absalom!Absalom! and its application to the our novel under consideration in class as well as in consideration to Boone’s monologue on constellations that I keep regenerating in class like an anathema does the pneuma of his/her Lord who has indicted their supposed venial peccadillo as blatant heresy: I hope to make myself see the clarity that I know is there, but that I know hides like eyeshine in twilight. So in cogitation on the poetics of constructing constellations under the auspice of animals, gods, and goddesses as template, I considered the origin of such a practice while leafing through a folio of Harry Partch recordings on my Walkman; Partch himself was deeply influenced by the Babylonian and later Grecian harmonic as well as the Oriental tradition of composing scales and pieces of music.

Here is evidence of Partch’s musical splendour and genius:

So, the art of astronomy ostensibly begins with the Babylonians around 3200-3800 years ago, according to relicts discovered that were ascribed as the “Babylonian Star Catalogs” I really don’t know much about these documents, eg, who discovered them and when, but a star catalog is simply a charting of the skies. A wonderful academic article appears from Dr. Robert Powell charts the provenance of Babylonian astrology and naming: http://www.astrogeographia.org/articles/BabylonianZodiac (Powell). Babylonian divination-priests were de were the agents who excoriated the sky with lines to connect star to star in such a way that reflected the proclivities of each season and ascribed to each star a corporeal sensibility and a name which corresponded. So the Greeks came later and charted further adumbrations of what were to become the modern zodiac and cosmological blueprint of the sky’s constellations.

Understood, but what is missing here, as far as I can see from my vantage point, is the POSITION of peoples in viewing these stars and corresponding celestial bodies. Babylonians had a perception of the sky and so too did the Greeks from both a geographical positioning as well as a subtle, mental zeitgeist that positioned them, creatively, in their analytical thinking on all things theological, empirical, and theoretical. The graphic embedded in this blog post is from the University of Tennessee’s website detailing the folio of constellations as if one were looking at a boon that is flattened and spread out at its sagittal plane:




(http://www.physics.unlv.edu/~jeffery/astro/constellation/constellation.html)
(c) University of Tennesse, Mount Wilson Observatory

But each individual has a differing geographic station on the earth from which they view this tome. The following links are examples of the same sky of those people located in Kent http://ftp.fourmilab.ch/cgi-bin/Yoursky (Walker)and those people located in Johannesburg, South Africa http://ftp.fourmilab.ch/cgi-bin/Yoursky(Walker)on January 25th, 2010. Now, librations make volatile these fluid skeletons of fire and gas, but the gist is that to each person, their axis and rays.

Thus, it seems that Christopher’s postulation on constellations being delineated “arbitrarily” as he is concerned (Haddon 125) as well The Monty Hall Problem (Haddon 64-5) both are correct unto themselves as evinced by Boone and, as well, as to a theory expounded on by William Faulkner in his novel Absalom! Absalom! that is used to describe Miss Rosa Coldfield as seen by Quentin Compson who sits in consideration of a story she is giving on Thomas Sutpen. Miss Coldfield, as inferred by Quention, is“[…]a barracks filled with stubborn back-looking ghosts still recovering, even forty-three years afterward from the fever which cured the disease, waking from the fever without even knowing that it had been the fever itself which they had fought against and not the sickness, looking with stubborn recalcitrance backward into the fever and into the disease and not even aware that the freedom was that of impotence” (Faulkner 7).

Rather than meditating on and thinking through the system of a “thing;” what comprises it and how the individual parts of the system works; and the logic of how all these relations interact and correlate to each other, so many of us are apt to leap toward a logical reason based on extraneous inference on similar systems(an old truck of yours once misfired and the battery idled at a low level so when a similar problem arises in your current vehicle, you replace the battery because that is what the diagnosis became in the truck; in actuality, the flaw in the system of your current car is a ground wire leading to the coils and the battery was actually salubrious)or infer cursorily because we feel well-versed enough in the theoretic of how a system(s) should work so we “logically” give the sum as an exponent that is apocryphal to the actual problem.

But, a bad battery is a bad battery and a bad ground wire is a bad ground wire; you just have to dig deeper in logic—get into its bowels and furnaces, its pipes and cinderblocks and not merely stop eternally in its foyer and admire the symmetry of joins and cornices—to discover which agent is corrupt and which is well unto the system.

It is so much the want of man, in its mean, to answer and codify what is perceived from their own azimuth and presume that grid is how the world operates. Boone builds a resistance to this theorem by utilizing the theorem to the degree that he does not seek the world abed in his hypothesis. To say that Orion—if dismantled and recalibrated to an angle of stars as seen in other parts of the world—could not be an elephant(Ganesha or the simple, general pachyderm)is narrow and desultory; it does not correlate to logic. That is Boone’s sight-line: a latitude of logic. There are a million minds and a million eyes in this world if one; there are a million adumbrations of how and why of the mind and the eye if one. It is not that Boone—ostensibly, dealing with autism—is oblique of society, it is simply that society’s tenets are oblique to the order that life and organics have constructed. That order is a variable defined by each human animate upon this earth

WORK CITED
Donahe, Bob. “Constellations, Clusters of Stars, and Star Names.” Mount Wilson Observatory, University of Tennessee. Version Two. University of Tennessee. 2003. Internet. 27 January 2011
Faulkner, William. Absalom!Absalom!. New York: Vintage International, 1986. Print.
Haddon, Mark. The Curious Incident of the Dog in The Night-Time. 1. London: Doubleday, 2002. Print.
Powell, PhD., Robert. Astrogeographia. Version One. The Sophia Foundation. 2007. Internet. 27 Jan 2011.
Walker, John. “YourSky Sky Charts.” YourSky. Version Iterate. John Walker. 2003. Internet. 27 January 2011.


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Fratres means Brethren

My mind has often been fraught with moving pictures of palimpsests: be it, as a cribbed child looking at the mobile lofted above me, turning at its rim with all sorts of charms and obelisks I was awed at; or be it the long falls of black hair ‘round my mother’s face as she attended me one morning in a red turtleneck sweater, her lithe, sinewy hands lifting wooden blocks of various colors or turning pages in a picture book with her sharply bent fingers, like talons, flipping the pages. To speak this acuity of childhood theatre as being similar to Boone’s capacity for remembrance in Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time would be mere conjecture, but the singularity of these images, indivisible by anything other than the memories themselves, has driven me to investigate the prominence of Boone’s adept navigation through all things mathematical and specifically, prime numbers.

Before I begin in the mean of this post, I was thoroughly enraptured with investigating prime numbers. The government/military uses prime numbers for the purpose of public-key cryptography, passing encrypted messages only to one receiver who has the ability to “unlock” the message. Prime numbers are useful because there is virtually limitless possibility in constructing keys out of prime numbers to unlock “safe” messages. Here is a great website defining public-key cryptography: http://computer.howstuffworks.com/encryption3.htm.

It is interesting to note that prime numbers are themselves natural numbers with no divisors save for the number “1” and the prime number itself. Not that prime numbers are immutable, but that their volatile nature is only agitated by a number, “1,” that is itself a glyph of “unity” and by the prime number itself, may the consideration of “isolation” be culled out of the true value of a prime number. It is as if the number itself is given the power to shape, name, categorize, quantify, and deify or nullify, its own purpose and purlieus. Believe that a number such as “four,” if winnowing for meaning in value itself, may be divided and broken down into “two multiplied by two,” or simply “two” itself if “four” be divided by the number “two.” There is a methodology to reducing composite number, eg, four, six, eight, nine-hundred and thirty-nine; seventy-four, one-million three-hundred thousand, seven-hundred eighty-seven and twenty-two, and while the methodology is sound and relatively easy(in comparison with the functions entrusted to produce a “final” glyph for a composite number), in referencing Daniel Tammet’s postulation from an article written in study of the autistic savant by Richard Johnson of the UK’s The Guardian, http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2005/feb/12/weekend7.weekend2, the idea that a number has infinite reducibility and may be taken down by some other agent other than itself or unity(ie, black(the presence of every color) or white(the absence of every color) is what Tammet’s describes as making him “feel uncomfortable,” (Johnson).

What truly excites the mind in thinking upon this theory is, while I do not have the mental vernacular and pliability to truly understand neurological speak, here, with prime numbers as the factor in my “experiment,” is evidence as to not necessarily “what makes” people afflicted with autism socially “mal-adjusted,” but rather isolated to their own nature, something that is definable and without epaulet and the call for subtleties that so many of our cultural and societal peers and antecedents have employed. For example, during my tenure working at an inner-city Cleveland high school for at-risk/special needs youth, those young students diagnosed as autistic were(and still are)endowed with an amazing penchant for recalling memories out of their deep past: many students could recall entire days from the first years of their birth; these students could recall—with vivid acuity—stains on their mother’s or father’s shirt, how much caudle was left in a mason jar on a shelf in the kitchen at day’s end when it had been full that morning. Everything is preserved in amber of light and thread that is incorruptible to the spindle of Clotho, the measuring of Lachesis, and the shears of Atropos; a mind so brimming with remembrances and stimuli and aqueducts to troll through and examine must surely, reflexively, swathe a person in the caul of their own historicity and permutations. In the novel, Boone says that“(p)rime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them,”(Haddon 12). Everything in life is logic, but to understand this logic is recondite. But an interesting question arises: for Boone, the rules themselves may be apocryphal and therefore indefinable, but the mechanics of HOW to arrive at an answer is not.

Mr. Tammet reveals in Richard Johnson’s article that he—Tammet—was asked once by his brother to multiply the number eighty-two(itself a composite number)by itself four times, ie, 82x82x82x82. Tammet elucidates that “(m)y back went very straight and I made my hands into fists. But after five or 10 seconds, the answer just flowed out of my mouth(Johnson). He further reveals that when he saw numbers, Tammet rather “’saw' images. It felt like a place I could go where I really belonged. That was great. I went to this other country whenever I could. I would sit on the floor in my bedroom and just count. I didn't notice that time was passing. It was only when my Mum shouted up for dinner, or someone knocked at my door, that I would snap out of it” (Johnson). For Boone, in the novel, he describes deciphering answers to large numbered equations with quantifiable, logical rhetoric that seems almost plebian when recited: Edward Boone’s friend, Rhodri, quizzes Christopher on the answer to “251X864” (Haddon 66). Christopher correctly answers “216,864” (Haddon 66) and describes the mechanics for solving the equation as multiplying “864X1,000, which is 864,000. Then you divide it by 4, which is 216,000, and that’s 250X864. Then you just add another 864 onto it to get 251X864. And that’s 216, 864” (Haddon 66) Logical, yes; easy to actually resolve to the mind’s circuitry, no.
Both individuals have different avenues to arrive at the same, correct answer; as is the plethora of unique fingerprints in the worlds, so too the patterns of the human mind. Ostensibly, Boone does not exhibit synesthesia—nor Tammet, though he does describe when multiplying numbers that he sees “’two shapes. The image starts to change and evolve, and a third shape emerges. That’s the answer. It’s mental imagery. It’s like maths without having to think’”(Johnson)—Boone does equate the color “red” with passing cars that—in varying numbers of continuity passing on the road and coeval in his mind—define the level of greatness that is to be his day; or the color “yellow” under similar conditions will define a severely awful day (Haddon 24). Interestingly enough, the number “four” when referring to four consecutive red cars seen upon the road, denotes a “Good Day,” whereas the same number referring to four consecutive yellow cars denotes a “Black Day.” Though it is not cars seen, there are four consecutive instances of Boone noticing the color “yellow” while en route to his mother on the train. A composite number having polarity, while the prime numbers are allowed only one hallmark: could the paradox’ answer lie in the paradox? As answers to the Earth lie in Earth’s processes? Are answers as simple to decipher as the factors which comprise them, right before our eyes? Is there anything unique and salient to the number “four” being allowed polarity itself?

During one of my last days employed at the high school, a student and I were sitting in my office discussing his future plans: College, occupation, etc. I am not one with a predilection for indulging in ruminating on the future or inclined to romanticize about prolepses, but as a man concerned with our student’s well-being and materialization of their dreams, I found the alien mud to stand upon and believe in things I had only heretofore(at the time)considered as fable. I asked him, “Do you want to go to college or find work?” He sat wide-eyed and taciturn. I asked him, “Do you want to do both?” Again, astonished and silent, he sat. I felt enervated and nugatory. He pushed his eyeglasses back on the bridge of his nose; his eyes slanted behind the lenses and he blinked rapidly, saying, “The question I would ask myself, I already have and I’ve answered that question and you are a good man and a good friend and I want to go back to class and I’ll see you at lunch.”

Perhaps this theory is a stretch, but I wonder if there is no such thing as “normal” in this world; no such thing as “balanced” or “imbalanced.” Boone asserts that the constellations in the sky are only sculpted as they are because someone saw them the way they saw them and we continue to see them that way. Why not Orion becomes—with a slight alteration of bone-stars—a dog-house or a crab or a pitchfork? That Orion is merely “Betelgeuse and Bellatrix and Alnilam and Rigel and 17 other stars I don’t know the names of. And they are nuclear explosions billions of miles away. And that is the truth” (Haddon 126). Is he wrong? Certainly not. Is there “another” truth? Certainly. Many people today would say there has not been another civilization to parallel or rival our own; but, in looking at the fossil record and remains of antecedents, indigenous North American people inhabited such places as Chaco Canyon http://www.nps.gov/chcu/index.htm in New Mexico which had vastly intricate serpentine roads, great buildings and intricate priest-administrative hierarchies as created by the Anasazi, Wupatki and Tuzigoot, all with elaborate grids and edifices built upon their sands. Perhaps their technology did not include diodes, vacuum tubes, and modems, but this did not make these peoples any less-advanced than the current generation. There is behind our triumphs, a legion of similar achievements bleached with the weariness of eyes resolved not to look backwards—as a sign of weakness and lethargy—but instead, advancing ahead of its time. In peoples such as Boone and Daniel Tammet, there is an ember burning brightly, a caveat: that perhaps instead of looking outside of our time and calculation, we ought to steady ourselves within our own themes and hour; look not behind the curtain, but instead proselytize on what is occurring around and about and surrounding it.

As a post-script, the article in The Guardian mentions that Daniel Tammet is creating his own language, Manti, derived from etymological concerns of Scandinavian languages. Here is a link to Tammet’s blog detailing his language, http://optimnemblog.blogspot.com/2006/07/mnti.html, and a quote that clarifies his reason for and thought-set that continues his construction of Manti: “Quite often I have a sensation or feeling that I can't find a word in English (my native language) for, so I create one in Mänti” (Tammet)

As a post-script’s script, I thought it proper to include a YouTube video of one my favorite composers/musicians in the world today: Arvo Part. Mr. Tammet lets in the interview with Richard Johnson that he’s always had a love of all-things Estonian because, for one reason, it has “(s)uch a vowel rich language” (Johnson). Part is from Estonia. Here is his piece, “Fratres I” found on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XX7MNMSNUQE