A Tropical Rain's presence
It's finally started to rain. My mind has, in consequence, woken up after a long hibernation. There's a little rivulet on the wall behind me descending from the pointless hole made for the dud air conditioning unit. Outside in the patio you can smell and feel on your skin the standing ovation of the flowers. (I just checked.)
My son is so eerily like me, he even has trouble with maths. From the little I've read, there are two schools of thought in teaching maths: one, adhered to by my own teachers back in Primary, holds that you should make numbers and operations comprehensible to children by talking about pizzas, pencils and basketball teams; the other holds that this is a perversion of the sacred concept of number, which is but imperfectly adumbrated in nature, and that you should give it to them straight: the number three is not an abstraction arrived at from successive contemplation of little groups of things, on the contrary, the little groups of things are pathetic and ultimately unsatisfactory attempts to incarnate the number in a material world to which it is intrinsically hostile, like trying to represent a spiritual Divinity as a crotchety old man sitting on a cloud. According to this second school of thought, not only are kids' brains pre-wired to grasp number as an independent mental category, but many children can only grasp it confidently as such, and talk of counting pencils and slicing pizzas will only confuse and discourage them. This seems to me to be very likely true.
True and also germane in groping for a handle on the reality we inhabit: we need to understand, ideally from earliest childhood, that when we count "things" we are imposing arbitrary and limiting categories on a world that does not contain them, and that was born without them. There are no numbers in nature because there are no boundaries. Maybe there are at the subatomic level, whole clouds of them, but I'm unqualified to go there so will stick to what I know. I know that nowhere in the entire known universe will you find three people. You may think there are three people, but you're wrong. And this is even if we discount the possible ectoplasmic skulking of the fabled Celestial Gooseberry. Wherever you see three people together, what you are seeing is not the number three but, first of all, a momentary juxtaposition of a sizeable number x of very large numbers y1, y2..., where y[n] represents the total population of each of x groups, tribes or communities of which the persons present are members, which only the crude limitations of our sensual apparatus prevent us from seeing, but without whose existence we would have difficulty even identifying them as persons. That for starters. Then there's the simple psychological fact that every time you put three people in close proximity with one another, you conjure up a fourth person, invisible to the members of the trio but visible enough to yourself, who is a kind of tentative, creeping amalgam of the three, but whose claim to independent personhood is usually so vaporous that he or she never gets beyond say, 0.02 of a person, just enough to throw the calculation out. Then there is the wide variety of imaginary people that each member of the trio glimpses in the others at different points: the stereotypes and strawmen, the approximations and reminiscences, the sinuous fantasies, making three a crowd or even two on a good day. And finally, there is the primitive singularity to which all personhood reduces when you have attained that particular plane of umbilicuspection for which prizes are routinely handed out on the last day of Zen Summer Camp.
All of which is to say that one has the greatest sympathy for those long-faced people who are currently going around harrumphing over Brump and Trexit, and muttering under their breath that counting votes on a particular bad day of a particularly bad year and turning them into long-term policy restrictions, irrespective of the number of brain cells incarnated in each vote, is a damn fool way to run a country. It is. Starting with the odd conceit that every vote, no matter whether cast on the basis of a close reading of half a century of historical and political documentation or on the basis of the troubled perception of Mr Farage as disturbingly Toad of Toad Hall-like from a certain angle, should be worth the same, a stipulation which must have many Martians scratching their antennae in bemusement. Bottom line, it's a fudge, and a bad one at that, but possibly the best we can do with the materials available, e.g. people's time and attention span and Dunning-Krugerish tendencies and suchlike. Which is precisely why (I'm coming round to this) Constitutions ain't such a bad idea, really, when you think about it. When they're done properly, mind. The idea being that there is stuff which should be kept out of the reach of any politician who might be tempted to tinker with it, with or without the aid of a plebiscite: hopefully we may yet be able to agree on what those things might be, and if not, 'appen we may not actually have anything deserving the name of a country, and need to do some cell division. If we don't like the way people vote, maybe the best thing to do is ask them to vote as little as possible, and on matters as trivial as possible, while for the rest (given that no one likes dictatorships except, occasionally, dictators) constitutionally ensure people can do what the hell they want, singly and in concert, an it pisseth not upon thy neighbour's chips. There. I told you I was politically naïve.
Numbers again. I stand at the patio door and try to estimate the raindrops, visibilium omnium et invisibilium. The drops multiply out of my reach, disguising themselves as other drops, or as undifferentiated humidity. How many are the same drop, playing fast and loose with spatial coordinates? But all this rain, taken together, is also a thing. A thing made of things: sheets, surges and bursts, minutes, memories, reachings into the gut, sensual loosenings of sphincters and awakenings of valves, smells, tracheal moisture. It is a thing, and they are things, as long as I am there to sort them as such. But there's the rub. Rain doesn't seem to want you to stand there and look at it and make decisions about it. It wants to envelop you and contain you, crawl under your clothes, seep into you, become you.
It wants you to become it.
Like music, it wants to turn you into something that can't count.
My son is so eerily like me, he even has trouble with maths. From the little I've read, there are two schools of thought in teaching maths: one, adhered to by my own teachers back in Primary, holds that you should make numbers and operations comprehensible to children by talking about pizzas, pencils and basketball teams; the other holds that this is a perversion of the sacred concept of number, which is but imperfectly adumbrated in nature, and that you should give it to them straight: the number three is not an abstraction arrived at from successive contemplation of little groups of things, on the contrary, the little groups of things are pathetic and ultimately unsatisfactory attempts to incarnate the number in a material world to which it is intrinsically hostile, like trying to represent a spiritual Divinity as a crotchety old man sitting on a cloud. According to this second school of thought, not only are kids' brains pre-wired to grasp number as an independent mental category, but many children can only grasp it confidently as such, and talk of counting pencils and slicing pizzas will only confuse and discourage them. This seems to me to be very likely true.
True and also germane in groping for a handle on the reality we inhabit: we need to understand, ideally from earliest childhood, that when we count "things" we are imposing arbitrary and limiting categories on a world that does not contain them, and that was born without them. There are no numbers in nature because there are no boundaries. Maybe there are at the subatomic level, whole clouds of them, but I'm unqualified to go there so will stick to what I know. I know that nowhere in the entire known universe will you find three people. You may think there are three people, but you're wrong. And this is even if we discount the possible ectoplasmic skulking of the fabled Celestial Gooseberry. Wherever you see three people together, what you are seeing is not the number three but, first of all, a momentary juxtaposition of a sizeable number x of very large numbers y1, y2..., where y[n] represents the total population of each of x groups, tribes or communities of which the persons present are members, which only the crude limitations of our sensual apparatus prevent us from seeing, but without whose existence we would have difficulty even identifying them as persons. That for starters. Then there's the simple psychological fact that every time you put three people in close proximity with one another, you conjure up a fourth person, invisible to the members of the trio but visible enough to yourself, who is a kind of tentative, creeping amalgam of the three, but whose claim to independent personhood is usually so vaporous that he or she never gets beyond say, 0.02 of a person, just enough to throw the calculation out. Then there is the wide variety of imaginary people that each member of the trio glimpses in the others at different points: the stereotypes and strawmen, the approximations and reminiscences, the sinuous fantasies, making three a crowd or even two on a good day. And finally, there is the primitive singularity to which all personhood reduces when you have attained that particular plane of umbilicuspection for which prizes are routinely handed out on the last day of Zen Summer Camp.
All of which is to say that one has the greatest sympathy for those long-faced people who are currently going around harrumphing over Brump and Trexit, and muttering under their breath that counting votes on a particular bad day of a particularly bad year and turning them into long-term policy restrictions, irrespective of the number of brain cells incarnated in each vote, is a damn fool way to run a country. It is. Starting with the odd conceit that every vote, no matter whether cast on the basis of a close reading of half a century of historical and political documentation or on the basis of the troubled perception of Mr Farage as disturbingly Toad of Toad Hall-like from a certain angle, should be worth the same, a stipulation which must have many Martians scratching their antennae in bemusement. Bottom line, it's a fudge, and a bad one at that, but possibly the best we can do with the materials available, e.g. people's time and attention span and Dunning-Krugerish tendencies and suchlike. Which is precisely why (I'm coming round to this) Constitutions ain't such a bad idea, really, when you think about it. When they're done properly, mind. The idea being that there is stuff which should be kept out of the reach of any politician who might be tempted to tinker with it, with or without the aid of a plebiscite: hopefully we may yet be able to agree on what those things might be, and if not, 'appen we may not actually have anything deserving the name of a country, and need to do some cell division. If we don't like the way people vote, maybe the best thing to do is ask them to vote as little as possible, and on matters as trivial as possible, while for the rest (given that no one likes dictatorships except, occasionally, dictators) constitutionally ensure people can do what the hell they want, singly and in concert, an it pisseth not upon thy neighbour's chips. There. I told you I was politically naïve.
Numbers again. I stand at the patio door and try to estimate the raindrops, visibilium omnium et invisibilium. The drops multiply out of my reach, disguising themselves as other drops, or as undifferentiated humidity. How many are the same drop, playing fast and loose with spatial coordinates? But all this rain, taken together, is also a thing. A thing made of things: sheets, surges and bursts, minutes, memories, reachings into the gut, sensual loosenings of sphincters and awakenings of valves, smells, tracheal moisture. It is a thing, and they are things, as long as I am there to sort them as such. But there's the rub. Rain doesn't seem to want you to stand there and look at it and make decisions about it. It wants to envelop you and contain you, crawl under your clothes, seep into you, become you.
It wants you to become it.
Like music, it wants to turn you into something that can't count.
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