Apparently "Rickety Rocket" is a 70s/80s cartoon series about four teenagers and their rickety rocket. Does anybody remember it? I don't. Because at that time I was pooing my pants, a day was a month, a month was a lifetime and the universe was the wide open park adjacent to the place where I grew up...

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Places Named After Numbers

There is a song by Frank Black that I like, even though the lyrics don't really make that much sense. Maybe it was just the phrase "places named after numbers, different kind of love", which caught my attention. It puzzled me, but somehow sounded true...
Far from being a maths genius, I did have a fascination with numbers as a child. I had an imaginary football club where each player was represented by a marble, with his own stats for stamina, skill and fitness. And yet later, I would employ that system to rate the girls in my class by character, looks and overall score. It was an attempt to hold on to a childhood dreamworld in the face of hard hitting puberty. As a child counting was my drive for many things - walking in the mountains ("let's reach 3000 meters altitude!!"), running the 50 meters as fast as possible, imagining the size of population of my imaginary planet (yes! I did have an imaginary planet! Ha!) and, of course - the stairs: When I was six or so, I had an obsession with counting steps on stairs during walks with my father. I remember reaching the number 10,000 after a week of counting and it made me increadibly proud. I loved counting. And felt like the count, until there was some maths wizz-kid in our primary school class who really was the count for all of us - he would always win at maths games against the whole rest of the class and later even participate in the German school maths olympics. But also him was just a puny shadow compared this man:
Yesterday, I came across a documentary about Daniel Tammet, a prodigious savant who was diagnosed with epilepsy as a child and Asperger's syndrome later. Recently, he learned German within a week - as he did with Icelandic a few years ago. He can remember the number
Pi up to the 25,000th digit and he can do the most difficult and intricate calculations in his head.
The special thing about him, however, is that he is able to communicate much of his inner life to the outside world, unlike other prodigious Asperger's. I'm deeply impressed by how he describes his inner life, his days are literally numbered. Calculations become imaginary landscapes and when he talks about it, it is quite poetic.
I have my own memory of what it is or was like to have a private imaginary world. But while my fascination with numbers, like that of many kids, was actually counting, Daniel Tammet seems to be doing something else - he reads them and wields the results like a poet would do with a phrase. In his world, language, numbers and emotion are intertwined. Numbers are actually living things, beautiful, intriguing or scary. For him numbers are an integral, necessary part of everything. Like in that Frank Black song -

Beyond below above
A gravity that slumbers
At the center of
Places named after numbers
A different kind of love

Thank you for the picture, Heidi Rettig.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

aaah i wanted to blog something about daniel tammet so thanks :o)

impressive that you counted the steps for a week. did you write them down?

i tended to make patterns with things, wasn't so fond of numbers. :o) e.g. colour of cars, pavement shape...

Anonymous said...

I enjoyed reading the post and thank you for using the photo! The Number 9 for shrine is still for sale - marked down to $19.99. No really! :)

Dani said...

Just anted to point out that we are nearing June!

AllofGodsMoney said...

"Places Named After Numbers" is a Frank Black (formerly from the band, Pixies) song off of his first solo album, circa 1992, which is a love song to black holes (which are often named as simply coordinate numbers, I believe). In that context, with the love-interest woman as a black hole, the song makes perfect sense: "light beams disappear into her darkened hair. I wonder if they reappear?"