There is a young man in the UK whose autism affords him a special relationship with number. He holds the world record for mentally calculating the value of pi to the longest string of decimals. It runs to thousands.
In a short interview for a free London newspaper, he described the process whereby he’s able to do his astonishing feats of arithmetic. He says that every number has a personality. A specific number will have an aroma, perhaps a voice or colour, a style of self-presentation. In fact, a number is a sort of person to him. This is his world - our world seems strange to him. Much as the world of the autistic is alien to the non-autistic.
When I have a party, I have a very good idea how the people I invite may interact. There may be new love affairs begun, there may be fist fights, there may be unplanned and unexpected reunions. So it is with him and numbers. If you ask him to add two enormous numbers together, he merely introduces them to each other.
The answer isn’t a calculation, it’s an inevitability. It isn’t an intellectual process, it’s a simple fact. Since those two numbers are what and as they are, there is only one possible thing they can be when they’re brought together. Like two people conversing. Why would that require anything more than observation?
My God!
I myself will walk around a whole city block to avoid a meeting with the most innocent of numbers. They are all cold threatening characters to me, the agents of tax office and credit card company employees, of usurers and insurers, of all the bullies who have smelled my numerophobia from afar. These sociopaths deposit numbers through my letterbox the way youthful yobs deposit excrement through the letterboxes of unpopular neighbours or human beings of a skin tone that doth not please them.
I get numbers.
The numerophobe is a beleaguered man or woman. We inhabit a world more and more ruled by numbers. Quantity is the new black. Education, health care, social and political influence and esteem are all issues of statistical quantity. True, there is a strong groundswell of discomfort among us, the flesh and blood donors in this numerical Matrix, but the march toward an entirely objective quantitative human world is inexorable.
This may seem paranoid to you. A little Da Vinci Coda to the demise of the West...
I don’t think so.
Put your self in my shoes. I’ve acquired a number of modest but useful skills in my life. I’ve been an actor and director, a musician, a postman and a teacher of the Alexander Technique. To me all these things are vital and indispensable activities, not just for me but for those I love and for society at large. And yet, having in good conscience followed my nose and discovered these glorious achievements of humanity, and achieved some level of useful skill in them, I find it very difficult at times to barter them for sufficient food and rent and beer.
My accountant, of whom I am very fond, comes to me for Alexander lessons. His bad back appears to be much improved as a result, and he seems to have a great appreciation for the work I do in that capacity.
Conspicuously, no one thinks to send him impersonal letters once a year demanding that he prepare an Alexander pupil for examination by a team of anonymous bureaucrats, in order to decide whether he will have to get a cheaper flat or stop driving his car. The tax office bureaucrats themselves do not have to learn a long part by Shakespeare and present it publicly (who will pity them their excruciating self-consciousness or uncontrollable stammer or perhaps their inability to even comprehend the words of the great man? Not I!). No, of course they’re not required to do this! Why should they?
Because every year I am confined by legal obligation to a small room with piles of papers covered in numbers and compelled to interpret accountants’ jargon and translate it into an accurate quantitative numerical representation and justification of my life of the previous year. I don’t really understand what I’m doing or what is required of me. I also make so little money that the idea of being punished for misrepresenting it makes me apoplectic.
So, I would like to suggest that all the accountants and tax officers and bank managers and credit card company CEO’s and book keepers be sent to rehearse a play or perform on a musical instrument and be judged by the critics of The Times of London as to their competency. And those that fail should receive...
What? A fine? A jail sentence? Notice of Bankruptcy?
These are the cudgels of the Officials of Quantity. I wouldn’t stoop so low.
No, I think it would be most just and most effective as rehabilitation simply to leave it at that. Every year, in their own personal time, to have to do what I know about, just to be permitted to keep doing what they know about.
Because that’s what I have to do.
There. That’s off my chest. But it wasn’t what I started to tell you.
I’m not proud of my fear of numbers. But I am like most people afraid of the unknown. And when I read of the young autistic man’s relationship with numbers, I realise that unlike him I have absolutely no sense of them. They have no character, aroma, colour, humour, style, nothing. No reality in fact.
Then I wrote a weblog entry the other day about the Trinity. And I realised I was wrong about myself. When I examine numbers in that way, I find that they do have uniqueness, physical characteristics, specific relationships in the world that I inhabit and understand. But that small perceptual gift has never been connected to the realities of life for me. Nor for the vast majority of accountants and tax officers, I suspect.
Do you think they treat ‘3’s with special respect as the divine Godhead? Do they explore the Kabbalistic numerological significance of the ratio of my professional expenses to my self-employed income, or indeed the cosmic significance of the sum I owe at the end of the tax year?
I don’t think so.
But is that scenario weirder than a young man introducing vast numbers together and getting immediate vast ready-made answers from their social interaction? He likes them. They’re his friends. He isn’t a great mathematician, of course. Why would he be? Numbers aren’t a problem for him. Only people with a problem pursue it to the level of expertise. And that’s no bad thing, of course...
What’s disturbing to me about all of this is the following asymmetry:
Modern culture, largely through the device of the technology we call science, has begun to quantify that vast tract of the human psyche that is unquantifiable. The bottom line is.... the bottom line. Those nasty numbers are finally showing us the sordid truth behind our pathetic subjective psychological/spiritual fantasies. And we’re buying into this bullshit, hook line and sinker.
Not long ago, those whose life and work was number saw deep and human truths in the numbers they pondered. Numbers had relationships with other things, numbers had analogues in other disciplines and spoke about the human condition. Arabian philosopher-mathematicians invented or discovered (who knows which?) zero! Newton’s Principia Mathematica as first published didn’t even contain any algebra! It was words and geometry. (Apologies if this is not as significant to you as it appears to me).
So the numbers that are betraying us are not even the real thing! Real numbers come to visit Isaac Newton and a young autistic man in London - to converse, to multiply, to convey their essence to those who have ears to hear. Lucky numbers, holy numbers, impossible numbers, incalculable numbers, they don’t reduce Life to literal or metaphorical dust.
How my education has betrayed me! All of those friendships, love affairs, offspring, marriages, all denied me by the ignorant degradation of numbers to mere abstract quantities without qualities.
Sunday, 4 October 2009
