Awash

Over the past several years I’ve made a routine of playing an online chess program five games a day. If I am uncharacteristically careful, focused and patient, I can usually force a situational draw in one out of the five games. In the thousands of matches played against my virtual master, I’ve only won once—I couldn’t tell you how. Otherwise I am systematically crushed and made to look like the rankest of amateurs. The program puts together inconceivably cunning combinations that are six, seven, eight moves deep. I notate and replay them, blinking and shaking my head in awe at their subtlety and power. I am never resentful of being so handily and repeatedly disposed of: losing badly to a superior adversary is infinitely more instructive than winning well against a lesser player. My own unswervingly mediocre abilities are improved by slightest degrees through every drubbing I take. Most importantly, I have learned to articulate various board compositions in my mind in mid-play. In a losing match yesterday, I found myself writing the following: ‘If he pushes that pawn, it will simultaneously threaten my knight and free his bishop for a spear on my queen and king. How did that happen? How was that set up? Shit, you’ve lost again.’

I’ve made much in previous posts of the sinister nature of mathematics, but I’m sure you’ve sensed it’s a mainly a ruse. People become jittery if there is not a villain populating the foreground of what they read and experience, and I am always pleased to provide one—however irresponsibly. Reviling mathematics is only something I do out of the ordered necessities of literary technique. If anything, I am, after having had no interest whatsoever in the subject throughout my misspent scholastic career, ready to learn the language of mathematics in all of its intricately symmetrical glory. And yet, before I commit the particulars of mathematics or physics or chemistry to memory, I should like to know how I—a species of monkey—would be capable of abstract thought in the first place.

My research into the origins of mathematical ability is unsettling—but I remain brave, curious, unflinching. The Egyptians, who were among the first peoples with a culture of written language and knowledge of mathematical applications, believed that all forms of numerical and linguistic thought were bestowed upon man by Thoth, an ibis-headed deity and a flamboyant trickster. To my mind, Thoth is as plausible a patron of human thought as any other. I have studied many of the world’s cosmogonies in detail and none of them offer even remotely satisfactory answers to the question of human origins, nature and ability. There is as much room for Thoth in a universe made from a superheated clot of atoms as there is in one made by God’s mysterious hand.

If I’ve been suspicious of numbers, it’s because mathematics has allowed western man to subjugate the world—our technological superiority has long given us a providential mandate to civilize the black, brown, yellow and other lesser people on the planet. The white scientific race has long justified its colonial enterprises on the basis of a moral responsibility to bring roads, medicine and bibles to the heathen hordes. At the same time, mathematics is a musical form of understanding and insight that allows is to adapt to impossibly peculiar circumstances. Mathematics is the humble and steadfast servant that makes hot water pour from our shower spouts in the morning. It amplifies our music - whether inspiring or insipid. The only illusion, it seems, is that mathematics carries a universal certainty in its equations and formulas. It was for good reason that Aristotle called 1 + 1 = 2 an artistic proof. He was among the first people to recognize that the symbols of language only hold meaning out of convention. Just as a bird could be a dog if everyone agreed to rename the objects thusly, the numeral 2 could be called 3 by general agreement. And perhaps 1+1 only equals 2 because Thoth wills it. He is capricious in the face of eternity and may revoke his own rules in a million years or so. Maybe 1+1 will eventually be 3 by the force of his unpredictable will.

What does it mean that we are a mathematical primate if the capacity to add, subtract, divide and multiply is a treacherous gift from Thoth? Thoth was known for his tricks and mischief, and the mischievous urges of a god can be very cruel to the mortals upon which they fall. I’ve noticed that the visual engineering and special effects often surpass the acting, plot and dialogue in most movies nowadays. The conversations people have on cell phones are far less sophisticated in design than the devices themselves. Semi-literate suburban housewives drive Humvees to the grocery store to buy jellied squid eyeballs for their dreary cocktail parties. Thoth must roar with laughter to see such inconsistencies. He must also be delighted to see how the genius fruits of a Swiss patent clerk’s mind can all come to be at the practical disposal of moronic thug. George W. Bush can’t possibly know that 6/10 of a gram of mass—in the form of unstable uranium of plutonium—can be converted into a catastrophic burst of energy, but he can order the launch of a nuclear missile onto the heads of the evildoers at his discretion.

We fuel our machines with extracts from fossilized fern forests and dinosaur bones—an impossibility when viewed in context. So it is not inconceivable that Thoth, out of his vast and tumbling cosmic humor, enabled us to make lawnmowers and stealth bombers and dayglo Jesus clocks and paperclips with our bizarre hands. Every sliver of knowledge he lodges in our brains is only intended to increase our abilities to entertain the heavenly pantheons—the many gods who sit and watch us conducting our strange operas. Perhaps Thoth dropped a chessboard and its cleverly imitative pieces onto the earth as a joke many thousands of years ago. Perhaps he later endowed an Arabic mind with the first algorithm that would eventually allow silicone chips to play the game. Should I learn some chess algorithms and practice at it more often and more seriously? Or should I build a giant cathedral to Thoth, sacrifice several gilded oxen upon its altar every fortnight and beg Thoth for the code to finally defeating this fucking computer program?