Counting the cost

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Life is full of strange numbers.  But mostly we ignore the subtle groupings and structures that shape the way we think our world.  How many of us are aware of the effort of putting 60 individual seconds into each minute, or of the seven-dayness of the week?  Has no one noticed that four always seems to divide into 12 but never 13?  As our daily acquiescence in the world's fictive homogeneity shows, by learning to count so glibly we have lost the rich granularity of existence.  We are numb to numbers.

Anthropology lets us retrace the gradual erosion in awareness which took place as civilisation evolved.  The simplest societies count one, two, many.  Earliest humans probably found only one.  Each object in their world was unique: it did not surrender its specialness by being rudely classed as like another.  The pebbles on a seashore were not numberless; instead, they were individual components of an immense experience we have now forgone.  Instead, we see only a beach.

As society progressed, the successful warriors and rising merchant classes demanded bigger numbers to cope with more cattle, more bags of wheat.  Already the sense of what five or fifty entailed was bleeding out of the words: fifty became a rich man's flock.  By the time a hundred thousand Persians marched against Greece, the concept of a soldier, a man, one, had been hopelessly damaged.

The loss of the purity of numbers went hand in hand with the rise of money.  Objects were converted to values which soon had only a weak and arbitrary sense of quantity:  one shilling was twelve pence, but how many is a penny?  With money came the need to manipulate figures by themselves; hitherto they had been regarded as incommensurable entities rooted in real things.  Mathematics was born the day six sheep first equalled six goats.

The Roman number system proved hopelessly inadequate: you cannot multiply DCIII by XLIV.  The logic of the Arabic system which supplanted it led to  revolutionary concepts like zero and negative numbers.  With the arrival of a notation for less than an absence of cattle, the last links between numbers and their origins in the external world had been cut.

Commerce was quick to seize the opportunities opened up by this untethered arithmetic.  Freed from any grounding in physical objects, numbers became amoral.  The abstract intricacies of double-entry book-keeping allowed ingenious frauds - literally unthinkable for the Sumerian clerks drawing up their inventories in cuneiform.  Present-day trading in currency futures is only the latest manifestation of counting's promiscuity and perversion.

In the computer, the neutral number attains its acme.  The whole world - its sights and sounds, our thoughts and emotions - can be reduced to a seamless string of 0s and 1s.  Paradoxically, there is now no sense of number in anything, even though everything is a number.  And ironically, the hidden figure that lies at the heart of all experience is 1, just as it was at the very beginning.  But on the way back we have lost entirely the richness of that original, particular vision.

(1987)

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The weekly essay

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When I was a schoolboy, I used to dread Monday afternoons.  It was the day we wrote our English essay.  The classes you hate are often those taken by some mentally defective bully whose only pathetic pleasure is to terrorise hapless children.  In this case it must have been from some deep antipathy to the form, or else a sense of personal inadequacy with words; it certainly had nothing to do with Mr Thurlow.

Normally grown-ups tower over you at school; Sammy Thurlow appeared small even to us in our short trousers.  He looked like a tiny Amazonian Indian dressed in a characterless grey demob suit.  And there would be no need to shrink his head: it was already brown and shrivelled, as if chain-smoking had cured him from the inside out.

On the Friday before the essay, Mr Thurlow would turn to us, his rheumy  eyes avoiding our gazes as ever, and between near-fatal coughing fits give us our theme for the following Monday.  We wondered where he got them from: 'it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive'; 'ambition'; 'the pen is mightier than the sword.'  They could have been framed in Sammy's native Amazonian dialect for all the relevance they had to this twelve-year old.

I did not understand essays then.  Drawn more naturally to mathematics, I could only approach essays as problems in search of a solution.  But answers were hard to come by: was the pen mightier than the sword, or not?  The best I could hope for were a series of alternatives, each paragraph nullifying the next with its "on the one hand" or "on the other."  I was deeply envious of fellow schoolmates who were able to take the title as the starting point for some huge fantasia, a pell-mell rush of ideas and images which never seemed to bother themselves with a final destination.  I was also convinced that in some sense they were cheating.

I could have lived with the rigours of my dialectical approach had it been easy to apply.  But it was not.  Every Monday I was faced with the same blank piece of paper, as if all my previous essays had been in vain.  I was oppressed by the sense of distance to be covered, as if the sheet of paper were all uphill.  The essay's form seemed to be a Procrustean bed which stretched my limited ideas and poor creativity to breaking point.

I realise now that it was meant to.  An essay that was easy to write would have been a waste of time.  As I vaguely but correctly sensed, writing is a journey, and often through harsh terrain.  Its destination is not an answer, but a coming together and accommodation of your current ideas.  Which was why I found essay-writing so hard: I had no ideas.

Nor did writing really help me to discover any.  Ideas come only from experience, be it your own or other people's.  As the first ideas begin to germinate within you, the essay becomes not so much simpler as richer.  The act of writing is a crystallisation of ideas; like a crystal, it is formed by creating links, and by establishing a larger order.  That order, however, is only one of many.  As its name suggests, an essay is an attempt, an instance of ambition and of travelling hopefully.

(1987)

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