Counting

Numerology, mathematics, and our general attraction to digits speaks volumes about our species. Why are we fascinated by numbers? For many reasons, no doubt, not the least of which is their semiotic value. Numbers are symbolic. One represents the solitary, and to some three a divinity, while a dotetracontagon might signify the emotional nuance percolating within a person. More simply, numbers are also a way for us to pin down meaning. I was born on this date and not another. There are this many days in a week, and this many hours in a day, and right now it is this time and not that, and so on and so forth, with a slew of related meanings attached to each numerical marker, and often differently for each of us. But numbers are also regarded by many, at least in the modern period, as the language of the universe, as famously stated by Galileo Galilei, a way of describing and deciphering the riddles of the cosmos, although even here we never settle on any kind of absolute certainty, as mathematics like so many human endeavors is also an invention. Friedrich Nietzsche incisively observed “the invention of the laws of number has at its basis the primordial and prior-prevailing delusion that many like things exist (although in point of fact there is no such thing as a duplicate), or that, at least, there are things (but there is no ‘thing’).” Plurality is an assumption. Yet our addiction to the numeric, its scientific, symbolic, and meaning-making capacities, persists. We seem to be drawn to the definitive, or at least the mirage of meanings we associate with the numerical. And what is a number, at base, other than a figure? For the human eye, everything is figured, and experience raw in no experience at all. What is, is figured, for us, in some fashion or form, and for all we know there is nothing beyond the figured, or at least nothing we can fathom. No matter how strong our desire might be to know what “really” is, we are at most given glimpses of misshapen figures as we attempt to figure out life with our incessant use of figures. Yet some matters must remain eternally insoluble, due to the limits of reason itself, and the beautifully messy, inherent complexity of life. We need not, and indeed cannot, “figure it out.” Nor is this necessarily the ideal aim of a life. Better yet, beyond figuring, is a life lived to the point of tears, as Albert Camus would privately encourage himself to do, living indelibly etched with feeling and knowing and savoring that cannot be calculated.