20160204.0644

There is a strange coincidence of numbers today. One way of writing the date is 2/4/16, and 2⁴ is 16. It is a small thing, hardly to be noted, but I find myself attracted to such details, and I have to wonder if there might be some way to use them as ways to structure larger narratives.

It has been before, to be certain; a couple of pieces on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (here and here, among the many others treating the topic) come to mind as examples for me. They would, though, with me being a medievalist looking largely at Arthurian works.

I have been giving thought to such things recently. In my personal journals--with which I am finally doing a decent job of keeping up lately--I have noticed several cyclical patterns. Because I use my journals as writing exercises as much as as places to record events and my reflections thereupon, I have a regular entry length. As I proceed through entries, paragraphs begin at recurring places on the page. A new paragraph begins on the new page on what seems a +19/+19/+1 pattern--the +1 coming from the spacing between entries. The coincidence of days proceeds similarly: +6/+6/+1. Simplifying the patterns given +19/+20 and +6/+7, which seem to be useful as regular patterns for celestial motions of one sort or another, perhaps of moons on some fantasy world. (The thought occurs that I could count the numbers of paragraphs between coincidences, offering yet another cycle to follow. And I am put in mind of an older NPR piece, here. Such is how I work. It is a wonder I can get anything done at all.)

Whether or not I will put such devices to use in any meaningful way, I am unsure. Like many academics, I entertain the fantasy of myself as a writer--and I do not mean the kind of writer that academics must be, publishing accounts of their work in venues few will read, and I do not mean the kind of writer that I already am, reading novels and drafting distillations of them into a few thousand words so that others can understand events without reading the books and I can get a few extra dollars that I certainly do not mind. I mean the kind of writer whose works are read and may be studied but are more commonly enjoyed. It is, for the most part, a fantasy at present, and while I long to make it a reality in the future, I do not see a way through for me to do it--partly because I tend to get lost in small details such as the numbers today.