The Ring 💍 Paris

Equations

Was Ken really supposed to believe that Martine knew the moment of her mother’s death? He could understand intuition, but telepathy? How could that be part of the equation? And what equation was that? Walking back to his office at the Collège de France, Ken reassessed his notion that there was one X, one unknown: Martine’s feeling for him. In whatever equation this was, there was X, Y, and Z, and who knew what else.

Martine had told Ken wildly different versions of the story. She had clearly left things out, like the fact that she was drinking with Antoine for three hours when it all happened. Was she also putting things in? While the scenarios shifted this way and that, one thing didn’t change: Martine was convinced that she knew the exact moment of her mother’s death. So, there was a constant in the equation, and yet Ken took issue with that as well.

It doesn’t make sense, he told himself, yet there it was: a woman sitting in the 5th Arrondissement knew that her mother was dead in an apartment in the 18th:

Ken searched his mind to make sense of it all. Could Martine’s brain have somehow made a connection with her mother’s brain over that distance? Could some waves or particles, or some combination of waves and particles, have communicated across the Seine and over dozens of busy streets from one body to the next? Did it travel through some fifth essence, some as-of-yet undiscovered form of sub-molecular space? He remembered the earnest look on Martine’s face, and the music that was playing in the cafe. This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. Was it all just a bunch of gobbledegook, a bunch of hopes strung together on a golden string? Was it just a fantasy concocted to connect lost souls to a cosmic home? Golden living dreams of visions / Mystic crystal revelation / And the mind's true liberation / Aquarius, Aquarius, Aquarius!

Could there really be spiritual waves — sparkling little things that we don’t know about but that connect everything to everything else? Were these the things that Leibniz called monads back in the 18th Century? And were they the god-strings physicists today make grand unified theories about? Or was this just another way of giving fantastic names — this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestic roof fretted with golden fire — to the quintessence of dust? 

Ken imagined a modern-day alchemist, Stephanus of Trocadero, in a small room with a desk and four white plaster walls. On each wall Stephanus wrote a triple-layered formula, inscribed eloquently in India ink. It looked something like this:

The jet-black layers of formulae ran from one end of the wall to the next, and from one wall to the next. Stephanus layered these functions of algebraic probability so that they could be read continuously.

Like a dervish, he twirled on one leg, as if it were the fixed foot of a compass. He was mesmerized by the beauty of the spell he was under. He looked from the door on one side of the room, to the window on the other, and recited a verse from John Donne: “If they be two, they are two so / As stiff twin compasses are two; / Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show / To move, but doth, if the other do.”

The equation surrounded him completely. He giggled to himself when he realized that he’d circled the square room, thus accomplishing what geometers long claimed to be impossible. This squared circle was broken only by the door when it was open.

The thought of the door disturbed him greatly, even when it was shut. It broke the continuity, even in theory, even after he locked the door with bolts and chains. The potential portal wasn’t so much a theoretical gap, an apocalyptic full stop, or a redemptive beginning as it was the mouth of an Ouroboros, swallowing all the formulae that came before it.

Stephanus stared at the ultralight beams that emanated from the Mac Air on his desk. He softly invoked the lost deity hidden inside the elusive fabric of light. Caught between Science and Mysticism, he unknowingly initiated himself into the Holy and Consubstantial Triad. When the moon is in the Seventh House / And Jupiter aligns with Mars…

Prostrate before his Mac Air, Stephanus hoped against all reason that the ancient gnosis would come floating to him somehow, now that the savages had sacked Rome and the City of God was nowhere to be seen. He hoped that a magic quintessence of dust would reveal itself in the ether.

But nothing happened. Stephanus just sat there, mesmerized by the Ideal circles of his imagination that hovered for a moment just before the sun fell beneath the city. The cave of his study was plunged into darkness. 

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Or perhaps Martine’s intuition had something to do with DNA. Was it possible that strands could communicate with each other? If so, then wouldn’t they most likely communicate with strands that were most like them? From mother to daughter, they emitted the same signal: I am the Monarch of Drama Queens. 

Perhaps the uncanny link between mother and daughter had something to do with the sub-structures of the brain. If so much can happen with ten million yes and no switches in an iPhone processor named Cortex-A8, what might happen with a hundred trillion synapses? Who knows what nonotechnological things were possible in the minute depths and intricate loops of neurons in the brain? Perhaps subatomic structures or forces acted on us even though we had no way of measuring them. Perhaps even smaller structures, forms of force or gravity that we can’t even imagine, were acting on these unseen forces. What frequencies might our brain waves be capable of transmitting or receiving? 

But did he really believe this? Even if all of this was possible, was it probable? And wasn’t probability infinitely more important than possibility?

And what did monads or god-strings have to do with science? Leibniz had the luxury of dreaming up monads because 300 years ago there were no electron microscopes or spectrographs. Did Ken really believe that his neurons were being manipulated by some unseen subatomic force, or that his brain worked like a wireless transceiver?

And yet there it was: a light blue kyanite ring that spat in the face of Science.

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Back in his study, Stephanus looked again at the locked door. Above the lintel he saw a figure emerge from the white plaster above it, which was now in darkness save for the ultralight beams from his Mac Air.

It was an angel, playing a Medieval instrument of rare device. Perhaps it was some sort of hand organ or zither, psalterium or dulcimer.

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Next: 💚 Di Parma

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