by John Allen Paulos

Numerology can easily result from free association and, given its assertions, it certainly seems like it has been. In any case, I thought I’d try my hand at it.

In particular, the date 9-11 and the destruction of the WTC twin towers have together given rise to all sorts of numerological claims. Here are a few more.

The twin towers were destroyed, so to the numerologist this might suggest the number 11, since 11 has twin digits and looks like the twin towers. The Pentagon was also damaged, suggesting the number 111.

Combining the omens implicit in the date of the attack and the three buildings involved yields 9111, which can be viewed as suggesting the product 91 x 11.

But the number 91 x 11 itself has a twinning property. What do I mean? Well, take any 3 digit number and multiply it by 91 x 11 and note that 643 x 91 x 11 = 643,643 and 819 x 91 x 11 = 819,819, and 547 x 91 x 11 = 547,547, and so on.

Moreover, 91 = 7 x 13, and 13 is widely considered to be a most unlucky number, easily outweighing the good luck that 7 often indicates.

Conclusion: 9111, the exact date of the destruction of the twin towers and the damaging of the Pentagon were numerologically foretold. After all, what is the probability that a 4-digit number would become so relevant to these tragic circumstances? It would seem the chances are a minuscule 1 in 10,000. Read more »

I learn to reap without violence
listen without taking; I yield —Lauren Turner, Poet

Learning How to Write a Poem

A time ago I thought, and
something said, Get out of the way, Jim
you’re occluding the sun
you make a mess of things
with your insistence
how do you expect a poem to come?
how do you expect a song to come?
how do you expect anything good to come?
how do you expect anything to breach
the dikes of yourself, to spin the hinges
of your gates, to split the mortar joints
you’ve pointed up so assiduously
laying brick upon brick year upon year?
Are you waiting for something else to come and
shatter or clean the panes of your casements
crusted with dust?

You stand there, a dumb dolomite, still
in a stream of love & pain which merely
splits itself, surging round, moving on
as if to say, you fool, come along,
this is the only stream there is with all its
joys and bereavements,

the only one there is—

come, learn, wait,
then speak

©Jim Culleny, 11/17/22

by Charlie Huenemann

Vasco da Gama was the first person we can name who successfully commandeered a voyage around Africa’s southernmost point, the Cape of Good Hope. It is a treacherous passage, where warm currents from the southern part of the Indian Ocean clash against the icy currents of the south Atlantic, leading to dangerous waves that have swallowed many ships. (Indeed, at the time it was known as “the Cape of Storms”.) Da Gama gave the cape wide berth, sailing far the sight of land, before turning northward and poking his way along the eastern coast of Africa, where many hijinks ensued.

This was in 1497, and Europeans were keen to find some route to Indian spices that didn’t involve crossing lands controlled by some sultan or other. Da Gama showed everyone the way, and the Dutch and the English rushed through and established colonies along the coasts of the Indian Ocean. Da Gama’s fellow Portuguese established colonies as well, of course, but not with equal success. Part of the reason was that Portuguese sailors as a whole were not very interested in following da Gama’s Cape Route because they knew damned well there was a monster down there that ate ships like snacks.

Sailors spend their lives and meet their deaths in the middle of huge and violent systems they don’t understand and can’t control (well now, who doesn’t?) and so they make up stories to pretend to make sense of them. Unsurprisingly, many of these stories feature ill-tempered monsters with gaping mouths. The nautical disasters clustered around the Cape of Good Hope was pretty clear evidence of some beastly demon, and in 1572 the great Portuguese epic poet Luís de Camões gave the dreadful beast a name: Adamastor. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Mary Hrovat

In 1995, I made two Christmas mixtapes that I labeled A Very Mary Christmas. I had recently gone through a period of wondering whether it made sense to go on celebrating Christmas, given that I’d stopped believing in the Christian story years earlier. In particular, I’d thought about whether I wanted to go on listening to Christmas music—especially the old traditional carols I love, many of which have explicitly religious lyrics. In the end, I decided that there were other good reasons to celebrate the time around the winter solstice. I made the mixtapes in a spirit of enjoying winter and celebrating both the darkness and the light to be found in family and friends. I kept some of the traditional carols (some only in instrumental versions) and religious music—Handel’s Messiah, for example. In addition, I included music that’s not traditionally considered Christmas music or even winter music; hence the now mildly embarrassing substitution of Mary for Merry.

I put together four 45-minute playlists that covered two 90-minutes cassettes. The first playlist was essentially my very own greatest hits for December. I opened with Jethro Tull’s “Ring Out, Solstice Bells” and followed that up with Canzona per sonare No. 2 by Giovanni Gabrieli, which has always seemed particularly jubilant to me. This playlist included my favorite songs from two albums I remembered from my childhood: one of the Robert Shaw Chorale singing traditional carols a cappella, and a 1963 album called The Spirit of Christmas with the Living Strings. I’m not sure I’d like that one if I heard it for the first time now, but musical taste doesn’t have much to do with it. That album calls up my childhood Christmases as no other music does—a mixed blessing, but it’s too deeply embedded in my memories to ignore. Read more »

by Mindy Clegg

Why should history be a part of our core curriculum in high schools and colleges? A variety of arguments have been put forth to support a historical education. Most notably is how history can inculcate a better understanding of the world. It can help us become more empathetic people, and better citizens, too. The kind of history we teach is also up for debate. A post-colonialist urges people to focus on more inclusive narratives that highlights the subaltern. A feminist lobbies for more women’s voices, while an anti-racist argues for the importance of racism in understanding the modern world. All this matters, but I’d also argue that understanding history as made by people, and as such complicated and contingent, can helps us to shape our future more effectively.

None of us can predict that future. However, a deep familiarity of history can give us a general idea of how change over time happens and how we can make better choices than those made in the past. But given that more and more, our educational system has become captured by corporations seeking to build a better employee and by individuals looking to indoctrinate rather than educate (see the anti-trans and anti-CRT bent of the MAGA movement), this is becoming increasingly difficult. Even some well-meaning progressives tend to focus on objectifying history and making it seem like something that happened, or at best, a celebration of “great men” rather than events that everyday people made happen. Our love of heroic stories of individuals and our distaste of subjectivity and complexity has blinded us to just how critical it is that we understand how we got here. But by ensuring that our students have a better understanding of how people make the arc of history bend, we can learn to chart a better, more humane path into that unknown future. Read more »

Shadow self-portrait at the train station in Bruneck, South Tyrol.

by David Greer

My property on Pender Island is just a postage stamp of a lot by rural standards, but the immensity of the surrounding stillness of the Pacific rainforest feels more precious to me than the numbers representing its square footage. With no other human dwellings within sight or hearing, the stillness is the silence of a cathedral in these weeks before Christmas, with the murmurs of devoted parishioners replaced by the soft chatter of Pacific wrens among the sword ferns, the nasal queries of a red-breasted nuthatch marching down a fir trunk, the gravelly chuckle of a raven passing overhead, and the slow creaking of an antique carriage clock being rewound deep in a cedar—the winder being a Pacific chorus frog perilously close to dormancy on a day threatening a hard frost. Much less audible, high in the canopy, are the whisperings of the tiny insect-hunters and seed-eaters that depend on the treetops for food: chestnut-backed chickadees, golden-crowned kinglets, pine siskins.

In this part of the world, on this island in the Salish Sea, the trees grow very large indeed. The aptly named grand firs may reach 250 feet and Douglas-firs are frequently taller, over 300 feet in some cases. In height though not in majesty they overshadow the western red cedars and bigleaf maples that dominate the glade in which my cabin stands, a quarter mile from the Canadian edge of Haro Strait and within hearing of the largest of the massive container ships struggling against the incoming tide.

Every tree has its own character. Outside the cabin stands a massive bigleaf maple (Acer macrophyllum) that has been through the wars but has risen again to defy the next winter storm. From time to time she drops branches as big as smaller trees (I have watched them fall) yet still carries on like some old limbless veteran, surviving by sheer will despite gaping holes in her trunk that delight children with supple imaginations. Read more »

by Mike Bendzela

Sleepless one Christmas Eve . . . monkey brain, coffee at 3 a.m. . . . then back to bed to stare at purple and green fireworks on the insides of my eyelids.

Meanwhile, my husband, the retired carpenter, saws wood loudly beside me. He is recovering from both cancer and stroke.

A chorus of human voices fills the room, no comprehension—it’s Latin—the words so swaddled in harmonic echoes they lift and disperse in the bedroom like smoke from a censer. The choir floats me to the edge of transcendence, sets me down like a feather. What is this?

From the radio turned down low, the announcer says: “This is what the season is all about—‘O Magnum Mysterium.’” No surprise here, the day before Christmas.

I think: This is what I should have heard at the Smithsonian a couple of years ago, at the Museum of Natural History, in the big, quiet room darkened but for spot-lit, black stone slabs, the Burgess Shale fossils, found a century ago in British Columbia by Charles D. Walcott, with his horses and pickaxes. These stones reveal life from half a billion years before present, give or take a few million.

This is my pilgrimage. But it’s sad to find myself alone in this exhibit, with this magnificent find. One must study the black slabs up close and judiciously, like the brush strokes of Old Masters, to appreciate the wonders there. Read more »