A Thought ~ 19: Numbers

On an earlier occasion, I suggested a Wildebeest's Theorem. At the heart of The Book of Numbers, I think, is, allegorically, the notion that numbers count; and that numbers are a thing.

Numbers are the promise of the future -- of surviving long enough for the species to be in it, still. It's not simply that there's safety in numbers; but also, crucially, that number (number) has the power to push back danger -- and even to crush it. That's the flip side (the understated aspect) of the Wildebeest's theorem.

Numbers are, in a seemingly tautological fashion, the reason why we count. There would be no need for it if everything and everywhere were a singularity. Numbers are a strength, as all armies know. And all snipers. Conversely, they are in certain instances seen as a weakness and a threat to stability and progress, as when there are "too many mouths." Too many noisemakers. Too many cooks. Too much plastic, even.

Numbers may be a tyranny, and a weapon against it -- a sure tyranny against tyranny. We pit number against number. In many fields now, and in all team sports, an equality of number is a prerequisite for legitimate contest. And for its conclusive end.

It is with numbers that, in important ways, we measure material deprivation and wealth; and determine winner and loser, failure and success, progress and regress -- and even realize our destiny.

Numbers are a code with which we contemplate and master complexity and great mass. Numbers are in the spirit -- of Genesis -- when/where God instructs Adam and Eve (Them Africans) to go forth and multiply number with number, and so to dominate:

"Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and every living thing that moves on the earth."

It is with numbers that the human species will do what it is that destiny demands of it. In the universe. In the multiverse, if you please.














Updated: September 8 and 13, 2017

Other Side of Noon: Haiku

In the hills' shadows.
Fervid drumbeats recall, God.
Blue haze 'surps the set.

Lingala Gospel: Zahara's Limbisa

Zahara sings Limbisa with an exquisite voice. That's all that needs to be said, really. The rest is flourish. Limbisa is a hymnal plea for forgiveness, such as only God can truly and fully render. It is a mea culpa, when the heart is at its most earnest: "Naye lelo, kosenga bolimbisi."

Three 'stringed' instruments are in use in this virtual confessional: Zahara's guitar, her own vocal chords, and her male companion's. I am not sure yet who he is, as I think Tresor Riziki is in a subsequent -- 'remix', or tweaking -- project. Wait! Language, Lingala (all the way from the two Congos), is veritably the fourth, on this imagined stage; at this make-believe altar. A quartet, then, of instruments; which blend into one elevating stream of melody.

Lingala, always musical, is, it is clear I think to all ears, the anchor sound in this song. Zahara crosses borders to bring it here; to make it, something obviously borrowed, her own. It is in turn the bringer-of-everything-together, in Limbisa. All, all for the greater glory of The Forgiver.

The words are chosen, and the lyrics are sequenced, with blessed and restrained passion. It's a perfect audio picture. It is picture-perfect.

There are no video images in this offering, much as one would have liked to have them. Just a stunning camouflage of stillness. Awesome singularity.

Final comment: For Zahara, as for Docteur Nico Kasanda before her, Love doesn't have to mean never having to say Limbisa.


Click to listen to the audio of Limbisa [No video is available]

[Click Here For: Limbisa Lyrics]

READ: Zahara releases a new single

Easter Sunday Afternoon

God's grey clouds return,
A constant plane-like rumbling.
Drips, 'blique thing. Ref-rains!



[Haiku]

Feast of The Immaculate Conception

Today, Catholics the world over celebrate the feast of The Immaculate Conception of Mary mother of Jesus. It is the 532nd such celebration, the first having been presided over by Pope Sixtus IV on December 8th 1476, so long ago. However, historical evidence suggests that the memetic roots of the Immaculate Conception trace back to ninth century England.

As a Catholic, who was once a Sacristan, I must confess that at some point I lost the distinction -- which I suppose we were once as catechists taught, taught when our English was still raw (which is not the same thing as the English in us) and when, perhaps, our attention was raging to be elsewhere -- between the immaculate conception of Mary herself and the virginal birth of her son, and God's son, Jesus Christ the Redeemer. The point being made to us was that she conceived and delivered Him when/while/though she was a virgin, but her own mother had not herself been a virgin.

Over the years I have fused the two notions, forgetting (and presently and belatedly surprised) that we were in our youth asked to believe that Mary herself was born without original sin, essentially taking the immaculate conception to be about the conditions of Jesus' own birth. I totally missed that fine point. No wonder I didn't become the priest my late father, a devout Catholic who must now be in heaven, had dreamt that I, his eldest, would be.

As it turns out, however, I was not alone in this. It is even possible that many and perhaps most Catholics, nowadays, wallow in that confusion. To re-frame Santayana's notion of chaos, that distinction is an "order of thought", a liturgical order, which brings confusion in our minds.

Though her conception was shorn of the "stain" of the original sin, which Adam and Eve committed somewhere here in Africa and perhaps East Africa (if the human-origin narrative of DNA experts is to be tagged to the biblical account of the Garden of Eden and the goings on at the Forbidden Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge), it was the product of sexual intercourse. In contrast, Jesus was conceived as a result of the Word, relayed to Mary by God's own angelic emissary, Gabriel. His was virginal conception, and just as endowed with grace.

When first mooted by Sixtus IV, the concept of the Immaculate Conception was not labelled a dogma of the Church; that is, as something which believers must believe. This left Catholics, who chose to, free to treat it as untrue, without the risk of excommunication on grounds of heresy. It was declared a dogma only in the 19th Century -- more precisely on December 8th, 1854 -- by Pope Pius IX.

That dogma was taught to my parents, both devout; and later to us, but perhaps only in passing. I think the confusion in our minds arose from the fact that we were being asked to believe two very ngumu ("hard"), very counter-intuitive, ideas rolled up essentially into one. A choice was made. And since Mary was not the Daughter of God, nobody went that far, it was easier to take away from her the more poetic and graceful notion of immaculate conception, which was indeed her's, and to attach it to Jesus -- whose own label of "virginal birth" somehow rang too mundane. Perhaps I am projecting a present thought-process into a past in which we thought rather more at face value, rather more intuitively. But perhaps the point here is that the two thought-processes meet at the very same standpoint.

I stop here, for I simply wanted somehow to link this day with a part of my youth, to toss up ideas which continue to puzzle. To learn more about all this, the reader must click here: A History of the Immaculate Conception.