Wednesday 2 January 2013

commutative property or sixth happiness

Perhaps I was a bit prematurely to dismiss the new year as numerically unremarkable. I heard an India fortuneteller on the radio this morning, prefacing her words and prognostications with the pronouncement that all numbers are indeed lucky, that this year, broken down as 2+0+1+3 yields six, the number of harmony in some circles and duty or domestic relations in others.

Personally, though I don’t buy into this sort of resonance and extra properties of digits wholesale and without reservations, I do often catch myself noticing a four (creation and rebirth) buried in a string of numbers all the time—though I use every mathematical operator I can think of to get to four, mixed multiplication, division along with addition and subtraction. I have notion from somewhere that four was my auspicious number, though I can’t recall what brought me there. I suppose that there would be no harm in it if I have been mistaken all these years and my lucky number turns out to be five instead. Also, when possible, I always try to remit a payment that works out to four, 82,00€, $48.00, £62.00. It is all a bit mad, I’m sure, and I guess a little bit maddening—look! It's a four, but it seems to me that vast outpouring of bills is a pretty flat landscape, dominated by zeroes and ones, and maybe a little packet of good fortune can be wired out as well. It’s a bit like ones choice for postage stamps, when bills were still mailed out, and payments usually were franked with grim and plain stamps, or else a bit of the evil-eye and just the opposite.