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THOUGHTS: Bobolinks and apophenia
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Jim Twiggs writes:
Reading Jansy's interesting post on apophenia, I remembered the 1997
movie Pi, directed by Darren Aronofsky, about a "number theorist (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_theory ) who believes that
everything in nature can be understood through numbers, and that if you
graph the numbers properly patterns will emerge. He is working on
finding predictable patterns within the stock market (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_market ), using its many variables
as his data set ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_set ) with the
assistance of his homemade supercomputer, Euclid (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclid ). He is shown to be capable of
doing complex arithmetic calculations in his head when a young girl asks
him to solve a huge problem for her and verifies the answer on her
calculator. Max also suffers from chronic headaches, as well as extreme
paranoia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoia ) (possibly paranoid
schizophrenia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoid_schizophrenia )),
manifested in menacing hallucinations, and a crippling form of social
anxiety disorder.)" --Wikipedia (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_anxiety_disorder )
The resemblance between this character's symptoms and the madness of
the young man in "Signs and Symbols" is obvious. As Jansy suggests (I
think), one of VN's main interests is in finding a balance between
"referential mania" on the one hand, and the obtuseness of, say, the
narrator of “The Vane Sisters” on the other. The balance would be struck
when one achieved a sane but intense awareness of the patterns in nature
and in our lives.
As for coincidence, regardless of its attraction to writers of genius
and its pull on our imaginations in general, we have an obligation,
surely, to resist being taken in. One might start by supplementing the
skepticism expressed in Stan’s recent post with the discussion of
coincidence in the very useful online Skeptic’s Dictionary:
http://skepdic.com/lawofnumbers.html
Toward the end of her post, Jansy begins to engage with the truly
important question about VN’s metaphysics--namely, how to reconcile his
insistence on freedom with his seeming embrace of a view that would
reduce us all to characters whose stories are being written by higher
beings whose stories are also being written by beings higher still and
so on to infinity. Alexandrov has discussed this problem both in his
hugely influential book and in an essay in Cycnos:
Vladimir E. Alexandrov
How Can Ethics Exist in Nabokov’s Fated Worlds?
http://revel.unice.fr/cycnos/document.html?id=1282
The last paragraph of Alexandrov’s essay is as fine a tribute--though
perhaps, come right down to it, a left-handed tribute--to VN as I think
I’ve ever read.
Don Johnson’s book Worlds in Regression is, of course, the seminal work
in this whole branch of VN studies. I have returned to it again and
again over the years, and always with profit and admiration.
Finally, I hope others enjoyed Jansy’s Freud joke as much as I did.
Jim Twiggs
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