73

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The Quran attributes the Tower of Babel to Nimrod. It is not by explicitly naming, but by reference to a king who wishes to claim divinity for himself. (Flavius Josephus agrees.) So the tower is built, and according to Tha’labi’s commentary, it is blown down by a great wind. This wind, which destroys the summit, sending it into the sea, also brings fear, and this fear fragments one language into 73. Why 73?

73 is prime, the 21st prime number. It’s reverse, 37, is also prime. Primes have been around longer than Babel. Well, primes have always existed, but the awareness of them is quite explicit in Euclid’s Elements, and it seems the Egyptians had a thing or two to say about them as well.

The numerologists have a lot to say about 73, as does the writings on the numerical aspects of Hebrew.  I am going to table this for the time being, I shall come back to 73 later.

 

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“An origin story cannot be read or adequately understood without taking into account the contemporary experience of those who pass down the story.”

Pierre Gibert. Bible, mythes et récits de commencement.

Twilight, she says.

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There are three. Each a sliver of degrees, a mathematical structure of knowing the unknown. Civil. Nautical. Astronomical. Six degrees. Six and six and six.  The separation, between day and night, between night and day.

Astronomical, she says. I want the darkest of the darks. Take me further.

 

Wind, Part I

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There are winds I love. They have color and texture and taste, so these are the winds I follow. To whom do these winds belong? There are so many, they have names, they have gods, they belong to their cultures.  The scirocco, the berg, the foehn, the karaburan. They race across plains and twist around mountains. They froth up the white caps, and drag you off to far away lands.  These winds, these external winds, they all come with internal components.  You think the wind blows only around the objects? No. It cannot be so. They must also blow through. They create, they have meaning. They rustle your soul.

Pay attention. Forever, we can demand this. Pay attention. But to what? The winds, I say. Watch the way they blow and what they mean, the winds from Africa, they bring the desert, and the winds of the desert are the winds that tell me the stories I most want to hear. Not just the African deserts, the Gobi and the Altai plains, the western deserts, the empty quarter.  Thousands of years of history, buried under a sand, a sand lifted by the winds, tiny particulates, moved across the surface of the planet, washed across our shores, breathed into your lungs, to become part of you.

These are the stories I have to tell you, if you wish to sit, to listen. The gods of sand and sea, the winds that bring them into your soul, into your being. And the winds you were born into, which were born in to you.  Each of us has our winds, and these are the stories you want to know, these are the stories of who you are, these are the stories I can see when I watch you pause, breathe, when I see the winds as they flow.