by Chris Eaton
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…is equal to the number of points you can map on a line that is infinitely long. How much space is there between the numbers 0 and 1? Or even between 0 and 0.1? Once again, the space is infinite. Coastlines are infinite. The circumference of a pumpkin is infinite. You can always create a more precise measuring tool that will allow you to measure more of the nooks and crannies of a jagged coast. And as you do so, the distance grows. Infinity can be present in a pinpoint. A raindrop. A snowflake.
The way he demonstrated this would become known as a Cantor Set. Or, ironically, the Devil’s Staircase. And it is explained most simply by a repetition of steps, continually subdividing the interval between points 0 and 1:
1. Divide the original interval into three equal parts.
2. Remove the middle interval.
3. Go to 1.
With each removal from the original interval, new intervals are created that form the Cantor Set. After the first subdivision, we have two intervals, from zero to one third (0, 1/3), and from two thirds to one (2/3, 1), with a total length of 2/3. After the division of those intervals, we have four: (0, 1/9), (2/9, 1/3), (2/3, 7/9) and (8/9, 1), with a total length of 4/9. And so on, and so on. The total length of the intervals will always be two thirds what it was before, or (2/3) to the power of the number of subdivisions. Steadily smaller and smaller. This is undeniable. But since you only ever remove a third of your existing lines, you can perform this exercise indefinitely. And as you approach infinity, the number of intervals in the set also becomes infinite… with a total length approaching nothing.
An infinite number of lines taking up no space at all.
The resultant graph, created by Cantor’s diagonal approach to depicting intervals, is where the Cantor Set gets its devilish name, because it resembles an erratic set of infinite stairs, on which you can never finish the climb to 1. Perhaps because this seemed like a joke, Cantor’s proofs and experiments with infinity were largely ignored, at least until computers were invented that could carry out his calculations to their theoretical non-endings. By the time he died in Halle, Germany, in 1918, almost no one had acknowledged his discoveries. He had also failed to prove God. But his new mathematics did give way to current chaos theory, which has replaced Newtonian physics as providing a better understanding of planetary motion and other natural occurrences. Now, with the growing speed and complexity of processing chips, computer models of real world systems base their calculations on infinite iterations and are increasingly better equipped to reflect actual real world systems with astonishing accuracy. Computers are used to recreate crash simulations in the automotive industry, anticipate weather disasters through finely calibrated climate models, and are even used by the government to predict the likelihood and potential results of enemy military action or a global pandemic.
And what is the main thing we know about non-linear dynamic systems? Eventually, when stretched as far as possible, beyond even imagination, any system will either:
a) gravitate to a constant (forever at rest);
b) keep climbing forever (only in unbounded systems);
c) exhibit periodic or semi-periodic motion (like the Devil’s Staircase); or
d) descend into completely random chaos, or at least what appears to be chaos until we are able to pull away sufficiently to discover the pattern.
Or perhaps there’s just something special about the number 9.
Chris Eaton was born on April 9. April 9 was also the date that marked the end of American Civil War. In 1991, the Russian state of Georgia officially declared its independence from the Soviet Union. In 2003, it was the day Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath regime was officially deposed, in which, through the wonders of the Internet, he knew another person named Chris Eaton had taken part. A coincidence? Or, if he were to dig deeper, would he discover a pattern in his own life he has yet to fully comprehend?
The patterns are there. The question is merely whether or not our interpretations of the patterns are correct. And would the patterns exist without us to perceive them?
Do we make the story, or does the story make us?
Though he’d agreed to attend university because of his parents, he rejected the establishment outright, and did everything he could to undermine it, from letters to the editor to alcoholism to posters of Che Guevara. In his second year, he nearly failed a paper on King Lear with a thesis that said the character of The Fool did not exist. The Fool, he said, was merely a figment of Lear’s imagination, two figures representing the same man, used by Shakespeare to accentuate the king’s madness, and it was clear by the way the bard used him that no one but Lear and the audience could see him. Many scholars have noted that The Fool seems to exist outside the play, appearing and disappearing without warning. The only times Lear actually speaks directly to him are when they are alone, and otherwise The Fool’s responses are more like witty quips, like a voice over your shoulder, to which Lear sometimes responds in ways that confuse the “real” people in his presence. The only exception is in Act III, Scene I, lines 41-59, in which The Fool, before his abandonment of Lear on the heath, delivers his ultimate soliloquy on madness and identity, where essentially Lear’s madness is complete and they become one:
‘Tis a king? A whale? Wallowing by nights
‘cross his feral wavering imagining?
Witless fisherman who, by day, sleeping
with fishes or laying hold the eel,
despises all? No phrases numerable…
This was later rectified in the Nahum Tate version of the play, which appeared about half a century later, with the same name but a much happier ending: Lear regaining his throne and Cordelia marrying Edgar. This Fool-less version was often performed instead of Shakespeare’s for nearly a hundred and fifty years.
He had similar results with an early paper in his third year on The Trial, in which he posited that Josef K’s unstated crime was a crime against society: being different, a failure in matters of conformity, refusing to take part in the universal experience. This crime is not even one set down on him from above, but by a general hegemony, like a corporate action, without a single instigator but by group mandate: As you know, employees always know more than their employers (p.17). After K is arrested, he spends the entire novel asking questions, demanding answers, resisting their will, not even realizing that they is the rest of the world and the important part is not that he hasn’t done anything wrong (p.3), but that he refuses to believe that the rest of the world can be right. His search takes him through the people closest to him (Frau Grubach and Fräulein Bürstner), logic (The Lawyer), action (The Manufacturer), art (The Painter), and finally religion (In the Cathedral). But it is Society that says he is guilty, Society that is defining him. And by continuing to deny it, he merely proves the point, right up to his execution. If he would merely accept things as they were, and confess to his crime, he would be found innocent. Kafka even prepares the reader for this in the book’s initial paragraph, when K is arrested and told to stay in the room and his initial instinct is to quickly pull on his trousers and say he will go next door and demand answers from his landlady: Yet it occurred to him at once that he should not have said this aloud and that by doing so he had in a way admitted the stranger’s right to superintend his actions (p.4).
This paper was refused by his professor and he was asked to write another.
Then, at the end of his third year at Oberlin, he wrote an essay about 9/11 fiction, which he initially dubbed the crassest and cheapest of genres, capitalizing on collective shock and misery to sell books. So many of the country’s masters, the established and the hopefuls, had felt compelled to address it, and Chris Eaton delighted in systematically toppling his idols and the idols of his classmates, which led to his ostracism, which led to his delight, which then led to the reconsideration of his delight, which led to his honours thesis in his final year about disaster literature through the ages, starting with The Bible and going straight through the horrors of The
Iliad and The Odyssey to Modernism, which led him eventually to one of the most extensive studies ever written on the complete works of L. Frank Baum.
After the horrors of the First World War, European fiction was forced into similar drastic changes, using abstract thought and formal stylistic play to come to grips with how and why human relations could have become so inhuman. Other movements, like Gothic literature, Romanticism and French Realism, were all brought on by earlier wars, the Seven Years War, War of the First Coalition, and years of Napoleonic conquest, respectively. The satirical eighteenth-century Augustans, like Pope and Swift, were composing in reaction to capitalism, or the war on the poor. And lining up lists of the great European writers and wars of the past two centuries, one could easily see the correlations. Although Tolstoy set his masterpiece during the debatably successful defense of Russia from Napoleon in 1812, the author had actually served in the latter months of the Crimean War, from September 1855 until its end in February 1856. H. G. Wells’s highly influential sci-fi book, The War of the Worlds, was clearly influenced by his time at the Battle of Dorking in 1871. The Tonkin campaign between France and Vietnam, in which Joris-Karl Huysman briefly participated as a clerk in the service of Alexandre-Eugène Bouët, is generally credited with shifting Huysman’s style from the naturalism of Zola’s Médan Group to the decadent barbarism of À rebours (1884). And in 1912, Louis-Ferdinand Céline joined the French army as an act of rebellion against his parents, setting in motion the events which led to him being shot in the arm while delivering a message past German lines, deserting the forces in a wagon full of green carnations and traveling to Detroit to study the conditions of Ford factory workers, another war on the lower class and the inspiration for Journey to the End of the Night.
In the field of English literature, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is most often cited as the signature piece of the post-WWI generation. Beckett was really only able to escape his Joycean mimicry – the shift from Dream of Fair to Middling Women (1932) and Murphy (1938) to Molloy (1951) – after running messages for the French Resistance during World War II. Hemingway did not actually serve in either World War, or the Spanish Civil War, but he wrote as though he did. And the only thing Hemingway fought at the Battle of the Bulge was pneumonia. But he was still present to witness many of these conflicts’ atrocities, unlike William Falkner who, upon failing to join the United States Army in 1918, faked a British accent to enlist with the British Royal Flying Corps in Canada, and was still in training when peace broke out. Even Falkner emerged from the experience a changed man, when a clerical error in his registration gave his last name the more distinguished U.
Before all that, there is evidence that Shakespeare spent some of his “lost years” serving under Francis Drake during the Anglo-Spanish War, particularly during the Battle of Gravelines (where he likely got to know Francis Walsingham). His near-drowning that day is often cited as the inspiration for the large number of shipwrecks and water deaths in his plays. In South America, T. H. “Rico” Henestropa, author of the epic gauchesque poem Chine Rosta, who was cited as a great influence by poets as varied as Chile’s Roberto Ávalos, Colombia’s Ignacio Zubieta, and even Mexico’s Nobel-winning Octavio Paz, lost two fingers and most of his faith in humanity at a battle alongside Argentinean natives to gain their independence from Spain. In Africa, Sachete had his civil war. Molière, Gustave Flaubert, Sotho Charpentier, Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities and Marcel Proust were affected by the French Revolutions of the mid-1600s, late-1700s, 1830, 1848 and 1889. And naturally James Joyce was traumatized by his time in Zurich, but even more so by the Irish War of Independence, which he heard about through letters from family while living in Paris.
Horrible acts are in our nature, if not to commit them then to certainly slow down and roll down the window and revel in them.
And not all disasters had to include such struggles between man and man. More often than not, the art of the day was used to come to grips with man’s relation to nature, which could often be equally cruel and unforgiving. It was as a way of dealing with the great tornado outbreak of 1896, in which hundreds of Americans across much of the central and southern states (including, but not limited to, Kansas, the worst of it located in St. Louis) were killed in their sleep, and thousands more injured, that L. Frank Baum wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. He could relate, having lived through a devastating storm of his own in South Dakota, in which the entire village of Newark was wiped clean off the map and Baum, who lived in a neighbouring town, lost his prize Hamburg chickens. Baum was also inspired by the wreck of the Titanic, which spawned dozens of works by everyone from Lucy Maud Montgomery to D. H. Lawrence to Jim Wallace to H. G. Wells and, seemingly, the first big-budget full-length film ever made, called Atlantis (although the Danish film was actually a fairly accurate rendering of Gerhardt Hauptmann’s German novel of the same name, eerily published just weeks before the disaster). Baum’s novel was published under one of his many pseudonyms, Orin Chaste, and was mostly about the relatives left behind, sitting on their front stoops and wondering what they might have done to save people if they had been on board. The title, Titan Porch Heroes, was also an allusion to the 1898 novel by Morgan Robertson called The Wreck of the Titan that Baum had enjoyed greatly. All told, Baum wrote more than a dozen different novels under seven separate pseudonyms, dealing with everything from the Iroquois Theater fire of 1903 to the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 to the great Ohio Basin flood of 1913, the most obvious being the trilogy of books as Schuyler Staunton, written for adults, in which he processed, in order: the Brazilian revolution of 1889, controversially using many of the real names of people involved, including the Emperor Petro II, H. Avaro (who was head of military coup to depose him), and H. Cristen (the so-called Dutch Marshall, who would become Avaro’s Vice-President and the first elected leader of the Republic of Brazil); the brutal succession conflict in Baluchistan in which a railroad worker with the American Construction Syndicate was mistaken for a U.S. millionaire and held at ransom for three days until his heart gave out; and the Sudan Revolt. And all of this is perhaps most ironic when it is considered that Baum’s own death was as a result of the flu epidemic following World War I – the inspiration for Camus’s short novel The Plague.
Despite the protests of her advisors at Haverford, she still selected, as the subject of her thesis, the Welsh inventor, the pioneer of sustainable, the hermit, the crackpot, the lunatic: Saith Crone.
It was a paper that was nearly never written. Saith Crone’s inventions had undoubtedly changed the course of history. An early pioneer in mechanical sewing machines and the creator of parcel post, not to mention mail-order retailing, Crone’s contributions to the lives of housewives in the mid-1800s might have been enough to ensure his immortality. It is, in fact, arguable that these domestic breakthroughs, by allowing women to become more politically active, contributed as much to women’s suffrage in Britain and the colonies as the hearsay and rumors of similar political movements in Sweden. Crone also invented the precursor to the modern sleeping bag, which he would always regret. And most interesting to the field of Environmental Studies, at the height of Crone’s retail empire, he took the considerable fortune he’d amassed in his short life, sold off all holdings he had in international commerce, and constructed an environment that would allow him to pursue the several new agricultural theories that had lately begun to obsess him. In 1872, after nine years of steady construction, Saith Crone completed his fortress on the northern coast of Wales, dubbed Caernrhyl for its proximity to the seaside community of Rhyl, and claimed he would never leave.
Caernrhyl (whose ruins can still be visited for a small fee, but few actually take the Sefydliad chan ‘n Crone Astudiaethau up on this offer) is not without its architectural interests. It is the only British castle, for example, to be constructed in the Elizabethan Renaissance style, in its truest sense, as opposed to the more common Renaissance palaces you can find under any rock in the British Isles. Its Paxton-inspired
design stands out dramatically from other Welsh fortresses like Caernarfon and Raglan, its outer walls constructed largely of molded steel to more easily defend against high-grade firearms and cannons, as the decline of the feudal system and new weapons technology made those old stone parapets entirely useless. Likewise, the inner court is a very good example of the Renaissance reaction to the Gothic and Greek ornamentation of, say, the Cardiff clock tower, with even its gardens laid out in grids approximating Japanese Sudoku puzzles, in cubes split into groups of nine. In these graphs, despite the un-nurturing Welsh climate, Crone succeeded in growing everything from beetroot, leeks and swede to bananas and mangoes, papayas and passion fruit. These gardens were clearly Crone’s focus. He’d calculated the height of the walls to keep the harsh Welsh winds at bay while maximizing the reluctant sun. The moat was fed by several nearby rivers, draining through perforated sheets of coco fiber in the castle foundation beneath the lush gardens and orchards. Plus, Crone had developed a complicated system of crop rotation, transplanting entire gardens of barely-sprouted plants, possibly as often as once a month (the diagrams he left behind provided no time frame), until the soil reached a fertility level of 0.1% nitrogen, 0.2% phosphorous anhydrides and o.6% potassium, comparable to that of the Nile. But of course the real curiosity was that Crone had built his self-sustainable fortress without any exterior doors or windows, sealed off totally from the outside world, with squared crenels spaced three feet apart and three feet deep, because he never intended to leave it or let anyone else cross its threshold, because he feared for his life at the hands of French assassins sent by the nephew and step-grandson of Napoleon Bonaparte.