I’ve got an opportunity for writers of all stripes who listen to this program.

I’ve been making The View from Planet Nancy for almost a year now, cooking it up in my living room and uploading it via satellite. Right about the time I get to feeling like enough is enough already and decide to quit, somebody will tell me how much they liked one episode or another and I think “Gee Whiz….there’s still this I haven’t talked about yet, or that…” and whaddya know, I keep living inside the everyday miracle of The View from Planet Nancy, and how it all keeps going.

But I really do get tired of the sound of my own voice. And the sound of my own thoughts, my typical way of reacting to everything. I’d like to open up this forum to some voices and some ideas besides my own.

And so, my fellow writers–what’s on your mind? What’s on your desk? Send something in, up to 300 words, and see if I don’t just read what you have to say on the air.

Go to AuthorNancyCasey.com, and upload your work as a comment to any of the posts that you find there.

What should you write about? Scroll around in the archives and you’ll get an idea of the kinds of things that grab my attention.

Storytelling and information. I want to know what science is, how it works and why we have it.

Religion is always interesting. Theologian Riffat Hassan says that if you are interested in the oppression and foolishness enacted in the name of religion, you should know that a social argument cannot ever trump a theological argument. Only a superior theological argument can do that. So it’s worth it to know where these theological arguments come from. There are so many ways to read the Garden of Eden story, for instance. I’ve been reflecting lately on the Prodigal Son, the shephered and the sheep–all those back-to-the-fold stories.

All the iconic stories are suspect, it seems, not just the religious ones. Read Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, and watch all the great figures of the American Heritage turn into tinker toys and fall apart. And where does that leave us?

These are interesting and worthwhile things to think about.

So is gender.

Perhaps you’ve had your worldview jangled by travel. Or art.

What’s there to learn about language and communication? How do we talk? What do we say? What good does it do us? Where do writing, gesture, and showing each other pictures fit in? Are there languages we can’t speak? Is there talking we don’t hear? Can science wrap itself around the phenomenon of language?

And then there’s this whole confusing business of making our way in the world–our expectations, our choices, how it’s turning out, our relations to others, who those others are… There is so much to learn and know and think about. Are you writing about it?

This is my call to writers who do write about these things. Send something in. AuthorNancyCasey.com. Up to 300 words. Paste it into the comment box. Let’s get some of your thoughts on the air.

I grew up in a post World War II nuclear family that practiced patriarchial Irish Catholic fundamentalism as a spiritual discipline and an art.  School uniforms.  Morning Mass in Latin. Altar Boys. Immaculate surfaces.  Catholic college.  Almighty God.  Mom, Dad, and the kids.

Receive the sacraments.  Make the novenas.  Stations of the Cross.Fish on Friday, Confession on Saturday.  You are called to be perfect as the father is perfect.

Dad was silent.  Mom was holy.  She saw that we chanted the rosary after dinner.  She helped us build our first May altars, knelt down with us before bed and prayed.  There were beeswax candles.  We sang litanies on feast days at midnight.  Sometimes my mother, my grandmother, and all the aunts would circle round the coffee table in the front window after Sunday dinner and disgorge their boxes of religious paraphenalia.  Scapulars, rosaries.  Sacred Heart badges.  They had miraculous medals to pin to your undershirt if you get the croup, and a tiny vial of water from the grotto at Lourdes where the virgin appeared to the little children.  They had holy cards with all the important prayers. like  “Hail Holy Queen, Mother of Hosts, hail our life, our sweetness and our hope”.

It was complicated how it all came about:  Jesus in the manger nailed to the cross.  Three persons in one God.  Mortal sin.  The Annunciation.  Adam and Eve.  It was hard to get things to add up. “Honor thy Father and thy Mother” means “Don’t disobey.”  “Thou shalt not kill” means “Don’t fight.”  When you want something, you ask the Blessed Virgin and she puts it in her heart.  Jesus sees it there and tells God.

No one exactly said it outright, but I figured out that the way it was supposed to feel had something to do with radiant light.  We had crystal rosaries and glow-in-the-dark crucifixes. Saints had haloes and bands of light leaping from their hands.  Mary wore stars in her golden crown.  Illuminated heart of Jesus, pray for us.  When it all worked out, you’d be bathed in radiant light, the mysteries and miracles would connect, and it would all made sense.  If you didn’t get there right off, well, just keep praying, stick with it.  Maybe when you’re older.

Well, I got older and it didn’t stick.  I took other roads in searh of that radiant light.  They didn’t like it, and used tough love on me.  I didn’t like that.

I’ve been thinking about these things because I’ve been reading Pure Lust by philosopher Mary Daly.  Lust, as in lustre, as in passionate longing — for beauty and truth and tenderness.  Even as that longing is encumbered by the dark weight of the knowledge that something is terribly wrong in the world today.  It’s a death-dealing phallocratic patriarchy out there, says Daly.  Lust has been perverted to Thrust.  We drill for minerals and fire our missles. We make vaginal probes and architectural erections. Sado-society, she calls it duplicitous, self-destructive, raping, lethal. It permeates everything–the ways we are taught to think, almost all of our expections.  ALMOST…

The real reality, the one we can’t stop lusting after, is a biophilic consciousness, says Daly, a consciousness based on life’s obvious afinity for life.  Yet we’re trapped in a sado-society woven of doublethink and deception.  But every deception contains a crack, a lens for lustre where real knowledge, preserved and handed down in the intuitions and memories of women, radiates towards us.

Who’d a thunk it.  The mothers and the sisters and the aunts.  Reflecting and transmitting elemental luminescence.  As best they can.

I took myself on a great big trip recently, and one of the things I did was use my airline miles to fly first class from one end of the country to the other and back. Imagine the perks–food, drink, priority boarding, a big seat… It was my intention to soak up every privilege–without appearing to be too much of a bumpkin.

Except that I am a total bumpkin.

Rich people have codes and signals, and I don’t know them. My comfortable, versatile clothes didn’t exude the right kind of pristine. My skin, hair, and fingernails didn’t show professional attention. Luggage that looks like its’s been Port-au-Prince a dozen times doesn’t make a person look worldly. Even through I’d washed all the mud off my clogs, they still looked like I’d worn them outdoors. Unlike the suede shoes on the man seated next to me which would be ruined if they got wet. His feet would get soaked, too. But I’ll bet the chain across his instep is real gold.

The flight attendant made it a point to sidle up to him privately, and acknowledge that he was a member of the high pooh-bahs of plane ticket money spenders, “so if there’s anything at all we can do to make your flight more agreeable…”

I’d already seen the perfect tailoring of his suit jacket when he stood ahead of me in the red-roped priority check-in line, his left ear pasted to the shaved globe of his head by a phone, into which he was steadfastly “yessing” and “absolutely-ing”, firmly laying out why his interlocutor should give somebody a second chance. “I realize that our performance so far hasn’t shown you…” and “You can be certain that I personally…” It sure didn’t seem like he could affort to lose this account, or not close this deal. “I just want an opportunity to demonstrate that what you’ve seen isn’t an indicator of the way things are going to be….”

It was 5:00 in the morning in Boston. Who was he talking to? Someone in Europe? In Asia? Or some local insomniac bully who was enjoying his power to make this guy grovel?But the guy was good. His grovel was professional, as befitting his shoes and clothes. He was like a boxer, parrying blow after blow, and bobbing back up, nimble and eager. “You’re going to see something different when you find out what our best work is really like.” His head never went down. He had stamina. Whatever the upbrading coming down the line, he was going to flip it into an occasion to regard a new improved future. At 5 AM. All in a day’s work.

People tell me they have some of the most interesting conversations on airplanes. I suppose. I guess you really have to believe that you can make a connection with anyone. We’re all humans, aren’t we? I’m sure there’s some social signal I don’t know how to give that might have set up the context for a pleasant exchange between me and this man. “Hey,” I could have said. “Awesome the way you took that spanking back there.” and if I had said that, he wouldn’t have heard. He put on a set of those everything-cancelling headphones as soon as he sat down, the kind that if he turned and looked at me, I’d be reminded of Steve Martin with that trick arrow going through his head. He didn’t take the bulbs off his ears for the whole flight. Not for the omelette, or the bloody Mary, or either one of the hot towels.

I didn’t care. I had my own armrest, a book to read. The seat was so roomy I could kick off my shoes and sit cross-legged. And I said, “Yes, please,” every chance I got.

My grandmother was the second-to-the-last child in a huge Irish family. When her parents died, she and her husband, Doc, the optometrist, inherited the three story house with the bay windows and wrap around porches. The house, and the bachelor uncles, the youngest of whom, Uncle Bernie, lived there still when I was a child.

On Sundays when we got to Grandma’s, we’d run into the parlor where Uncle Bernie stood waiting for us, hands in his pockets. He shuffled his slippery shoes on the carpet. Do you see one? Is it there? With pantlegs flapping to the clumsy footwork, he flicked Necco wafers out of his pockets, and sticks of Beeman’s gum. Pennies occasionally. One for each of us. No matter how much we danced around him and begged for more, laughing up at the dome of his Santa Claus tummy.

Uncle Bernie was different before The Depression, they said. He was in real estate and would sometimes rush away, saying, “I have to go show a house.” He lost all his apartments, everything, in the crash of ’29. He wore a suit every day and always drove a Cadillac. My grandmother’s albums have picures of him during the War. That would be World War I, when she knit socks for the men in the trenches. In every photo, Uncle Bernie stands in uniform, beside the elephantine haunches of an automobile. Uncle Bernie drove the general’s Cadillac.

Uncle Bernie didn’t read to us or play games of cards like my grandfather did. But he let us sit on the toilet seat or the edge of the bathtub in his bathroom and watch him shave. He sudsed up a brush in a cup the way our dad did and the lather all over his face made him really look like Santa Claus. We’d kick and bounce, call for him to dab us on the nose, expecting the taste of whipped cream and not soap. The aftershave was Old Spice and he made burbly sounds and smacked his jiggley cheeks. He smeared some white goo from a tall bottle onto his palms and into his hair and the comb left tracks front to back through his white widow’s peak. He was getting ready to go across the street to 12 o’clock Mass.

No way we could go to 12 o’clock Mass. We went at 7:15 or 9:30. 12 o’clock Mass was for people who were lazy. And Uncle Bernie. You didn’t ever get to do something justs because Uncle Bernie did it. At dinner, he ate his dessert–a bowl of custard–first. My grandmother made his plate up special in the kitchen. The meat had to be extra well-done black. He wouldn’t tolerate spaghetti, because it looked like worms, nor could he bear the sight of a green bean because there could be a worm hidden inside. Uncle Bernie’s cure for any ailment was bicarbonate of soda. Sometimes my mother and the aunts would exchange murmurs and glances because of him in the bathroom after dinner.

There’s a famous family photo of me in a skinny wet bathing suit, cringing in black and white beside the rear bumber of Uncle Bernie’s Cadillac, wailing straight into the lens, “I caaaaan’t.” He’s bowed to the box camera at his belly, telling me to stand up straight, stand still and smile. Uncle Bernie wouldn’t think of bare feet and hot asphalt, only that one of those kids in the wading pool by the driveway should and get over here next to his green and white Cadillac for a picture.

Uncle Bernie spent his weekday evenings at a funeral parlor. It was just one more oddball thing Uncle Bernie did. Hanging out with his friends in the back of a funeral home.

Uncle Bernie. He drove the general’s Cadillac.

I have enough life experience to know for a fact that the words most often spoken in hippie construction are, Hey, that’s really cool.  We should put a foundation under it.  Old homesteads.  Experimental housing.  Barns and sheds.  Makeshift housing.  All that originality.  All that grace and character.  So much history in that structure.    Composting as we speak.

A lot of structures have been rescued by foundations, while some remain standing by the force of their own internal miracle.  Other structures, you should just go ahead and let them fall down.

The biggest problem with foundations with making it solid at the very bottom of things, is that they are a fiction.  You can think you have made one, but geology will always have its way with it.

The turn of the 20^th century saw a major mathematical program in academia called foundations—the search for a few self-evident concepts—definitions or principles—out of which you could derive all of mathematical truth.  The idea was to articulate the basic stuff, like maybe what a number is, and the bare-bones logical rules, like something can’t be true and not-true at the same time.  Get those basics together.  And show that you could build all of mathematics out of it.  Foundations.  Part of the march towards the digital age.

The program was a complete failure.  It seemed straightforward enough.  2 + 2 = 4.  That’s so cool we should put a foundation under it. Turns out, somebody proved that you can’t.  There’s just no way you can come up with a basic set of foundational statements to hold up math.  And even when you try, somebody can take the opposite statements and use them for a foundation to make a math that’s completely different.

Probably the best known example of this happened in geometry.  Regular old Euclidean geometry—the geometry for building houses—has, as one of it’s foundational statements parallel lines don’t meet.  But if you ask, What if they do meet? you could invent a whole different kind of geometry.  People have.  Geometries of warped spaces in many dimensions that some people dream will be useful for building spaceships.

The upshot is, even when the foundation seems pretty solid, it can be interesting to check it out.

Consider, for example, the many distinguished careers and contracts related to the breeding and carving up of living creatures to see what they’re like inside, or injecting chemicals into their brains to see what they’ll do.  This is all founded on standards, regulations, and complexities of ethics and belief that make these practices good for us, because the creatures are so much like us, except for in the kinds of things that can hurt them.

To perpetrate a genocide, you have to work into the foundation of your world that some humans are sub-human.  Savages.  Cockroaches.   With those kinds of ideas you can enslave people.  Even people you can’t see.  They’ve gotten used to living like that.  It’s a higher wage than they could get anywhere else.

A lot of people think it’s fun to start fires and blow things up.   Something in the power of that energy release.  A bunch of them have gotten together and invented a version of peace and prosperity that’s got a foundation cobbled from mutually assured destruction.

So you can put a foundation under just about anything.  Although no foundation is going to last—which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

A lot of people don’t realize when they are contemplating a structure, that 75% of the work is in the foundation.  And the other 75% is the finish work.

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.   That sentence was penned by a young Noam Chomsky in his doctoral dissertation in linguistics as an example of a sentence which is grammatical, but meaningless.  Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

Problem is, no sooner do we hear something like that than we start to conjure a hue which is colorless green—listless, drab and unremarkable.  Sleeping ideas, they could be anywhere.  A furious sleep isn’t hard to imagine.   Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.  Maybe, when the ideas open their eyes, the greens will be colored with fury from the sleep.

That’s why Plato banned poets from his utopian republic.  He envisioned a society in which everybody knows what’s what because words are well-defined and the allowable sentences can be identified.  How can you be grounded in the rational, reason and the real with poets skulking around, striking random words against each other like rocks, making sparks.

I’m thinking about that because I’ve been carrying around 100 Selected Poems by e.e. cummings.  No colorless green ideas, per se, but you do find leaping greenly spirits of trees/and a blue tree dream of sky.

e.e. cummings is probably best known for his lack of capitalization and oddball punctuation, or maybe for writing eddieandbill as a single schoolchild word, but his poems also have roamingly stern bright faeries…  the whyless soul…  and children building this rainman out of snow.

sweet morons gather round, he calls and words bump into each other all over the place.  silent certainly mountains. … my sweet old etcetera/aunt lucy…  raving city screamingly street wonderful…

I turn the page and he says, my father walked through dooms of love.  Another page and he says, whenever men are right they are not young.  On another, freedom is a breakfastfood.

On the back cover, Marianne Moore says that e.e. cummings “does not make aesthetic mistakes.”  I don’t know about that, but I do know that if Plato had met Mary Daly, he’d have banned Elemental Feminist Philosophers from his republic as well.  Daly’s method is to use language as a double edged tool which at once unweaves the lies of stag-nation and restores the elemental feminine.

We are immersed in a necrophilic society, she says, surrounded by necrophiles and necrocrats, lovers and dealers of death, we are bored to death, anesthetized with boracracy whose borocratic institutions rule the mis-begotten state of boredom.

Boredom is a clockocracy, a jockocracy, a foolocratic junkocracy, where you get up every morning and listen to the olds, the same old necrological news, the patriarchal prattle.

Mary Daly would replace mister-hood with sisterhood, give the whole staledom of maledom a misterectomy, rout out the strange deadfellows, the toms, the dicks, the harrys, the butchers, the bullies, the hacks and the fops.  Down with academentia.  Derision for fembots, presbots, popbots, numbots, foolosphers, and psycho-ologists.  Calling all revolting hags, all cosmic crones in tidal time for contrary ways and counterclock whys, foxy foresight, glamor and grace.  Spinsters, weavers, wickeds, weirds, come out and dis-close, dis-order, dis-cover the words that will awaken the feminine wild.

Nope, Mary Daly would not have made it into Plato’s utopian republic.  She’d be in exile with e.e. cummings, who said, humanity i love you because you/are perpetually putting the secret of/life in your pants and forgetting/its there and sitting down on it

Alan Turing was a British mathematician and logician.  In the first half of the 20^th century he articulated a conceptual framework surrounding so-called “mechanical thinking devices”.  His ideas were entirely theoretical.  Because Alan Turing lived before the first electronic computers were actually built.  All the same, many of his ideas remain at the foundation of theories of computation and the field of computer science.

One question Turing thought about was:  Are there circumstances under which a computing machine could be said to think?  This led to the formulation of an idea which has come to be known as the Turing Test.  If, in every interaction, the machine responds in the same way as a human would, we can say that the machine mimics the activity of human thought.

Turing published this idea in 1950, a time when cognitive scientists were confident that language was a capacity unique to humans.  The computers envisioned at that time—which would soon be built—were devices that accepted written inputs and returned written outputs.  And so it happened that in the 1960s and 70s, the field of artificial intelligence blossomed with computers programmed to narrate, and converse.  They’d be stuffed with a big detailed vocabulary, a lot of grammar, and information about idioms and metaphor like,  hit the lights, and love is a rose.  Each generation of them got better and better, but sooner or later they always flubbed up and flunked the Turing Test.  At first the promising machine might  answer complex questions and tell original stories, maybe even try to lie.   But then it would invite some children down to the meadow to play in the thistles or ask someone if they’d like to exchange heads.  For a long time, computing machines flunked the Turing Test hands down.  It just wasn’t hard to make the machine give away its machine-ness.  Things are little different now.

Have you ever had an unhappy customer service interaction, full of— press 8 to return to the main menu…  please re-enter the last four digits…   your password has expired…  I’m sorry that is not a valid response…  You eject yourself from the labyrinth of menus and wait out the minutes and the muzak that it takes to reach  a customer service representative who hopes you have a satisfying experience today and who turns out to be as circularly obstinate as the robotic voices you just ran away from, and you ask, “Are you a person or a machine?”  They respond indignantly that they are a person, and you think, HA!  That’s exactly what a machine would say.

In that case, you’d be the one administering the Turing Test.  How do you make sure you are speaking to a human?  You could keep demanding to talk to a supervisor until finally someone said something that no machine would ever say.

Chances are you’ve taken the Turing Test many times—every time you do something like sending a message or a comment through a website and a panel pops up displaying a smear of smudges and asking you to type the letters that you see.  That’s how they filter out spam.  They don’t want to deal with the mail that comes from machines.  Of course, if you can’t figure out what those gloppy letters are, you flunk the Turing Test and they’re not going to deal with any mail that comes from you.  Or rather, the machine that handles the mail isn’t going to deal with mail that comes from you.  Because the machine thinks you’re a machine.  But you’re not a machine.  You were only impersonating one.

Today I made an expedition to the public library and have returned with a load of provisions.

One of the books I brought home is called, Design in Nature:  How the Constructal Law Governs Evolution in Biology, Physics, Technology, and Social Organization.  It’s by Adrian Bejan, a scientist, and his ghostwriter, J. Peder Zane and the cover promises that the book will engage  the non-scientist reader from the first sentence to the very last word.

From the book jacket and first few pages, I’m able to glean that “flow” is a central concept in the book. Inside live plants and animals, stuff flows, always.  When the flow stops, the thing is dead.  This is also true of river systems, the book says.  As well as lightning bolts.  And committees.  The book equates the presence of flow with the presence of life and proposes a law of physics that says flow is always trying to maximize itself and that’s what drives the evolution of everything from cells to social organizations.  Ambitious stuff.

Some of the chapters are called, “Why Hierarchy Reigns,”  “The Design of Academia,”  “The Design of History.”

Others have names like, “The Birth of Flow, “Witnessing Evolution”, “Seeing Beyond the Trees and the Forest.”

I’m ready to give this book a read.  Or a start.  Get far enough to have (or despair of having) the experiences promised by the back cover:  “never look at the world the same”, “blow your mind with fresh interpretation.”  Sure I’ll go for that.  Why not?

A story from the introduction explains the value of using the “constructal law” to consider and interpret phenomena that have flow.  For example, piioneering soil scientist Robert Elmer Horton spent years tramping around gathering data in river drainages, and hours at the desk developing and studying maps, counting tributaries and river channels.  After a lifetime of work, he concluded that regardless of the river or the terrain, every main stream in a watershed tends to have about 4 tributaries.  Using only pencil and blank paper, flow scientists obtained the same result in the comfort of the office, prompting the authors to muse that that, “No doubt, Horton’s empirical work made it easy for us to verify our findings.  But had he known about the constructal law, he would not have had to perform innumerable measurements to reach the same conclusion.”  Ah, if only he had known, he could have saved himself the trouble of struggling through all those boggy river basins getting blisters, frostbite, and sunburns.

That attitude reminds me of the scene from Saint-Exeupery’s The Little Prince where the tiny mysterious man declines a pill for preventing thirst, saying that he’d probably only use the time he saved to take a pleasant walk to a well and have a cool drink.

And it reminds me of a piece of paper I have stuck right here to the wall.  It astonished me so much, I ripped it out of Sky Mall,  the in-flight magazine for shopping at cruising altitude.  It’s an ad for a Double Dance Mat, 39.98, ages 5 and up.  In the picture, a colorful piece of plastic is spread out on the floor and somehow, with the aid of two “C” batteries, the nattily-dressed multicultural children various follow its cues to learn dance steps.  It looks like maybe they are supposed to stomp out flashing lights with their feet..  At any rate, beneath the tableau  the headline cheers their rollicking good behavior, promising that the dance mat will teach children how to dance without all that distracting music.

I’ve started reading The Death of Nature:  Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution by Carolyn Merchant.  The front cover promises me that a “confrontation” with this book will cause me to rethink “the meanings of science, its historical origins, and its role in today’s world,” because, as the back cover tells me, the book is about “how the scientific revolution sanctioned the exploitation of nature, commercial expansion, and the subjugation of women.”  That idea might not be as shocking as it was 30 years ago when this book was first published.  I know that Rene Descartes and Francis Bacon are key thinkers of the scientific revolution and associate them with phrases like “plundering the secrets of nature” and “knowledge is power”.  The culture I’m immersed in certainly adheres to such notions and considers phrases like “the earth is our mother” poetic or quaint.

What surprised me right off—my first confrontation in reading—was that the question the book was asking wasn’t “How did nature stop being female and a mother?”  It was, “How did nature turn into a machine?”

Which got me to thinking about the extent to which  I view nature—or rather everything—as a machine.  Cause and effect, reliability.  Do this and that will happen.  I can explain summer and winter in terms of the moving parts of the solar system.  Describe my aches and pains as dysfunctions in the systems that move my bones around.  Improve my relationships by learning how responses developed as a child operate in my present behavior.  I solve problems by straining information through sieves of logic.  Even for things I can’t see, my understanding of them is an understanding of how they work: photosynthesis, black holes, ecosystems, digestion.

If you accused me of seeing the world in that foolish, mechanistic way, where everything is part of a part, acting and reacting with all the other parts in reliable, tick-tock predictable ways, I would tell you I’m not as narrow as that.  But when, really do I think it’s irrelevant to ask, “What causes that?” or “How does that work?”

So that was my first confrontation with this book, The Death of Nature.  Thinking about thinking that everything is part of a machine.

The second confrontation was with the idea—also not unfamiliar—that it is wrong to rip into Mother Earth and mine her entrails for metals, an idea far from Western Civilization, I thought.  So it blew my mind to discover that this idea had a place in Western thought up until about 500 years ago.  In the first century, the Roman compiler Pliny wrote in his Natural History that earthquakes were a show of earth’s indignation with us for mining her bowels for treasure as though her surface was not bountiful enough.   Detractors of mining in Europe and England in the mid-1500s maintained that if Mother Nature had intended humans to use metals, she wouldn’t have buried them so deep.

I like to think I live a little closer to the earth than the average US-American—eat low on the food chain, do without glitz, go natural every chance I get.  Yet, I cannot begin to imagine my life without metal.  Is there anything in my house that, if not made of metal, wasn’t made with metal?  The sawblade on the boards, needles that stitched the upholstery, the woodstoves, the axe, the pens, the frying pans, the electronics, screws and nails, chicken wire, zippers, guitar strings, the roof, bicycle spokes, pushpins, jar lids, shovel, can opener, eyeglasses, spinning wheel…

The poet Carl Sandburg wrote that “arithmetic is where numbers fly in and out of your head like birds”. If that’s the case, I thought maybe I’d see about trapping me a few, growing them out, trying and raise my own flock of numbers. When I grow my own, I become  that much more self-sufficient.

Growing your own numbers is ideal for the beginning do-it-yourselfer.  Numbers are compact and various.  They are troubled by few predators and require little, if any, maintenance.  There’s no evidence of numbers shrinking or expanding in extreme temperatures.  Nor are they known to settle in shipping.  Numbers aren’t prone to repetitive-use injuries.  They neither hibernate nor go dormant, and are fertile 12 months of the year.

Millennia of observation in the wild suggest that numbers, overall, are docile and easy to handle.  All numbers will come when called, although more than a few of them have names that would take longer than the estimated age of the universe to say.  Ease of calling is the reason most growers cite for giving their numbers nicknames.

A number will always roost in the same spot—on an imaginary piece of string known as a numberline.  This string is without width or depth, as are the numbers, which line themselves up along its length in order of their size.  As long as there are no gaps when everyone’s up on the roost, you know they are all there.

On the rare occasions when a number does go missing, it can always be found by counting to it.  Many growers count by 2s or 100s or gazillions or Xs or whatever works to land exactly on the number before the sun burns out.

No one has yet succeeded in raising a full flock of numbers in captivity, so questions do remain about housing.  How long a piece of numberline string must you get to hold the entire flock?  And will you need a pickup to get it home?  How much room does it take up when it is rolled tight? What about when it’s fluffed?  Can you see to the other side when you look through it?  Number growers are encouraged to participate in networks and newsgroups to help one another sort these things out.

Fortunately for the novice number grower, it’s not hard to start a flock when we live in a day and age where numbers are just about everywhere for the taking.  They course through the air, and can be written down with tens and elevens, tally marks, cuneiforms, or hieroglyphics.  You can find them in libraries and stores, on the insides of wires and bathroom stalls, anywhere they have logarithms and divide-by-two.  Think locally—educate yourself about the most commonly used numbers in your region and choose those with qualities you admire.  Don’t get carried away with exotics at first, but do include a few if they appeal to you.  Once you get them settled in, be prepared for the young flock to grow.  Numbers reproduce sexually and asexually, and can be planted, hatched, or propagated from cuttings.

It’s unclear how many generations it will take before you flock is complete and has all the numbers. But once your flock is stable and growing you can use your home-grown numbers as you need them and  decide for yourself whether numbers raised in captivity are as robust and diverse as the ones that grow in the wild.