9 October 2984

a thousand years later


1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144.........the series of Leonardo Fibonacci (or Leonardo of Pisa, 1170-1250). His influence persists as the series he discovered continues to set the proportions of the universe. Unaffected by history, they say, or even by natural evolution, which it guides rather than follows.

So does it guide this, or pervade it, this story of the year 2984 as imagined now from the twenty-first century by the still present mind of these fingers... someone who read 1984 but disbelieved it, a thousand years earlier, after it was written by George Orwell who himself died in 1950, the year zero that replaced the birth of Jesus in the now discarded Christian calendar.

Everything changed when George died, at that connective moment, as it must for each one of us when we die, though death is not the termination of everything. A presence has gone but its influence does not cease suddenly, it continues for all time in that each action or event has unending consequences. And a unity besides. (Such a unity as that of a series?)

one

one

two

three

five

eight

thirteen

twenty-one

...to write these numbers as words is to move slightly from pure ratios towards the world as it is, as it was, as it will be, still eternally returning though constantly new and as complex and as unique and as apparently mixed-up as is each and every moment.

This isn't like the science fiction we knew in the last Christian century, thank goodness, when belief in the sublime fell away and the mind was discounted, despite Fibonacci, and others. This is the fiction of reality, write the fingers, and of course each reality is an illusion.

Did the series exist before Fibonacci? Did mathematics exist before mathematicians? Isn't that a good question? And what is your answer, he asked of someone.

We would write yes, write the fingers, but the someone says no, for to her mathematics is the way that mathematicians see things, not necessarily what they are.

But what about seashells, type the fingers, they existed before people and yet they follow the Fibonacci numbers in the outward growth of their spirals?

Ah, but that is what people have observed, it's a function of the mind to perceive that way - the whole of nature is interpretation, it's a series of fictions, as is this, this collection of stories, this book of the world, as it is, as it was, as it could be the end of the chapter.

Yes George Orwell's 1984 continues, and though we have escaped the consequences he foresaw, it has consequences of its own and more later.

What is this? This is life.