Fracture Patterns
The first time I came across the Patterns was learning to play piano at age six. During one of the hated early-morning practice sessions (I was missing the LONE RANGER on TV, dammit!), I realized in a burst that all the different little chords and scales I was roting out were just variations on a theme. The main chords (I didn't think of them as "major" yet) were all, without exception, a note then one 4 baby steps up then 3 more.
I didn't have to learn them all. I just had to learn HOW to do them. The white and black keys didn't seem to be arranged so logically after that, but it didn't matter. I had a method.
It was beautiful.
From that point forward, I began searching for pattern - for Patterns. And I
found them. And they served me well.
Throughout high school and college, they were an invaluable ally against the wandering of my mind. I was classic ADHD - Attention Deficit with Hyperactivity Disorder - and I could no more read a textbook for more than a page at a time than I could fly up to a sixth-floor dorm room. In class, I was forever fidgeting and doodling and writing messages to my friends in cryptic made-up alphabets, doing anything but processing the words coming out of the teacher's mouth. I was saved more than once by a terrific but brief short-term memory, one that let me replay the last few words said when called upon during my wanderings and come up with a reasonable if not wholly accurate answer.
And, of course, by the Patterns. The mnemonics. The tricks. The shortcuts.
There were my first, the musical ones. Similarities - learn one chord structure and you have them all. . Mnemonics - instead of the difficult FCGDAEB remember the order sharps come into keys with the phrase "Father Charles Goes Down And Ends Battle" (and for the flats the obverse "Battle Ends And Down Goes Charles's Father"). I made up my own shortcuts for key fingerings, I learned to just think of one thing and let my fingers figure the rest out.
In school, it was mainly mnemonics and tricks. In Astronomy I learned the order of stars was All Good Boys Do Fine. I remembered how to do sines, cosines, and tangents in Trigonometry by the magic phrase "so ca toe a" (SOHCAHTOA - sine=opposite over hypotenuse, cosine=adjacent over hypotenuse, Tangent=opposite over adjacent). Where there was not a easy mnemonic I could set a long list to song, like applying the list of Presidents of the United States to the theme from "Laverne and Shirley".
My favorites were always the math tricks. Adding up all the numbers from one to a certain number was: that number squared, plus itself, divided by two. 9 was 81+9 halved or 45. 10 was 100+10 halved or 55. 100 was 10,000+100, 10100 halved or 5050. To get the squares of numbers near 50 you just took 2500 and applied the difference between 50 and that number in hundreds, then added (ALWAYS added) the square of that difference. 49 was 2401, 48 was 2304, 47 was 2209 - and going the other way we had 2601 for 51, 2704 for 52, and so on until it became more work than it was worth and you had to apply a NEW trick.
Some of the tricks I learned from teachers and from students, in the oral tradition that has served lazy students for centuries. Others I made up myself. I especially liked the ones I made up myself, and was always disappointed when I found a more elegant trick for the same problem or one that was the same as my trick but which had been made simpler or using a more easily-remembered form of an equation.
Now, I know, all students do this and so do most people that have to work things
out using their brain or remember complicated things on a regular basis as part
of their life or job. But I, you see, used it for EVERYTHING. Two twins in school
- I told them apart because one parted his hair on the left, one on the right:
the left-parted was Jeff, which had the same number of letters in it as "port",
the nautical term for left. Sometimes they were even more convoluted or made
sense via a logic only I understood - I knew my history teacher was Mr. Lawson
because, of course, History is the Son of Law.
And maybe the other thing that set me apart was all of these Patterns I found worked GREAT for me, and they never left me. Most students used their Patterns as a means to remember something for a brief time - a test or a semester. But mine never deserted me, they never rode off like the simpler correlations of name to face or date to occurrence. There was something my brain just LIKED about them, they were like old friends that you're never sorry to see go.
I don't think I started to get into trouble until Medical School.
Medical school is, as some of you know, a mnemonicist's dream and nightmare.
There is so much to learn on top of the crushing amount of work that no one
survives without a multitude of little tricks. The cranial nerves - On Old Olympus's
Towering Tops, A Thin And German Viewed Some Hops. The Dow Jones Industrial
Averages Closing Stock Report took me through the bowels (duodenum, jejunum,
ileum, appendix, colon, sigmoid, and rectum). King MIDAS taught me the possible
causes of coma while the prince of Denmark showed me the carpal bones. But from
all this came my problem.
My problem came about because I had too many old friends, and so many new ones coming in every day. The Patterns began to fight and collide. I would be trying to remember the lobes of the brain and would instead remember the first 50 prime numbers. Trying to remember the tune for the turns on the way home was just as likely to bring up the song for the Preamble to the Constitution or the names of my myriad cousins.
I solved this, at last, by remembering that the Patterns were my friend, not my enemy. I began using new Patterns to remember where all the Patterns went, what they were for. My meta-Patterns organized all my friends, they both differentiated them and sorted them, they made them FINDABLE. And there was more - I also could link multiple Patterns together to solve more complex tasks. A single word or snippet of music could point the way to both that list of cranial nerves and the muscles controlled by each. I could remember my friends' names, what they did, and even their parents' names with but one Pattern, one trick.
This was heady new ground. And, as always, it worked GREAT.
Of course, I didn't finish Medical School. There was too much work, too little sleep involved, even with the aid of Patterns upon Patterns. And my teachers were not willing to cut me too much slack. In their eyes I was too self-absorbed, too unwilling to to more than the minimum, too uninterested in the practice.
They didn't understand what I KNEW, what more I knew every day. They didn't understand what I could DO.
So, I found a variety of jobs that suited my talents. I filed. I indexed. I
collated. But the office life became too dreary after a time, and my bosses
never liked the amount of time I spent reading things that really were none
of my business or part of my job. I was an excellent waiter, I had tools for
every table and a glass never went empty for long and a dish was never placed
in front of the wrong person. But I never lasted for long at any one place.
Still, I made enough money to provide the basics and further the pursuit of Patterns.
I began reading the dictionary, the encyclopedia, looking up a wealth of information on the Internet, and finding a trick for all of it. I began perusing gaming magazines, learning game theory and practice, finding ways to piece out the sequence of moves that lead to a chess position or remembering the order of card playing in Bridge. I flirted a bit with card-counting in Vegas, and made enough to see me through a summer before the word spread.
It was fun. A LOT of fun.
As my skill at calling up the minutiae of the universe grew, I became aware
that whole bodies of knowledge were beginning to coalesce into single thoughts.
I built meta-Pattern on top of meta-Pattern, and I got to where a single phrase
could lead me almost instantly down any path in a whole variety of practice
or knowledge. And then I reduced these down to what I began calling my Words
- a single Word that let to the phrase that lead to the Patterns that gave me
the trick or datum I needed.
I began coalescing these multiple Words into other meta-Words where each letter represented a lesser Word. And eventually I began developing the final Word.
It was a long Word, right at my limit to remember without using another trick which of course would have made things recursive, redundant, circular. Each letter represented on of the greater Words I had organized in my personal constellation of the mind. It of course had a tune to it was well, each tone as significant as each letter, even the way the syllables formed on my tongue important and speaking volumes, each combination of letters from the sequential to the disparate leading me in another direction.
I began keeping the Word on the top of my head, on the tip of my tongue, at all times, and as I did this all the little tricks and traps I had never organized, all the little Patterns I had little use for or which didn't fit anywhere, began finding places to fit. They began slipping into the crevices and gaps in the chains.
And then NEW ones began appearing.
Tricks and data I never dreamed of, stuff I'd never read, methods I'd never
figured out or been taught - all these began appearing as I mused on my Word
and squeezing their way into the strings and the chains, ferreting their way
into rooms I never knew I possessed.
I would be heading home from a new restaurant and suddenly know a new shortcut down roads I had never driven. I would see a woman waiting on the bus and know to tell her that her son was safe.
It got scary - well, it would have been scary if I wasn't so wrapped up in how NEAT it was. One week I only had to read the first paragraph of each magazine article to know where it was going, the next I just had to glance at the first sentence, and finally I just scanned the magazine covers as I walked past the newsstand. To watch TV I just flipped through the sixty channels every hour or so as new programming came on - then I just had to hit the major ones and leave those that were just slightly differing mirrors alone, then one day I realized they were mainly repeating themselves, even if they didn't know it, and the simple knowledge of the schedule was enough.
I began spending less and less time outside. I took long baths and listened to the paths connecting and new ones opening. I hummed tunes to myself made up fragments of the notes of the Word, each time leading myself to a beautiful old composition or a new one undreamed of by Man.
I found Shakespeare's lost plays. I walked down the streets of Alexandria, of Babylon, of the Emerald City. I began piecing together what the other men had learned of astronomy, of the universe, and I pondered not only each person on my sphere and the chain they had come from, but the various forms of life on other spheres - their culture, their peculiar ethics and ways of thinking, their poetry.
I found that each datum, each trick, each sensation led to a mind that had conceived or processed it, that these minds led back through time to grunts and impulses. A chorus of hosts, each mind on each world, began singing the Word. It was all things, it was all times, it was the name of God. It was ME.
I drifted off to hosannas and praise.
And of course, that is why you find me here today, as you have found me every
time in the past few months you have frequented this library, each day you have
decided to drop off your used parcels and acquire new ones.
For, as you know, when I awoke I had forgotten the Word. And I had no trick, no mnemonic, no Pattern to bring it back.
I have tried rebuilding the chain, relearning the old Patterns and making new ones, but it is not to be done. Too much of me is tied up in the Word, everything beyond a basic ability to get along, just enough knowledge and processing to understand what I see and read and seek for that which is lost.
I know it must be here somewhere. This is the neighborhood I grew up in, this is the library I haunted as a child as you haunt it now. This is where the foundation for my tower was built, and it must be here that I will find its key again.
For I know the Word must be one that Man has written, either a proper one or a mundane one, perhaps an amalgam of both, perhaps a compound. But it is here somewhere. I would not have used a made-up word or a meaningless sequence of symbols set to a meaningless tune. It would not have been useful that way, it would not have been a trick, a Pattern.
I know once I find it, the mere repetition in my mouth will lead to the rest - the music, the inflection of the syllables, the mysteries within.
And I will find it, again - or find it for the first time, as up to now I have only built it and lost it. I will find it.
And again I will hear the choruses of angels.
Maintained
by Rick Wyatt - rick@rickwyatt.com