alkemical
02-05-2007, 12:02 PM
23: How weird Is That? (http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/artslife/story.html?id=106dafea-2a1f-4188-a10b-e51fabceb952&k=54248)
Ian Daffern
Weekend Post
Saturday, February 03, 2007
I woke up today at 10:13. Ten plus 13 is 23. This article is being published on Feb. 3 -- the second month and third day of the year, or 2/3. Forty-eight years ago on this day, a plane crash killed three legends of rock and roll: Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and the Big Bopper. Other culture heroes like William Shakespeare, Johnny Carson and River Phoenix each had their birth and death on the 23rd day of a month. Kurt Cobain died in the year 1994 (1 + 9 + 9 +4 = 23!). You see where this kind of thinking takes you?
Jim Carrey stars in a supernatural thriller titled The Number 23, which opens on Feb. 23. In it, his character receives a book titled, yes, The Number 23, and as a result becomes aware of a lot of occurrences of 23 in his life. The more he looks, the more he sees. Soon he is obsessed, soon after, unhinged. The film is inspired by an actual occult belief in the number 23, called the 23 Enigma. The more you learn about it, the weirder it becomes.
This is a primer on the number 23, itself a prime number, a number divisible without a remainder by only itself and the number 1. The earth's axis is on a 23-degree tilt. Two divided by three gives you .666 repeating, which rounded off early gives you the Number of the Beast. Three divided by two gives you 1.5 which gives you ? nothing exactly. But wait, there's more!
One of the earliest to subscribe to the 23 Enigma was beat poet William S. Burroughs. For him, it was not just the unusual frequency of the number; it was that in any coincidence he would find the number 23. When he was in Tangiers in the 1960s, Burroughs met one Captain Clark, a ferry captain who boasted of not having had an accident for 23 years. That night the boat sank, killing Clark and everyone aboard. Later that evening, Burroughs heard a radio broadcast about a plane crash. The pilot's name was Captain Clark. The flight number was 23. After that day, Burroughs kept a record of similar coincidences. Throughout his journal, 23 recurred over and over, like a footprint of chance, like the signature on the handiwork of fate.
The 23rd letter of the alphabet is W, a letter whose shape suggests two horns pointing down and three points up, like the devil-horns hand-sign thrown up at rock concerts. On the typewriter keyboard, W lies directly below the two and three. Are you feeling like me yet?
Another high lord of 23 was Robert Anton Wilson, a self-described skeptic, science-fiction author and former Playboy editor. He caught the 23 bug after a Playboy interview with Burroughs, which made him start records of his own. In an essay on the enigma, Wilson writes of how he was thrilled to discover that parents each contribute 23 chromosomes of DNA at their child's conception. He completely freaked out when he learned that Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), the British poet and author of books on magic and the occult, also tied 23 to reproduction "by defining 23 as the number of 'parting, removal, separation,' 'Joy' 'a Thread' and 'Life.' ?Wilson died last month, on Jan. 11, 23 days before the publication of the article you're reading now. What's more, this article was assigned on Jan. 23.Creepy.
Authors like Burroughs, Wilson and Crowley have made 23 a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy -- an in-joke by conspiracy-loving creative types.
That has made it hard to distinguish between deliberate and "authentic" 23s. A prison cell in A Clockwork Orange bears the number 23, which is also the number of humans killed by the androids in Blade Runner and the number of the bowling lane favoured by the Dude in The Big Lebowski: all 23. Chris Carter, the television maestro behind the mega-conspiracy series The X-Files named his production company Ten Thirteen: He was born on Oct. 13, the 13th day of the 10th month.
Cartoonist Jamie Hewlett regularly hid 23 in the background of his comic Tank Girl, before taking it to his current creation, the virtual band Gorillaz. In Gorillaz' autobiography,
Rise of the Ogre, bass player Murdoc takes the piss out of the enigma: "It takes 23 swift kicks with a Cuban-heeled shoe to boot the head off a yak. Coincidence or not?"
Sports are not immune. Michael Jordan's jersey number for the Chicago Bulls was 23, a number he so thoroughly dominated that he and 23 became interchangeable in the hearts of his fans. English soccer-star David Beckham took up the number 23 in tribute to Jordan. His teammate Owen Hargreaves, the only Canadian player in this year's World Cup, also wore 23 when he played for a team in Munich.
And speaking of Canadians, the number of the greatest sports legend of all time, Wayne Gretzky, was 99 -- and 99 is three to the power of two twice. So potent was this combination that the NHL retired it once the Great One left the ice, making sure no player would ever upset the balance of the game. Furthermore, 99 minus 23 is 76 -- the year I was born.
But once you begin noticing the 23 Enigma -- where does it take you? It depends on the significance you ascribe to it. If, like the protagonist of The Number 23 or that of an H.P. Lovecraft story, noticing this signature of fate peals back the skin of reality and upon peeking through, you realize, as you suspected all along, that there is a dark hand manipulating the events of all creation to a malicious end, well then, 23 can be profoundly disturbing. If this is the case, I suggest using a Type 1A Mental Blocker, or Mind-Shield, which, in a pinch, can be constructed using ordinary kitchen aluminum foil.
However, if upon noticing this signpost of coincidence, you find that 23 is a cosmic clue ? or even better -- a key that turns the spirals of happenstance into a system of order, then that is something else altogether. And for this, while I'm far from a believer, at least I can understand the appeal.
We are bombarded with numbers every day. Interest rates. Fatalities. Twin towers falling on the 11th day of the ninth month of 2001 (2 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 11 + 9 = 23!). What a relief it would be to know that these figures had some meaning, if only we could grasp it. If we could peer behind the scenes of the movie set of our lives, like the hero of that other Jim Carrey movie, The Truman Show, and discover a reason for our fortunes, how reassuring, how grounding, would that be? A good lie to live by until the day your number comes up.
Carrey has said in an interview that he is a follower of 23, but whether this was before or after he signed the contract to do the movie I do not know. I wonder, however, what keeps drawing Carrey to these scripts; the meta-reality plays of The Number 23, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Ace Ventura 2. Does perhaps this clown-prince of Hollywood, who pulls on a different face every single day, yearn for a sense of order, for the knowledge that there's something true left underneath?
© National Post 2007
Ian Daffern
Weekend Post
Saturday, February 03, 2007
I woke up today at 10:13. Ten plus 13 is 23. This article is being published on Feb. 3 -- the second month and third day of the year, or 2/3. Forty-eight years ago on this day, a plane crash killed three legends of rock and roll: Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and the Big Bopper. Other culture heroes like William Shakespeare, Johnny Carson and River Phoenix each had their birth and death on the 23rd day of a month. Kurt Cobain died in the year 1994 (1 + 9 + 9 +4 = 23!). You see where this kind of thinking takes you?
Jim Carrey stars in a supernatural thriller titled The Number 23, which opens on Feb. 23. In it, his character receives a book titled, yes, The Number 23, and as a result becomes aware of a lot of occurrences of 23 in his life. The more he looks, the more he sees. Soon he is obsessed, soon after, unhinged. The film is inspired by an actual occult belief in the number 23, called the 23 Enigma. The more you learn about it, the weirder it becomes.
This is a primer on the number 23, itself a prime number, a number divisible without a remainder by only itself and the number 1. The earth's axis is on a 23-degree tilt. Two divided by three gives you .666 repeating, which rounded off early gives you the Number of the Beast. Three divided by two gives you 1.5 which gives you ? nothing exactly. But wait, there's more!
One of the earliest to subscribe to the 23 Enigma was beat poet William S. Burroughs. For him, it was not just the unusual frequency of the number; it was that in any coincidence he would find the number 23. When he was in Tangiers in the 1960s, Burroughs met one Captain Clark, a ferry captain who boasted of not having had an accident for 23 years. That night the boat sank, killing Clark and everyone aboard. Later that evening, Burroughs heard a radio broadcast about a plane crash. The pilot's name was Captain Clark. The flight number was 23. After that day, Burroughs kept a record of similar coincidences. Throughout his journal, 23 recurred over and over, like a footprint of chance, like the signature on the handiwork of fate.
The 23rd letter of the alphabet is W, a letter whose shape suggests two horns pointing down and three points up, like the devil-horns hand-sign thrown up at rock concerts. On the typewriter keyboard, W lies directly below the two and three. Are you feeling like me yet?
Another high lord of 23 was Robert Anton Wilson, a self-described skeptic, science-fiction author and former Playboy editor. He caught the 23 bug after a Playboy interview with Burroughs, which made him start records of his own. In an essay on the enigma, Wilson writes of how he was thrilled to discover that parents each contribute 23 chromosomes of DNA at their child's conception. He completely freaked out when he learned that Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), the British poet and author of books on magic and the occult, also tied 23 to reproduction "by defining 23 as the number of 'parting, removal, separation,' 'Joy' 'a Thread' and 'Life.' ?Wilson died last month, on Jan. 11, 23 days before the publication of the article you're reading now. What's more, this article was assigned on Jan. 23.Creepy.
Authors like Burroughs, Wilson and Crowley have made 23 a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy -- an in-joke by conspiracy-loving creative types.
That has made it hard to distinguish between deliberate and "authentic" 23s. A prison cell in A Clockwork Orange bears the number 23, which is also the number of humans killed by the androids in Blade Runner and the number of the bowling lane favoured by the Dude in The Big Lebowski: all 23. Chris Carter, the television maestro behind the mega-conspiracy series The X-Files named his production company Ten Thirteen: He was born on Oct. 13, the 13th day of the 10th month.
Cartoonist Jamie Hewlett regularly hid 23 in the background of his comic Tank Girl, before taking it to his current creation, the virtual band Gorillaz. In Gorillaz' autobiography,
Rise of the Ogre, bass player Murdoc takes the piss out of the enigma: "It takes 23 swift kicks with a Cuban-heeled shoe to boot the head off a yak. Coincidence or not?"
Sports are not immune. Michael Jordan's jersey number for the Chicago Bulls was 23, a number he so thoroughly dominated that he and 23 became interchangeable in the hearts of his fans. English soccer-star David Beckham took up the number 23 in tribute to Jordan. His teammate Owen Hargreaves, the only Canadian player in this year's World Cup, also wore 23 when he played for a team in Munich.
And speaking of Canadians, the number of the greatest sports legend of all time, Wayne Gretzky, was 99 -- and 99 is three to the power of two twice. So potent was this combination that the NHL retired it once the Great One left the ice, making sure no player would ever upset the balance of the game. Furthermore, 99 minus 23 is 76 -- the year I was born.
But once you begin noticing the 23 Enigma -- where does it take you? It depends on the significance you ascribe to it. If, like the protagonist of The Number 23 or that of an H.P. Lovecraft story, noticing this signature of fate peals back the skin of reality and upon peeking through, you realize, as you suspected all along, that there is a dark hand manipulating the events of all creation to a malicious end, well then, 23 can be profoundly disturbing. If this is the case, I suggest using a Type 1A Mental Blocker, or Mind-Shield, which, in a pinch, can be constructed using ordinary kitchen aluminum foil.
However, if upon noticing this signpost of coincidence, you find that 23 is a cosmic clue ? or even better -- a key that turns the spirals of happenstance into a system of order, then that is something else altogether. And for this, while I'm far from a believer, at least I can understand the appeal.
We are bombarded with numbers every day. Interest rates. Fatalities. Twin towers falling on the 11th day of the ninth month of 2001 (2 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 11 + 9 = 23!). What a relief it would be to know that these figures had some meaning, if only we could grasp it. If we could peer behind the scenes of the movie set of our lives, like the hero of that other Jim Carrey movie, The Truman Show, and discover a reason for our fortunes, how reassuring, how grounding, would that be? A good lie to live by until the day your number comes up.
Carrey has said in an interview that he is a follower of 23, but whether this was before or after he signed the contract to do the movie I do not know. I wonder, however, what keeps drawing Carrey to these scripts; the meta-reality plays of The Number 23, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Ace Ventura 2. Does perhaps this clown-prince of Hollywood, who pulls on a different face every single day, yearn for a sense of order, for the knowledge that there's something true left underneath?
© National Post 2007