Cicadas in the Storybook Savannah
A long time ago, the cicadas in the Storybook Savannah found composite numbers baffling, in the same way that we find the number "120,473" more baffling than "10". Recall, dear reader, that the Storybook Savannah was born of an ill-tempered wish, a human's desire for a fundamentally simple world. But such a desire is vain, and simplicity to an unthinking human eye is a Potemkin village, hiding the knotty disorder that enables such a smooth veneer.
The cicadas do not use place value, you see-- they are caught up in the upbeat and whorl of primes. They represent 2, 7, 13, and 997 with only one digit each. But a number like 36, which we find pleasantly symmetric (2 times 2 times 3 times 3) requires four digits to write! To the humans who brought this world into motion, this was a curse to be overcome. They correctly reasoned that counting would be rendered arduous: "the number after seven is two-two-two, after which is three-three". The twee moral they hoped for was that cicadas would enlist other animals to help understand the world, just as they would be enlisted in return. Interdependence and community, arising in an orderly fashion from fundamental difference-- how desirable! What a pleasant toy model with which to enjoy the facts of existence!
Of course there is interdependence in the Storybook Savannah; of course animals help one another navigate a universe made hostile to them by the specter of legibility. But ending the conversation there undermines the tenacity of the mind, the richness of neuroplasticity. Perhaps even now, to those of us weaned on place value, the cicadas' counting-songs will seem needlessly baroque, a waste of time better spent spewing widgets. But the rhythm of the primes as you count them, where every second number contains a two, lends itself to a sort of looping story structure. Once the first cicada poet likened numbers to ideas, the first cicada counting-epic was born, whose 128 verses each corresponded to a number in counting order. Each number is represented in the story as an idea-- "day" represents 2, 3 is a protagonist-figure, and so forth. I'll replicate it here to the best of my translating ability, emphasizing the "number words":
(1) In the face of formless hibernation,
(2) the first day broke-- and the first love, too.
(3) That night the nascent Three was born,
(2-2) and then the days were doubly bright.
(5) And with the Feast they held one night,
(2-3) Three had the strength to see the sun.
There are scores of these epics, passed down through itinerant mathematician-poets. They're more than enough to burn the rhythms of everyday counting into one's head. And once you've learned enough of them it's impossible not to notice that every six verses, Three is mentioned during the day. Nor is it possible to ignore the amusing consistency with which every thirty-five verses the demon Seven interrupts a feast. To the cicadas, the primes we see as fundamentally irregular fill gaps in regularity, inventions providing something to say when the cycles of the world are silent. They are the glue that prevents time from grinding to a halt when the universe is in fallow.
And these poems reflect space, era, culture, subculture, and even the identity of the family that made them-- all this in a tool made to count, say, from 243 to 343. It's not uncommon for marriage proposals to involve learning another family's heirloom counting-epic-- expressing a love so great that it reconfigures your relationship to the ebb and flow of time.
Yes, in this world made bewildering by the selfish desire for legibility, it is reassuring that the circulation of art can make it habitable again.