[Joe Crocker]

The current issue (17.1) has an interview with Don Paterson and 2 of his poems. I am ill-read and have only recently sampled his stuff. I am having fun exploring it and very much enjoyed his take on the world expressed in the interview.

The two poems are intriguing. Each has its own title but also appears to be part of a series called Aenigmata. They appear to be riddles.

The first “Reed” echoes the traditional riddle format “my first is in”. But soon it becomes clear that it follows a sequence 1,2,3,5,8, 13. This is the Fibonacci sequence. But it seems more related to a musical theme 1=monotonous bird call, 2= two tone nee-naw ambulance siren, 3=the simple triad of a bugle reveille call 5= a pentatonic scale eg 5 black notes and 8= the white notes of an octave, while 13 = all the notes. And with all 13 notes, all tunes are possible. The metaphor now turns to weaving as the notes thread themselves around the lines of the musical stave or the warp of a loom. And I guess that brings us back to the title “Reed” which, as well as being a means of vibrating a musical note, is also the name of the comb that separates the warp strings in a loom.

The second piece “Die”, doesn’t appear to have much to do with death. “Die” refers to that discrete uniform distribution generator used in gambling. I’m not sure I would call it a poem, more of an essay on the ignorant use of mathematical symbols in popular culture. I was a scientist of sorts and it still amuses me when films about clever academics often have them backgrounded by blackboards scrawled with mathematical symbols, which either make no real sense or which have been copied arbitrarily from maths textbooks. My favourite current example is in Match Of The Day when the opening credits show famous footballers and their managers, with Pep Guardiola, the genius behind Man City, looking thoughtful in front of the standard formula for solving the roots of quadratic equations. (So that’s how he does it!). The references Paterson makes to film shots and formulae are, to me, very obscure eg Professor Perot in in the 1943 film Marie Curie. But I nearly choked on my chocolate biscuit when the text then went into an explanation of the difference between aleatory and epistemic uncertainty. I used to work in risk analysis, running probabilistic models of risk scenarios. I have never seen any discussion of uncertainty invoking these terms outside this very narrow field. I wonder how Don Paterson came across the terms. My initial suspicion was that he was randomly plundering statistical textbooks and that this discussion made no more sense than the suggestion that Pep Guardiola might use quadratic equations in his game plans. A sentence like “The spoked diagram perfectly describes the internal/external distinction as it relates to epistemic and aleatory uncertainty, something the literature would not adequately parse until the 1980s.” makes me bristle with skepticism. However, Paterson’s explanation seems pretty sound (although I think epistemic uncertainty can only be entirely “eliminated” with perfect knowledge of a population). So, should I trust him or distrust him on his opinions about things beyond my ken, such as Professor Perot’s spokes or Joseph Parsi’s 15th century notebooks? Is the answer to this riddle, that the poem is playing with us by presenting a textual version of the silly popular pseudoscience that sees mathematical symbols as a kind of magic? Or is it an erudite dissertation that goes way over my head?. Oh, and who are “the guild”?

I'm probably just talking to myself here. But is anyone else interested enough to comment?