Myths and Maths

Myths and Maths

Or

The Myth-tress and the Math-ter

Part the First

Once upon a time not so long ago but nearer than you might think there lived a woman of indeterminate age, some say she was young and some say she was old but I will leave it up to you to decide. Her name was Selene and there was nothing she liked better than to gaze at the moon whether it was full and brightening the night into day

or whether it was the finest most delicate crescent hanging in the luminous blue of the evening sky….

One night whilst she was myth-tering  (for those who have never heard of this it means gazing softly at beautiful things thus making space for stories to arise out of your imagination, not so much letting either as  they bang on your inner door until you let them out more likely!) she heard voices coming from which direction she knew not. And this is what they said:

‘How many times have we had this conversation whilst the wheels of creation spin?’

‘ Infinitely, is the answer…my dear!’

‘ But it is simply not so, for it was I who was created first and you slipped from my womb whole and entire as you are today. It was the ALPH who made us from pure breath, a sigh of loneliness and our sleeping selves were woken to enter into ALPH’S greater dream.’

‘Not at all my darling, it was I myself and me who came first and you grew from my rib for so it was said to me by the dream whisperer The ALPH OM, indeed the very most beginning and the end.’

‘And what about the middle? asked the Mythtress, for that is who she was, arguing eternally with the Mathter for this was their purpose. ‘Who came first and who was last and was the last to become first and the first last as the future had spoken all those aeons ago..’

‘You can’t mix your metaphorical time slips like that. There is no middle only the beginning lengthening to the ending or indeed the ending beginning earlier, will you never understand?’ he replied

So it continued, the Mythtress and the Mathter engaging themselves in wordplay, as to who was right, well I will leave that to you my dear reader.

On the other hand Selene struggled with understanding for sometimes she just knew stuff  in her heart but when her head started to make a sense of it all, it went fuzzy again. She had heard them mention Alf O’May, surely a well known Irish folk singer of the time, but what time and when time she couldn’t quite grasp.

‘You well know,’ said the Mathter ‘that humans again and again mistake the ALPH and OM for something entirely other’

‘Do you mean those certain lazy humans who shorten the NAME into aom. This sound, the first sound of the creation.’  she said.

Selene wondered about what they were saying and indeed if what they said was true.

‘You know that there is not only the first but the last sound for because there is only the beginning and the end spiralling infinitely round their double zero and chanted