20 September 2022
by Rey Armenteros
Eleven-twenty is the new one in her repertoire. She was going from one to ten and then passed ten with eleven, twelve, and then thirteen. With hints of seventeen, sixteen, twenty, and twenty-five in frequent conversation, she is getting the understanding that there are other numbers beyond the ones she knows, beyond her ability to count to ten.
When something is so much that you can’t possibly fathom it, it is eleven-twenty. She brings it up all the time now when trying to impress us with the amount. From the back seat, she said the cars were eleven-twenty, and I looked around, and there were a lot of cars on the freeway. We dropped her off at the Sunday school, and I was quiet, thinking about the significance of those two numbers as they applied to my own learning process as a child.
Sesame Street was my earliest memory of counting numbers, and back in my day, they had a skit that counted to twenty. It was animated, and the numbers were lined up one to ten in one direction, but then they turned around a corner to continue from eleven to twenty. This made the numbers configured like an L, and that was my eleven-twenty.
I know that in my search for connection, I am stretching the boundaries of relationships just to have something tie in with my daughter’s experience. Her eleven-twenty has to do with an amount she cannot yet comprehend. Mine is different. I assume Sesame Street made eleven to twenty turn because they needed to fit the long line inside the squarish shape of a TV screen, and that is the only significance that corner had.
But it affected the way I configure numbers in my head. That corner was multiplied in my brain because of this skit that originated one cool morning in Miami when I was witnessing each number sound out its name. And it did no less than shape the way I will always picture the order of numbers in my head.
Since that day, I begin the one to twenty in the same way. Every time I picture any of the numbers from one to twenty, it is always going around the corner with eleven. Not long after I saw that on TV, I took that basic L-shape and constructed an architecture on the Sesame Street foundation. After twenty, the configuration makes a right turn at twenty-one. From twenty-one to a hundred, it is a straight line. This straight line continues to one hundred ten but then turns left again, following the Sesame Street logic and then following the rest of the rules, but when it gets to two hundred, I make a new column on the right, like creating a new street that is parallel to the first — just like returning the carriage on an old typewriter to start a new line. And the next hundred would be the next block over, and so on. The Sesame Street left turn happens in a greater scale at the eleven thousand and then the right turn at twenty thousand with the hundred thousands also becoming parallel blocks of this advancing city that, instead of starting in some central space by a river or harbor, actually began in a corner of nothing and blew outward like a blast. For my entire life, this has been the way I imagine the placement of numbers.
Numbers have power sources in them. I have been drawn to numbers without ever understanding them. In childhood, my lucky number was eleven; this was due to the baseball uniform my grandmother made for me having this number on the back, and it also happened to be the issue of the first comic book I read seriously. What I liked about it physically, was that it was nothing more than two sticks, and that might have been why my grandmother chose that number when cutting the patterns for them, because a one is easier to cut than any other number. Eventually, I included fourteen as another lucky number. Later, I was drawn to seventeen, partly because in guessing games of the one to twenty type, I would win most with that number.
Tarot cards have an important connection with numbers and numerology. The major arcana are numbered from one to twenty-one, and the Fool is the non-numbered card. In some decks, he is represented with zero, and I have heard that this is actually incorrect. I wonder. I think of natural numbers versus whole numbers. We learn that the conception of zero must have taken a foothold in ancient times after much resistance from the clergy of many cultures. The traders are the ones that had to win in the end because the concept of zero serves an important function as a tool, especially when adding and multiplying through numbers.
The Fool is empty; he has yet to live life, and that is why there is no number attached to it. It is often set in the beginning of the major arcana and no doubt that is why he is sometimes numbered zero while in front of the Mage, who is number one. Is a numberless card the same as one that is marked with a zero? I think certainly not. But they can be synonymous, at times.
I guess we start with nothing, not even zero. I have a solid memory of pondering zero and just not getting it. The first grade mathematics question was eight plus what number equals eight, and I couldn’t believe they were asking such a question, because the puzzle it caused was of the type I thought could never be solved. According to the teacher, however, the answer was zero. And I was enlightened. It was like a magic trick, but when you know a trick, it is no longer fascinating. In a short time, zero became just another number. Eventually, you conclude that zero is not nothing. But zero is a concept, and nothing (if it exists) is the reality.
Yet I think the nothing that we start from has something in it. When our daughter was just born, she came from some mystery that we equate with nothing, but with the little that she had, she understood some things. We call this incipient knowledge instinct. I don’t know where this comes from but I do know she came already knowing something. And from there, her knowledge has grown. Perhaps you need the basics in instinct to grow from.
The daycare she goes to does a good job of teaching her. It used to be that we were aware of everything she was learning because she was exploring things in front of us. Now, she comes home and she knows the alphabet. One day, she will understand the concept of zero, and we will be talking about basic arithmetic problems.
She came home from the daycare with two goldfish one bright afternoon. The daycare was supplying them to teach the kids about feeding and taking care of pets. We felt obliged to buy a fishbowl and fish food. One week later, one of the fish was floating belly up. I was the one at home when this happened, and I went through emergency procedures to revive this thing, almost panicking because the one thing I did not want was for my daughter to understand this thing had died. Twenty minutes later, I had to flush it down the toilet anyways, and I gave a good deal of thought to all the times I wondered about when she was going to one day know about this thing called death. Well, here it arrived. I told her that afternoon that the fish died, and she cried a little, but this was not traumatizing. The second fish was dead one week after that, and she didn’t cry for that one. The Tarot card known as Death does not mean what most people think it means because it is about change and not necessarily death. I can’t remember just now what number pertains to this card. Regardless of the number, I don’t think my daughter actually knew what had happened to her fish because she had yet to internalize the idea of death.
Our family is partly Korean, and in Korea, the number four equals death. From my understanding, this is simply because the number is a homophone with the word death. There may be no other reason.
Four is the only natural number that can be reached by adding a number to itself and also by multiplying the same number with itself. I can see the significance spelled out anew for me when she observes this coincidence one day. Unlike language, this connection is not by design. It arrived at such a condition by accident or higher power. Numbers populate the one system that allows no linguistic interference. They are what they are, and you reach solutions by following prescribed rules.
Counting in numerology runs against what we commonly understand as addition. You take a number that has more than one digit, and you add each digit to create a new number. If that number is still more than one digit, you do it again and again until you get the one digit. That means that the numbers of greatest significance are one to nine. You can’t break them down. They are the numerical elements from which all other numbers come from.
Some numerologists believe the number nine is a highly-spiritual number, and if you add all the one digit numbers using the numerological way of adding, you arrive at nine. (When you add every number between one and nine, you get 45, and when you subsequently add the four and five, you get 9.) In three, you find creation because it takes two to make a third thing; it also has an edge when it appears as a triangle, so I interpret this as sharp or confrontational. Four is stability like the cubic structure of buildings.
This is all fascinating stuff because I can understand the symbolism, but what does it all mean in the end? I use my personal significance with numbers as an interesting way to interact with my world but it might mean nothing more than that.
I know that my preferences for certain numbers over others came from some early interactions with numbers, perhaps while I was playing with toys and noting the dynamics of when you had three action figures rather than two, for instance; three might have had more possibilities because you can do more with a greater number of things.
I prefer odd over even numbers. Odd numbers are more dynamic. Even numbers are made to be balanced, to be “fair.” You need to share, and you need more than one thing to be able to share. But most people, I feel, prefer even. It is a preference that is culturally instilled. Just look at the language. Even sounds justified. Odd sounds like it’s not normal.
One is the number of all things, the beginning, the individual, best represented in my thoughts as a circle. Two is one split down the middle; it summons concepts for the sake of all duality. Though I prefer odd numbers, two happens to be my number, because I am a dualist by nature since I need to have both sides represented in every important decision I make.
The way I look at every concept has to do with how I can split it. My art is split in two: pictorial art and verbal art. In my pictorial art, I make drawings and paintings. In drawing, things are hatched or they are massed. Hatching is when you draw parallel lines to shade an object in a drawing. Massing is when you get the side of a crayon or a broad brush and you shade a mass of color in one sweep. Massing is virtually uncountable, whereas hatching is arguably countable, even if there are hazy or broken lines that are indistinct from others. The time 11:11 shows me four hatched lines. I always liked it for that reason, and also from the conceptual aspect that it is the only time on a digital clock that has four of the same number.
In my dualistic outlook, the conceptual subsets can branch into twos, but there is no symmetry in this because certain things are not split further; if I diagramed these branches, it would look like a family tree that is heavy on one side.
After dropping our daughter off at Sunday school, my wife and I went to the coffee shop. We were talking about the words she’s been using lately. This morning, I heard her use crappy three times, and I was not sure if it was what I thought it was. We agreed that I had to stop using that word around the house.
These days, she always finds the opportunity to say, “I know, I know.” She said it in the car this morning, when I called to her attention a balloon she used to point at as a smaller child. The balloon was missing, and when I pointed that out to her, she said, “I know, I know.” Where did she pick that up? Where did she learn die? She learned the word before the fish ever entered our household. Words can be like numbers, it seems. They line up to get learned, one way or the other, in whatever order they might come.
At the coffee shop, I kept looking at the time. We had to pick her up soon. It was 12:34; this was another minute in the day represented by this strange grouping of numbers based on the units of twelve and sixty that I particularly enjoyed on a digital clock. Her time at Sunday school is the only time my wife and I have together without her. Over cups of coffee, we were talking about our lives. There is a lot that we still need to reach. We have been living life with the gear stuck at neutral for several years now. She asked me how I would like to live life. I told her I didn’t know. I was thinking that as an artist, I was already doing just that, but I did not mention this. What about our family life? I didn’t know, but I told her I’ve been thinking about it.
When we returned to pick her up, we took her to the playground just across the parking lot. It was too hot. I really didn’t want to be there, counting the minutes till we could go home, but I played the part, goofing around, and yet taking every opportunity I could to sneak under the shade. Moments later, I realized that this is the kind of day people idealize. I was finally sitting on a bench, and sunlight was crowning the tree above me. I was looking at the leaves, and through the spaces, the sky was broken into pieces and the sunlight was glittering through them. I found that I was struck with a quiet sadness in this comfortable moment where my wife was talking to another mother and our little girl was running around with a piece of bark in her two hands. It was a moment that we would later look at with fondness, where we were in the same space even if we were not partaking of each other’s direct company. And it was natural to do this, as if it were our routine, and as if it were a day-by-day display of how it always will be till the very end of it.
Before this, she was giving us pieces of bark, telling us they were tickets. Her super power was the ability to turn these tickets back to life. But if anyone else touched them, it would make them die.
She mentioned “die” several times when running around the playground. She was picking up a sliver of bark from an elm when the ticket playing was over, and she was aiming it at me saying I couldn’t do anything or she would shoot her gun. For my wife and I, today presented the moment when the complete innocence we sensed in her was no longer complete. Regardless if the concept of death and using guns were still well beyond her, it was the beginning of something on the long line of symbols, objects, and concepts that would arrive into the field of her understanding and calculation. And that is the way it should be, I guess.
— Rey Armenteros
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