Some more faux-cabbalah numerological teasing from the Admirable Carroll. In this case seven days-to-a-week and five marks-of-the-Snarks are being bandied about with an alarming insouciance. The Bellman is explicating all of this with his steam-powered magic lantern, a Victorian ancestor of the modern-day petrol-driven flatscreen TV.
The attentive reader plucking at my ink-sodden sleeve with his pesky insistence that I explain the previous cabbalistic reference is to be ignored. Focus your eyes instead on my horse-driven pencil as I divide 42 (the Ur-Number of The Hunting of the Snark) by the product of 7 and 5 to obtain the number 1.2, which I them multiply by 7, and then multiply by 5, to obtain … 42!
Of such inexplicable yet amazing coincidences have entire religions (and even financial systems) been built upon, as Bertrand Russell once pointed out, far more succinctly than I.
Snark Film Update … some art and an interview with a matte painter (named Matt, what else?) on the soon-to-be-released-somewhere McNeff live-action version of the Snark. Share and enjoy!
As for entire religions building on operations on 42, you (and Russel) may be right. However, recently it has been observed that in financial systems (with "2" standing for "bowsprit" and 4 standing for "rudder") 42 has been multiplied by 4. The result then has been devided by 7. We all know the result, but perhaps I am the first one who can tell how it happened.
ReplyDeletePerhaps I should not have brought poor Russell into it … he would have pointed out that numbers are always truthful in their operations, it is we humans who cannot be satisfied with just that, and only that
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