#11 WORD SERIES: APOPHANY

BLOG: I should write one. But I am without ideas, and my dog, Scooter, who sometimes writes for me, is no help today. Scooter is full of ideas but presently he’s focused on my English Muffin.

 Everyone knows how a word always brings a string of others along with it. If you say the word yellow, you can’t help it, you remember things like the yellow shirt sadly splashed with spaghetti sauce. Or maybe the sun, which itself is not yellow even though children color it that way but is a mix of all colors. From space, the sun appears white. Only in a rainbow where its light is separated do we see the sun’s various colors.

 As I have before, I’ll write about a word: apophany:

 My mind bounced to Archimedes. Remember him? He lived a couple hundred years before B.C. flipped to A.D.; a long time before we changed BC/AD to BCE and CE.

 The story is that as he stepped into his bath, Archimedes, mathematician, physicist, engineer, astronomer, and inventor was thinking about his friend Hiero’s problem. (Imagine parenting a kid like Archimedes. Well, his parents solved that problem by sending him off to study in Egypt when he was ten years old)

Friend Hiero gave a goldsmith a goodly amount of pure gold for the making of a votive crown. Those exquisite objects, some even embedded with jewels, were hung at altars or shrines, before sacred images, or even placed on the head of a god’s statue. This was serious stuff.

If you know anything about the behavior of Greek gods, you know not to call down their wrath by deception. Hiero had heard how some goldsmiths cheated clients by concealing silver under the gold exterior of a crown, popping a goodly amount of gold in the smith’s pocket. That was Hiero’s problem. How to know.

Archimedes’ brain was relaxed when he stepped into his bath and noticed the displacement of water.

An epiphany! Suddenly it was clear how the volume of water’s displacement equaled the volume of whatever part of his body disturbed the bath. Archimedes was so excited by his understanding (“mfl=Vflp=Vcylinderp”) that without a thought (like Scooter, so focused on my English muffin that nothing else entered his mind), he jumped from the tub and ran naked into the city streets of Syracuse (Sicily, not New York) yelling,“Eureka!” The Greek interjection meaning, “I’ve got it!”

 drawing by Pietro Scalvini, engraving by Carlo Orsolini, 1737

 An epiphany, a moment of sudden revelation. But that’s not my word today.

My word concerns another sudden revelation. It resembles epiphany, but it is not one.

Apophany: “moments of deluded revelation caused by creating patterns out of unrelated things then believing those patterns to be true.”

Gamblers are good at this when they imagine seeing a pattern in the number of times a pink jockey jersey shows up on a particular race day, or in numbers that appear in repeated throws of dice. They place their bets believing in a pattern.

I was recently given the opportunity to build an apophony. My friend Jeannie called me for the name of an eye doctor.

“I have some sort of eye infection,” she said.

“Wait!” I said, “I have an eye infection.” Coincidence? I think not.

“When did you realize something was wrong?” I asked.

“The other night at dinner.”

“The night I saw you at the restaurant?” The night we both wore green sweaters? Coincidence? I think not. I started paying better attention to this conversation.

“Yeah. I had the lobster tail dinner,” she said.

“You DID?!!

“They weren’t even on the menu,” she added.

“Wait!” I had the lobster special.” Same restaurant, same night, green sweaters, both ordering lobster that wasn’t on the menu. And . . . we each learned about it that very afternoon from the same woman!

A pattern was forming. I hope you can see it. This was like placing my foot in Archimedes’ bath. An “Ah-ha” was building.

Jeannie wasn’t listening to my collection of unrelated things. She carried on. “The chef ordered several pounds of lobster bits for making bisque, but fifteen tails were mistakenly delivered. So, he created fifteen special plates. Nice, huh? I got the last one. Lucky me.”

“Wait! You said you got the fifteenth plate? Do you realize the significance of that number?

My mind had been on Archimedes. Archimedes was Greek, and so was the philosopher, Pythagoras, from whom we get numerology which teaches us that numbers hold the key to one’s personality and unique path in life.

I mean . . . my pattern of unrelated things was stacking up like a game of Jenga. I’m not sure what I was beginning to believe, but I was on my way to it. Just look at all these unrelated things belonging together!

Shazam!

There it was. What more did I need to believe those unrelated things were meant to lead me to an understanding of my friend Jeannie by the discovery of her numerological identity.

“Jeannie,” I said. Fifteen signifies positive change that may even already be in motion, or change that needs to be made (like medicine for an eye infection). Yours is a lucky number. It’s even in your address!

The numbers 1 and 5 describes good talkers. Jeannie IS one! And the gift of art. Jeannie is an Artist! Fifteen speaks of a dramatic temperament and strong magnetism. I mean, this is Jeannie. Who can argue!

My lobster order was number twelve, and I’m not so impressed with the meaning of twelve, so I’ve left it out of my pattern building.

According to proponents of numerology, our guardian angels can’t directly make us make right choices but, hey, they can send us signals. I gave Jeannie the phone number of our eye doctor.

I’m not running into the streets naked, but surely you agree. These seemingly unrelated patterns are full of meaning if you pay attention. I’m a believer!

“Scooter, get your foot off the keyboard.”