MATH, BATS, AND TELES

  This morning, my son showed me some baseball geometry, by which I mean he demonstrated some of the new thinking about the angles created by your feet when you're batting. I wonder if some older baseball fans are nostalgic for the angles great players of the past used? ("Yogi Berra had an unshiftable faith in the power of the isosceles triangle-- these young kids today don't respect the parallelograms of the past.")
  This reminds me of a conversation I had with a young music student who was visibly disturbed by my assertion that math affected people emotionally. She hated math class, avoiding it whenever possible, and couldn't really deal with the notion that math and music were connected. Music was like her oasis (try not to think of the overrated rock band when I trot out this metaphor).
  To avoid charges of hypocrisy, I'll tell you that my relationship with math (and science too) is complicated. I hated having to sit in classes thinking about all that stuff, but although my actual understanding of those worlds is sketchy at best, I find that philosophically I'm in bed with people who see the world through those lenses. As much as I love music packed with mystery and chaos, I see even that stuff as governed to a large extent by ratios, numeric balance, and the like. I love the work of Schillinger, a man who wrote damned fat books about math and music that have influenced me profoundly in spite of my rarely straying past page three. (On the subject of fat wordy doorstops that mostly stay on my shelves, I used to enjoy reading Spengler while beginning an evening of drinking. I liked the way it illustrated my despotic treatment of my brain cells; it felt like I was forcing my staff to work really hard right before they clocked out for the day.)

  Wrapping up this lagniappe (I like to throw these ten dollar words in for the people who have told me that my writing forces them to pull out the dictionary; for me, dictionaries are like the olives in a martini), I'll add that my son's obsession with the quotidian lore of bats and gloves has reminded me of my youth, when I used to look down on guys who obsessively pored over Gibson catalogs, while I hypocritically thumbed through books containing photos of Fender Telecasters. These physical objects seemed like talismanic totems to us, and I've gradually tried to pull myself out of that kind of gear weirdness, which seems to me now to be counterproductive and fetishistic. In fact, I hate my instruments at this point, and think of them as enemies whom I employ year after year not so much because of their reliability, but rather because (like sinister valets in a Russian play) they've got something on me and I'd rather keep working with them than risk being blackmailed.