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My plan for the first volume of this journal was to have four
issues of about four articles in each issue. Not only was the
number quiet doable, the quaternary of it all seemed appropriate for
my notions of Trickster as a holistic creative function. Well
needless to say, Trickster will have his own way and Trickster will
count in her own sequence. Health problems with authors and the
editor delayed the production of some essays and the publication of
the third issue. I was faced with a short third issue that would be
slightly late or switching to a three-issue volume with the third
issue being somewhat long. I have wrestled back and forth with
this trying to figure what is the best policy, and I have decided to
go ahead with a third short issue because I want this journal to be,
not only peer reviewed, but also to be prompt with the publishing of
author's essays.
This numerical difference with trickster research should be
telling. We all use numbers to control and order the universe, and
when we talk of numbers we talk of them as though their semiotic
content was stripped down to monovalent count status to, of course, be
used with any set of objects. Some even believe that the universe
itself is a numeric construction whose mathematical description is not
only the most accurate process of describing the universe, but that
somehow numerical truth and mathematical formula are written into the
very fabric of the universe. We metaphorize numbers into the very
thoughts of the Mind of God, and make the Creator the great Geometer,
or we make mathematics into the secret code of the universe that
mankind, the great counter, can manipulate.
However, despite such numeric idolatry and despite our cultural
pretensions that numbers are somehow are not really
“semiotic” like other signs, numbers really are just another set
of signs and, I think, just as subject to Trickster’s semiotic play
as any other sign. If Trickster is the enemy of order, surely the
cultural control feature of numeric operations would be something
where Trickster plays. Such
constructs as mathematical monsters, fractals, or irrational numbers
play recursive disruption of the established orders.
The specter of numeric worship, as it appears in gambling
delusions, lotto fantasies (corporate, governmental, commercial or
individual), numerological scams, and the whole bizzare dance of
recursive mathematical operation continually stretches and challenges
of the boundaries established by the control measures of numeration.
Gematria, letter counting, and even Jungian symbolic use of
numbers become devices which Trickster uses to challenge the more
limited notions of quantification.
So the problems I, as editor, have with quantifying articles and
issues of the first volume of this journal have become prime ground
for Trickster to play with disordering numbers.
Given the abuses of “bottom line” thinking, or the
innumeracy of the educated public, or the awe in which we hold
statistical predictions or calculus proved theories, perhaps it is
just as well that schemes and notions of numeric consistency might be
garbaged by Trickster.
Please direct comments to C. W. Spinks
Editor and Publisher (cspinks at trinity.edu) |
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