Colonel Lágrimas by Carlos Fonseca
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Purposeful Madness

If, as a mathematical genius, one discovers that the language of mathematics itself is evil, where does one turn for solace, or at least for an explanation of why this is so? Not religion, which uses even less reliable language. Not psychiatry, which has a language no one actually understands. Not science, which is the process by which mathematics is used to poison the world. And certainly not philosophy, whose vocabulary has nothing to communicate at all.

No, if an explanation for the failure of mathematics is to be found anywhere at all, it will be in alchemy, and its cognate field of Kabbalah. Both alchemy and Kabbalah reject conventional wisdom about how the world is constituted. They are the ‘sciences’ of anarchy that undermine all language. The former knows that things are not what they seem. With patience and by using arcane secretive processes, the essence of things can be transformed. The latter knows that the language we use to describe things can only lie. Language can never touch the essences discovered in alchemy. Together alchemy and Kabbalah may reveal the fatal flaw at the heart of mathematics.

So the mathematical genius hides himself, forsaking not just professional society but also all but the most primitive human contact. He “...doesn’t want to be understood. His wish is simpler: he wants to be forgotten... to erase all legacy.” He spends his day doodling esoteric symbols that are inspired by historical figures known, and often persecuted, for their devotion to the dark arts: “... in his desperate battle for anonymity, he seems to inject himself with enormous doses of historical memory. The pleasure of healthy poison.”

The colonel, for so is he unaccountably called by the locals, is not a military man. He was of course born somewhere but he is stateless. He mother was an Hasidic Jew; but his father was a wandering anarchist. So the colonel has no real religion. Perhaps he was already anonymous as far as the world was concerned - except of course for the matter of his mathematical skills. His mathematical writings should be the most vulnerable part of him. Very few others had any interest in them. And none of those with interest could really understand what they meant. On the face of it they are ephemeral - opaque equations, derivations, and proofs. Mere words.

Yet, perversely, these ancient pre-doodles persist. He had asked someone to round up the publications in which they appeared and destroy them. But he doubted the promise. In any case, other mathematicians had seen them already. They would remember the content even if they did not understand it. They would pass on what they knew. The alchemists’ and Kabbalists’ greatest secret was how to hide what they had discovered. This is the secret he was bent on discovering.

But language always wins. It is madness to believe otherwise. The colonel’s sin is irrevocable. When he dies: “Someone will take charge of the macabre task of looking into the corners of this moldy home in search of his final work: a mathematical sketch of an invisible project. Then will come the meetings and a kind of mathematics-cum-mysticism, the posthumous labor of a group of professors-cum-Talmudic sect.” Language is invincible. It conquers even those who use it... no, especially those who use it.

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