Dennis Jackson ran a rare and used bookstore in San Francisco. I’m grateful for the happenstance that brought us together, though I’m afraid if you were able to ask him now, the feeling would probably not be mutual. I somehow got on his mailing list right around the time I was in town visiting an old friend. I love independent book stores, and the name caught my eye, “Chaosmos, carefully curated books, books from the obscure to the luminous.” Plus, there was a two-for-one coupon.
The bookstore smelled like books, not like peppermint mochas. I loved that. I was greeted by two bookstore cats, one right next to the door, the other lurking nearby. The bold one was a gray tabby who meowed emphatically. Being a keen observer of bookstore cats, I realized I must have come in around dinner time. The shy one was a redhead, lured out of the stacks by the promise of kibble. A middle aged black man proceeded to feed them. Soon he spoke to them in what sounded like a Scottish accent, “Come now, Leopold, you have your own. Let Molly be.”
Leopold and Molly. That is so cute. I took this opportunity to show off my erudition, “Leopold! Leopold Bloom? Does he eat with relish the inner organs of beast and fowl?”
The man turned and beamed warmly (he knows I’ve read Ulysses, and probably suspects I am fond of cats), “Indeed he does, though he generally settles for Friskies.”
I perused the aisles. As promised, there was a carefully curated collection of obscure and luminous books. Literature, poetry, mythology, history, metaphysics, art, philosophy and science. Many foreign language books, books on language, cryptography, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, systems biology. I felt dizzy (like a visitor to the infinite hyperdimensional library of Borges). My quest had plunged me into intellectual depths way outside of my specialty, and I couldn’t help but feel a mad tingling sensation simultaneously drawing me to dozens of books on these shelves.
“Focus, Lipschitz. Focus” I told myself. I settled for a classic Chomsky book on syntax, and a book of Polynesian mythology. I made my way back to the checkout counter, where Leopold kept watch amidst stacks of incoming books. The proprietor peered at me over his glasses as he rang up the Chomsky book.
“Noam Chomsky, Aspects of Syntax.” He spoke in a neutral tone, but it still sounded like a question.
“Right. Well, I’m having a dinner party and I need to convince my guests that I’m an intellectual.”
He eyed me quizzically, half-smiling, some inner calculation proceeding in his consciousness. After a small delay, he replied, “This is an excellent book. I hope your guests are properly impressed. Assuming you actually read it.”
Suddenly it dawned on me that this unassuming fellow standing in front of me was the mind that had had carefully curated this amazing collection of obscure and luminous books.
“Is this your store? This place is fantastic. I’ve never heard of it – I wonder how I ended up on your mailing list.”
He looked puzzled, “I have a mailing list?”
At that moment I started to feel a little awkward about using the online BOGO coupon.
“Maybe my daughter set it up. She helps out around here from time to time.”
Anyway. “So, this bookstore is your baby? Wonderful selection. I have to ask, what’s your background?”
“Ah, well. I was once a professor of linguistics, but I dropped out of the rat race to spend more time with my studies.”
I know dropping out of academia to spend more time doing research sounds ironic, unless you’ve worked at a university. I instantly connected.
“Linguistics? You are just the man I need to talk to. Got anything for alien races beyond human conception?” Filter. Dammit. Normally I have a filter.
Fortunately, he let it go. “Does James Joyce count? I’m fairly competent at Joyce. I once developed an algorithm to discern higher order structure from syntactical patterns in Finnegan’s Wake.”
“Finnegan’s Wake? I tried reading that once. Good job finding higher order patterns in that one!”
“Well, the secret is you have to discard notions about linear word order, strict literal interpretations, and focus on rhythm, syllable length, cadence, repeating motifs, things of that sort. Really, quite a lot of it is in that book you have there.”
“Polynesian mythology? I should have suspected!” being intentionally obtuse.
His patience with me was admirable. He smiled amicably, and let it pass. “My bookstore’s name came from Finnegan’s Wake. Chaosmos. Page 118.”
“I love that word! Chaos, cosmos. Perfect.”
“It also refers to the literary device of chiasma, of which Joyce was so fond.”
Wait! I had actually heard of this one. Back in grad school when I was decompressing my brain between intense periods of scientific rigor, I would smoke pot and try to read Finnegan’s Wake. I never understood it, but it did occasionally make me giggle (which maybe meant some part of my mind understood it). At one point I bought a Cliff Notes guide to James Joyce, and read about his use of chiasma, where a phrase would be repeated in one sense, and then reversed. Sort of like Carefully Curated Books, Books from the Obscure to the Luminous, but not exactly.
He continued. “I spent a lot of time looking for hidden symmetries, like chiasma, detecting broader scale patterns in language. Global connections between repeated motifs, things of that nature.”
Something started tickling my brain. “Chiasmas. Sort of like inverted repeats in DNA.”
He raised his eyebrows.
“There are bits of DNA called transposons that hop all over genomes, they use inverted repeats to pop in and out. Nature’s chiasmas.”
“’Language is a virus from outer space,’” he quoted.
“William Burroughs. Nice… It makes me wonder if any of your linguistic techniques might be applied to molecular biology. I’ve been trying to use information theory to detect… unusual signals in DNA.”
Possibly the slightest hint of an eyeroll at the mention of information theory. “Well, I’ve done a bit of cryptography consulting work, and information theory can certainly be useful when you have no idea what you’re looking for. But I prefer a hypothesis-driven approach to discerning meaning from language. What is the message likely to contain? Is it a natural language? What is its structure? A purely statistical attack mainly generates a lot of uninterpretable correlations.”
I nodded. I certainly had my share of uninterpretable correlations. I was starting to feel a strong sense that I needed this guy on my team. “So, what’s your current research program, here at the University of Chaosmos? Now that you’ve managed to figure out Finnegan’s Wake.”
“Oh, well, I’ve always been captivated by the idea of building a BS detector. But that’s probably not practical, what with Gödel’s Theorem and all that. It would be nice to understand the essence of language and consciousness. What is truth? What is beauty? Simple questions like that.”
“You know, I did see a Chomsky quote recently about how modern science was started because people started to realize that simple things were puzzling.”
He smiled. “That’s my man.” He looked wistful for a moment. “You know, some of my students used to refer to me as Samuel L. Chomsky. This was in reference to a popular American actor, widely considered to be a bad ass.”
“I am aware of his work.”
Suddenly he dropped into his best stone-cold, bad-ass SLJ accent, “And I dare you, I double dare you, motherfucker, say ‘Colorless green ideas sleep furiously’ one more time.”
I was a speechless for a few seconds. “Huh, and so you had a hard time fitting in with academia? That’s weird.” That clinched it. He was officially on the mad science team. “So, you mentioned occasional consulting work. I may actually have a job that’s suitably puzzling for you…”
Though his taste in obscure and luminous books was impeccable, you’d have to move a lot of Chomsky to pay rent in San Francisco, even in this neighborhood. So to discover that he moonlighted as a consultant and translator made a lot of sense. Turned out he was receptive. We talked until well after his regular closing time. By the time I walked out of Chaosmos, it was a dark and stormy night.
I was close to the Wharf and the air smelled like brine, kelp and fish guts. I kept hearing a second pair of footsteps on the wet pavement, but maybe it was the rain echoing in the empty streets. Started imagining shadowy human figures in my peripheral vision, so I ducked into a hole-in-the-wall coffee shop to escape the rain and my paranoid mind. I was greeted by dingy lighting and the welcome smell of stale grease. I paid $5 for an over-brewed coffee and felt the chill gradually seep out of my skin. Through the reflections in the front window I caught a glimpse of a silhouetted figure in a trench coat and a bowler hat, and had an almost subliminal sense of momentary eye contact. I shook it off and dialed up a Lyft to the train station.
I caught the last train back to the South Bay. The train was half-filled with soggy travelers, and I could swear the faint odor of fish guts had followed us onto the train. I ecstatically collapsed into a seat, stripped off my raincoat and started paging through the Polynesian mythology book. I went straight for the sea gods. I read a little about Tangaroa, the sea god of the Maori people, sometimes taking the form of a whale. Banished to the sea after a major dysfunctional god family feud, where he spawned many sea creatures. Moved on to Kanaloa of Hawaii. Ooh, this one is a squid! God of the ocean, the underworld and magic. Lord of slimy, wet venomous things. Possibly the same deity, in cephalopod form. The myth of a scary squid god banished to the depths was not lost on some of the more scholarly fans of H.P. Lovecraft, and possibly to the writer himself, who placed Cthulhu’s sunken prison city, R’lyeh, in the remotest part of the south Pacific. Then there was Dakuwaqa, the shark god of Fiji, who thought he was the top of the food chain until he took on a giant octopus guarding the island of Kaduva. The tentacles have it.
I noticed someone was reading over my shoulder and glanced up. A pale man of indeterminate age, a shaved head and somewhat bulbous eyes was overly fascinated with my reading material. He gestured toward the book and spoke in a raspy voice, “Dakuwaqa. Shark god. He’s not so tough. Kumugwe is better.”
I was annoyed by the interruption, but impressed this random hipster knew about an obscure Polynesian myth. How many over-educated people were there in this city? The poor guy probably had a Ph.D. and worked in Starbucks.
“Well, yeah, he got his ass kicked by a giant octopus. Total wimp. Kumug-what now?”
“Kumugwe. Best sea god ever. Dakuwaqa was beaten by a giant octopus. Kumugwe has a pet giant octopus.”
“So, doing the math, Kumugwe is at least two levels above Dakuwaqa in bad-assitude?”
“Yeah. Plus he eats eyeballs and can see the future.”
I scanned through the index, “He’s not in here.”
“Kumugwe is from the Pacific Northwest. But Tangaroa, Kanaloa, they’re all the same god.”
“And Cthulhu, too, right?” I said, grinning.
His expression didn’t change. “This is my stop.” He grabbed his trench coat and bowler hat and strode away.
