Open Writing

Arithmetic has been my downfall. I would have fared better in a pre-mathematics world where there was no need to square pies, chop logarithms, or know how mean the distance was between woe and misery. As a child I struggled to find out how long it would take a static water tank to empty if it held forty-thousand gallons and leaked at a rate of three gallons a minute. My answer "It depends whether the tank was full to begin with and how far the site of the leak is from the bottom of the tank" drew biting comment from my teacher, and mirthful support from my classmates who recognised its validity.

My place in the annual arithmetic examination was next to the bottom except for my last year in Form Four in which I mysteriously occupied the place next to the top. Even thinking about doing sums hurts my brain, my mind goes all to pieces, and I can focus on nothing except getting back to ‘modus non numerus.’

It is a comfort to know that my incompatibility with numerical computation is not unique. Ptolemy I of Ægypt said to Euclid, the Greek geometrician, "Hey, Euk, there has to be an easy way to learn all this stuff you do. Whereupon, Euk relied, "You wish! There is no royal road to geometry." To this day, Euk is correct.

But, who knows, Ptolemy and me could be in a for a big surprise, although it is too late for either of us, because the Americans are now finding ways to reduce the time it takes to do and learn many things. So far nothing appears to be working for the numbers game, but I am keeping my eyes peeled just in case a really, really easy scheme pops out of the woodwork.

That wonderful instrument of information, television, informs an apparently impatient population that hard work and mental effort are no longer necessary to achieve primacy in any field of endeavour. With the minimum outlay of cash, a minimum investment of time, and a sure-fire scientifically developed method of instruction, any person can achieve their dreams the lazy way, that is, by taking the ‘Royal Road’ to success. What did Euk know, huh?

A learning system promising to teach anyone any language promises success without effort. It reminds me of the old failed programme that placed a loudspeaker under the pillow, the premise being that it filled the mind with facts during sleep. You don’t see those anymore, and for a good reason.

I’d say that every man who gets the wrong side of thirty looks at the mandatory abdominal protrusion in the bathroom mirror and remembers being nineteen when it was like your granny’s rubbing board. For the vain who want to do with time what Knut was advised he could do with the tide, there is an easy way to get six-pack abdominal muscles. You have to buy the programme, and with no more than five minutes a day on three days a week – for the mathematically challenged, that’s a total of fifteen minutes per week – you will have a set of rectus abdomini that stands out like an alpine range.

Do you wish you had worked harder at school and passed the eleven-plus, gone to grammar school, then on to university, and become a don in the cloistered quads, shining forth with wisdom like a bright star in the darkness of night, but didn’t? Do not despair. Just choose a degree, fill in an online application form, and send it off for the degree of your choice. And in seven days you will be the proud possessor of a baccalaureate, magisterium, or doctorae degree in the discipline of your choice, and all for a few hundred pounds, but sans effort, sans tempus, and sans knowledge.

Or perhaps your immediate need is to lose weight. You will have dieted and tried to lose weight more than ten times, but failed and slipped back into your old habits each time, and you are now desperate and a nervous wreck because the more you think about dieting, the more you eat, and the higher the bathroom scale creaks upwards towards the "one at a time, please!" sign. No more failure – guaranteed! You can either buy a bottle of pills for £80 for a thirsty day supply, or some cream to rub on your skin, and the fat will miraculously disappear.

The promise is that the excess body weight, "Which is not your fault!" will disappear as swiftly as your cash, but in practice this has not been found to be the case. The advertisements fail to make the point that pills or rub-ons alone will change nothing but your bank balance, and that unless they are supplemented with diet and exercise, nothing will happen, which is where we came in, because diet and exercise will reduce weight, and the pills will not motivate a person to undertake either. Ho hum!

Have you failed repeatedly in choosing a life husband or wife? Fail no more! One company will match you to your perfect mate on twenty-nine deep levels of compatibility, in short time – no more long courtships, dancing around, looking your best, speaking nicely, or behaving as if butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth. Join this scheme and find love, perfect love, molto rapidamente!

The flaw in the system is that the principals looking for compatible persons fill in the forms themselves and if they are not completely honest the whole thing collapses. It is noted that applicants tend to dance around the truth of the causes of past relationship failures, express themselves nicely, sometimes artificially so, send flattering pictures, and describe themselves as if butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths. Which is where they came in!

Perhaps you want to get rich quick, make your fortune, and retire to a desert island for which you paid cash after only six months on the system. Then you are catered for. You can either buy lots of houses for no cash at all, and pay for them with the profits of re-selling theme, or else you can become an online investor, etc. etc, etc.

All you have to do is to send for the "Big Book Of How To Make A Fortune From Nothing" and you are on your way. If that sounds too daunting, you could always write a book of nonsense by collecting details of get-rich-quick schemes offered by others and put it up for sale on eBay or television and live off the profits. There are always plenty of people looking to get rich without working, without effort, without any knowledge of commerce, and often without any idea of anything. Invariably they fail.

Have you always wanted to play the piano, but didn’t like practising? You can buy an ingenious speedy learning plan that promises you that you will be booking Carnegie Hall – the Royal Albert Hall if you do really well – in six months time, although you will be accomplished enough to give public performances after only two weeks.

If your ambition does not extend to the above stellar occupations and all you want is some way to clean your bathroom and kitchen, or get the blood out of your best suit after a night’s entertainment, there are a host of products offered by a tele-fascist adman who shouts like an old-time street crier, and is as welcome in the living room as an enraged rhinoceros with toothache would be in a small caravan. He is said to be English, but if he is, then I suspect that Billy Mays was exiled by the combined will of the British people. He shouts, and those of us who were not deaf when he first burst onto our small screens have now been made hard of hearing by the sheer volume of his intense deliveries.

However, he has, he insists, the answer to all your cleaning problems, whether it is stubborn stains inside the unmentionable, soap scum on your bath, mould on your shower walls, blood on your dinner jacket, hard to remove grass stains on your kitchen floor, or pet traces on walls, upholstery, curtains, decks, or ceilings. Please note that all you have to do is to virtually show the bottle, spray gun, cleaning pad, or power-sudser to your stubborn stains, scum, moulds, and traces and they instantly surrender, and move into your neighbour’s home never to return!

These – and many other – products are marketed in between the moment in the film you are watching when Charles Laughton jumps out towards the great bell of Notre Dame, and the moment that he actually lands on it. What this does for our digestion and hypertension has not been clinically studied, but I shouldn’t wonder there’s a doctorate in it for someone willing to give it a few days. Just as you sense the resolution of the commercial, a sonorous voice-over adds, "But wait- call in the next ten minutes and we’ll double your order! This product is not available in stores." Sometimes the voice promises to add to your order two or three of the products they were selling at fantastic prices six months ago, of which they evidently have mountains of unsold stock, but will send it to you "Absolutely free with your order. You just pay shipping and handling." The voice does not tell you that shipping and handling costs more than the products are worth. They are in business for their benefit, not for yours.

"Still," you figure, "If buying these products works so easily and well - ‘bling!’ – they are worth the cost, and imagine getting those other items free!" You give your secret number to the disembodied but pleasant voice at the other end of the call line, spell your name twice, provide your address, and sit back for a life of ease and glowing cleanliness.

Looking for the easy way has spoiled many a person whose early life showed outstanding promise for a bright future, but whose loathing for effort and application prevented his ever striking a bat towards that promise. Sad to say, these, among the constitutionally lazy, the chronically fatigued, and the aged who are unable to do what they once did but still have aspirations to move forward, are the target audience for "Do it quickly, effortlessly, and buy it from me NOW!" merchants whose products, or potent analogues of them, can be purchased from budget stores for a fraction of the cost.

Some of these do-it-fast-and-easy schemes have occasionally seemed attractive to me, but I am still looking for a quick and easy way to access them without having to lift the telephone and do all that dialling and telling. So far, nothing!

But all is not lost. Using the non-maths half of his brain, King Ptolemy – not to be confused with Ptolemy the Mathematico after whom the Ptolemaic System is named - established the Great Library at Alexandria that contained half a million manuscripts, and housed a museum, a zoo and a facility equal to a research laboratory. He never did find the Royal Road, but his learning that there wasn’t one didn’t stop him moving forward and not only accomplishing a great deal himself, but through his influence, some of the greatest names of the ancient world who laid the foundations of modern civilisations, arts, and sciences, were assisted on their hard roads to success.

In Ptolemy’s Alexandrian laboratory Euclid, Heron, Claudius Ptolemy, and Archimedes worked out their grand schemes. Science and mathematics were developed, geared machinery was built, experiments with steam and jet engines conducted, biological and medical studies advanced, ancient texts copied and translated including translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek by seventy-two Jewish scribes to produce the Septuagint.

So despite the door of computation being shut fast against the unfortunate, celestial light still shines through the window, and the wise, like their royal predecessor, will bathe in its inspiration and press on with arts, literature, theology, philosophy, religion, and a hundred other subjects that enrich lives in ways that mathematics cannot broach, but without which the world and its people would be unpleasantly darker.

Copyright © Ronnie Bray

All Rights Reserved

Other stories at:
http://www.2theheart.com/author_ronnie_bray
http://www.meridianmagazine.com/voices/011024summer.html

If your mind goes blank - how do you know?