29 april 2024

29 april 2024

John Bjarne Grover

It seems that Per Sivle's short story "Berre ein hund" (= 'A mere dog only') from 1885 has a sort of role in the history. It is possible that this could be a wellknown phenomenon: Sivle came from the farm 'Brekke' at Stalheim on top of the steep Stalheimskleiva which leads down to Gudvangen, and Stalheim is close to Haugsvik which is some kilometres up from 'Oppheim'. A person from Oppheim could be called an 'Oppheimdøl' (or even 'Opdølheim'? - no, that sounds more strange again - like a psychiatric hospital, sort of). When I was a teacher at Hauge/Stalheim Privatskule in the spring 1977, some kilometres north of Vossavangen, it was a private school organized by the parents in the village since centralization had struck even there and called for students of smaller schools to be driven by bus down to Oppheim for schooling there. I recognize the language of Per Sivle from the region. If 11 september 2001 in USA were about 'Opdøl', it could even have been about this Sivle story.

Sivle from Stalheim died in 1904 - he seems to have shot himself (unless he got some 'help' from others - and the name of later PM 'Trygve Bratteli' could perhaps have created associations about something like that?) at Christiania Bad - allegedly because the norwegian parliament had not renewed his poet salary. The german army introduced its new helmets called Stahlhelm (annotated from source) in 1916.

I thought: If "Berre ein hund" (= 'A mere dog only') from 1885 is something in the story, it could be because there seem to be elements of the photo of the planet Mars (source) in the book - that is, because Sivle had 'seen' these outlines for his inner mind - the relevant words had given a 'poetic echo' which sounded right by his poetic intuition. The relevant 'ostrich' is, though, slanting like a diagonal. When did Georg Cantor discover his famous 'diagonal argument' or 'diagonal proof of uncountable sets'? Ah, that was precisely also in the year 1884-85 - probably at the same time as Sivle wrote his short story. Cantor had suffered from some depression - he probably felt like a mere dog only after his scientific work had not been sufficiently recognized - but in 1885 he got the stroke of genius which made him famous and which has continued like a stray riddle in mathematics ever since, even if everybody agree that it is nonsense only. The nonsense is seen in its logical format:

- Assume that the ocean is green
- Then let a drop of red colour into it
- Then it is no longer green
- Hence it is red

(See also vol.3 p.318). Assume that you can list or order the set of all real numbers with infinite decimals. Then the set is countable. But then you can make a diagonal to this which is not in the set. Hence the set is uncountable, says Cantor. But that is nonsense - the diagonal is easily counted with one finger (or with 'a mere dog only') and everybody agree on that. The fallacy is in the idea that you cannot negate an adjective and believe that what you then get is something interesting.

Why has this dominated the world of mathematics (or rather thrown a sort of spell of fascination onto some mathematical logic) since then? Probably because of an intuition of Mars - its invisible presence in the mind of Cantor and Sivle even if they did not know about it - like a diagonal in the knowledge of all things: It is something and indeed that is interesting. It has a 'transcendent' presence in the mind - 'uncountable', as Cantor called it.

A few days ago I photographed Tigris and Euphrat on the ground. Yesterday another interesting item presented itself to me on the ground - it looked like a nice woman's dress - she turned around for me to observe it:

Then I returned to some images of Mars for continueing these ideas of Sivle and Cantor - and discovered that this madonna in a dress seemed to occur with a child on the south pole of Mars - made more easily seen by enhanced and annotated photography:

Ah, that is when I understood it - the reason why this woman from the south pole of Mars occurred here on the ground would be that Tigris and Euphrat should be on the north pole - as indeed they do - only in the opposite order Euphrat and Tigis - if it is not a giant panda or even a polar bear:

(Source)

There was a small paper item (a small book, is it?) close to the dress on the ground - which seemed to comment with some precision on the 'Oppheiming' or 'Updulhm' - and which likewise seemed to find a correlate in a detail from the south pole image: