Dear friends,
Today I leapt into the lake to wash the bookkeeping off.
The year’s been busy with films & construction, so many tasks got triaged, which is a polite way of describing procrastination. Most of the spreadsheets got bumped into autumn, after the start of school, after the Camden Film Festival, and now right smack into the middle of the backyard pear harvest. By harvest, I mean the misshapen pears falling from our misshapen pear tree onto the ground. We try to get them before the crows do, but the sight of a crow with a pear skewered onto its beak is high rural comedy, so we are not well-motivated gleaners. We’ve yet to see a partridge in the pear tree.
I’ve always done a lot of my own bookkeeping, partly out of embarrassment over my purchasing practices and partly because I love numbers. But this year, for whatever reason, the number of projects and LLCs aswirl is getting the better of me, so I think I shall soon hang up my bookkeeper’s costume and seek help. As it is, a colleague and a bookkeeper help with a few of the bigger projects, so surely help is not too far afield. Once, another colleague tried to get me to hire a bookkeeping firm in San Francisco, but for what we would have paid them, we could have bought a luxury canoe each month.
The intersection of filmmaking, spreadsheets and canoes is not a viable newsletter topic, so I’m hopeful that this week’s drivel, especially after another lull of these past weeks, will get my unsubscribe rate back up to respectable rates. But we filmmakers do spend a surprising amount of time in spreadsheets, not just tracking expenses but also building lists of potential locations, collaborators, characters, and all the rest. Deciding who we invite to participate in our films isn’t a tidy or quantitative process, but spreadsheets get involved, and there are enormous numbers of ideas, names, themes and organizations sprawled across the research hard drives of my past films.
I have wondered, at times, if we would ever bring these all together into some enormous database: the Wicked Delicate Universe. They’re unwieldy, so I don’t see how we would do it, and they’re also quickly outdated, as contacts move on, change jobs, retire. But I’m comforted by their existence, whether as a trace of the process that went in to creating the films we’ve made, or as a well of inspiration I can always dip back into. There are a few people who pop up now and again, who I’ve never had the chance to work with. One of them is Carlo Rovelli, who responded politely to my request to bring him to the Maine woods to talk about quantum physics. He made the mistake of not flat out denying the request, merely saying he was busy, so I’ll just write him every year until he wises up and tells me that according to quantum physics, the Maine woods don’t exist at all, so our visit is not possible.
I suppose my grasp of quantum physics, like my career in numbers, got stunted at some point. My love of numbers in elementary school manifested itself in odd ways that puzzled my teachers, and I won’t go into those here, because by the time my schooling was through, I’d gone over to poetry more than calculus. My dream of becoming an astronomer led me to become an observer of a different kind. More of a wanderer than a physicist, if I’m being generous with myself. (To be a planet, incidentally, is to be a wanderer; that’s what the word means. This information is free of charge!)
Lately, I’ve been thinking of studying calculus. Not because it would help with bookkeeping, nor because I think I’d really be able to find the time, but mostly because I’m curious what the brain can do. And then what a brain would do with it. Did I fade away from calculus my senior year of high school because suddenly the bridge between it and what I wanted to do with it - stargaze - seemed unimaginable? Intangible? I wonder about all the false starts we make as young people finding our way into the world. All the trails we do not take. 27 years later, what might I now make of calculus? What would I see that I now do not see? I don’t like the idea of not knowing. It feels like a way of sensing what those trails-not-taken would have been like.
Before I leapt into the lake, I stormed up a small mountain trail, having spent too long at the desk and fallen into a pleasant rage. The woods were quiet, and I could hear acorns falling now and again as I wound my way up among the roots and rocks. It took about five minutes to shed the madness of the numbers, and after fifteen minutes I was a mile from the trailhead, sky high and looking out at the lake, the big lake near here, loving the long shadows of spruce trees across the water. The wind was picking up and it felt delightfully cool after the climb. I could have wondered what my high school calculus teacher would have made of all this, whether calculus could shape a brain in any appreciable way that one could sense from a mountainside perch in Maine, but from what I recall, he mostly wanted to repair his motorcycle, not teach calculus, and who could blame him. All those numbers, you need the wind now and again.
Very fun blog, Ian. And your photo is stunning.
The word "calculus" comes from the Latin for pebble, because Romans used pebbles on counting boards. (This information is also free of charge!) As for the intersection of caluclus and poetry, I found this poet — Britt Kaufmann who "set out to take calculus for the first time at age 47 so she could cross it off her bucket list. She did not expect it to lead to her first full-length collection of poetry:" A new release entitled: Midlife Calculus: Poems Paperback - September 6, 2024. I hope her work is not "derivative."