RECURSION

I’m sitting in my chair and I have done this many times before, and it was always the same every time, the same cushion, the same chair, the same television. Everything is always the same. It’s like life is just on a repeat cycle but I suppose that’s how it must be. When I was working, it was a repeat cycle as well. Get up go to work come home have a beer and dinner go to bed. Get up go to work come home have a beer and dinner go to bed. Get up go to work come home have a beer and dinner go to bed, get up… You get the idea, but then there are more cosmic recursions are there not? Every day the Earth rotates so that we see the Sun for a certain amount of time, which we call the day, and we get to see the stars for a certain amount of time that we call the night, as the Earth rotates and we fade into the terminator and back out of it again. It is recursion. And we still use God‘s words for day and night. I guess that’s the recursion of the language of the Bible. That happens all the time in all sorts of contexts. The cycle of good and evil has been happening for all of recorded time and we still do not know how to stop it, and keep it at a good period.

Everything is recursion. The water cycle is recursion, rainfall is evaporated by heat, goes back up into the air as water vapour and then when the air cools, the rain falls again, and it goes back up into the air and the recursion continues.

You look at the stars and you see them rotate every night. They move from east to west every night as the Earth rotates beneath them, and they also move across the sky as the Earth rotates around the Sun, as Heraclides said. Smart buggers those Greeks. Eratosthenes even worked out the size of the Earth by waiting for the recursive motion of the Earth’s rotation, and using a stick and measuring a shadow.

You can see different constellations as the passage of the year passes but it’s not them rotating, it’s you, but you can’t believe the horoscope because that’s complete piffle. The twelve signs of the zodiac were first defined back in Babylonian times, but the Earth has a recursive motion that is called the precession of the equinoxes, and between Babylonian days and now the Earth has precessed just enough to make some of those zodiac constellations different to the original ones. Apart from which if you read the horoscope and believe it you really do need to get another life. I suppose that would be another form of recursion.

If you take a photograph of the sun once a month or even once every couple of weeks with a fixed camera it will form a figure eight, which is called an analemma, and this is also a recursion because you don’t need to take any more photographs. The next year’s sequence will be just the same. The whole thing is because of the inclination of the Earth, which gives us the seasons and there again is another recursive sequence. Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter. People have written a lot about that, even Vivaldi, but he used violins and not verbs, and when his music is finished you will experience the Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter again, over and over.

Then there is the recursion of the tides, flowing in and out twice a day everywhere on the Earth, feeding and then drying out the creatures that live on the edge of the ocean. There is an astonishing number of life forms that exist in this periodic tidal region. Even Sydney rock oysters that you eat at a restaurant and for which you pay a high price, are subject to the tides. The Great Barrier Reef, the only thing made by living creatures that can be seen from the international space station, also reproduces due to the recursive nature of the lunar cycles.

Ancient wisdoms that are passed down from parent to child are recursive as well. Adults tell children things, and the children tell their children the same things, and so the recursion goes on, otherwise Nursery Rhymes would die out. And they don’t, although I think today they might be in danger of being lost. I do not hear kids walking on a footpath and saying, “Step on a crack and you break your mother‘s back.” All of those things are gone, because kids are too busy playing computer games on their smart phones.

I used to tune harpsichords and that is a recursive process as well. You tune the A with a 440 Hz fork, and then go up a fifth and then go up another fifth and then go down an octave because you’re too far up the keyboard, and then you go up another fifth and another, and you keep doing this until you have covered every note in the middle octave, and then the notes that you have tuned must be tuned by octaves to the other notes until you have covered every key on the entire keyboard. It’s a very recursive process but then I suppose music is recursive isn’t it? You have the Sonata form where there is a theme and a development and then a return of the theme, or you have theme and variations where there is a theme and of course bloody variations and a return to the theme at the end, but it’s not the same with life is it?

We all know that that we will die one day. It is the same for everybody, because we have seen it happen and we know it does. There is some kind of recursion promised in the Bible but who knows if that’s true. It might just be the imagination of people living in the iron age. It may be the word of God but which God is that? There are many gods. There was even a pantheon of gods and they died and came back several times and that was some kind of divine recursion. Even Jesus did that, but only once as far as we know, although when he was resurrected apparently all the graves in the area gave up their dead in a mass resurrection.

That was a strange recursion but now we have to think about the rise and fall of civilisations. Rome rose and fell, England’s empire rose and fell, the Spanish empire rose and fell, and many others. There is a rise and fall of everything and that echoes the tides themselves.

Then there are the recursions in mathematics, the most artistic of which is the Mandelbrot set. All you have to do is calculate Z squared plus C and then keep feeding the result back into the initial Z and simply plot everything that does not fly into insanity. If you do that with a high degree of resolution you will then find recursion within the shape itself even at the highest magnifications.

Sometimes the lack of recursion becomes a big puzzle. Take the number pi. There are no recursions in it because it just goes on forever, each digit apparently random. In fact if you converted the numbers in pi into letters it would just be a jumble but somewhere in the infinite length of that number there would be a group of words that made sense and they would describe your entire life but they would also describe your life in infinitely incorrect ways so you can’t rely on pi to tell you when you’ll die.

There is also recursion in the production of beer because everything is recycled. The bottles are recycled, the spent barley is sold to farmers for animal feed, and the spent yeast goes to make Vegemite. The animals eat the feed and shit on the ground and it becomes a fertiliser, probably somewhere it will be fertilising the next generation of barley, which will go to make more beer, and when I worked in a brewery we always kept our particular strains of yeast in the laboratory, so that we could use them again for the next generation of brewing, another recursion, and all the people who eat Vegemite will go and buy some beer so the consumption and production are both recursive.

And there is Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theory, which was achieved by a recursive process of layering symbol upon symbol in order to prove there were true statements in arithmetic that could never be proved by ordinary logic and this upset mathematicians at the time but it has not been disproved and so we still have to believe that self-referential recursion can be fatal for any form of science or mathematics.

Even politics is recursive in its own sad way. First we get Labor, and then we get Liberal, and then we get Labor again, and then we get Liberal, and so it goes round and round like a windmill of moderates. Nobody cares much about that here because they’re really just all the same. The leader doesn’t run the country, the public service does and we don’t get to vote for them. They just stay in their jobs forever, until they die. This is yet another recursion limited only by mortality, and thank God for that.

I wonder sometimes if life could be recursive. The whole universe will die one day, and there will only be a quantum vacuum. Will anything come back and will there be another awesome recursion?