Plum blossoms fade,
Cherry trees bloom;
The mathematics of change written in petals.

A gust of spring wind, and a flurry of white petals flies from the plum trees, now shedding their blossoms after an unusually long flourishing. Just as the white flowers fragment into uncounted flying flakes, so the spams and the nametags fly to me in the postal mail and online. I have well over a thousand printed adhesive nametags now, and they keep coming. Yesterday's arrivals were adorned by drawings made by children with cancer, or lavishly colorful flowers of the season. Tomorrow, perhaps more kittens and puppies. If I were to use each one of these labels in the proper way, I'd have to send out more than a thousand pieces of paper mail. In other words, I would become a mass mailer myself.

On line, the hundreds and hundreds of spam e-mails don't stop either, nor the manufactured names which appear with them. The names are like those "virtual particles" which we are told are sizzling around us at every micro-moment, coming into being and disappearing so quickly that "existence" may not be the right word for them. Or they are like the multi-billions of neutrinos, each of them some form of individual existing entity, that nevertheless pass through us every second without a trace. Every spam-name neutrino is different for every recipient, produced by the endlessly inventive combinatorics of the name generators. I have heard from ordinary follks like Erma Mullen, Gilda Marino, Lesa Charles, and Alexander Howard. But I have also heard from fantastic characters like Reannon Cephus, Firdaus Cheeseman, Theodosius Stoker, Eustorgio Bingman, Lamprecht Hylton, Husam Reiff, and one of my favorites so far, Tutankhamon Barsh.

And then I receive spam mails from those names made from dictionary words scrambled together, which can be a constant source of amusement. "Notably U. Worsens" has worriedly e-mailed me, as well as "Chimp J. Freaked" and the macho "Flexed U. Hairiest." "Arsenic R. Factorization" might have sent me a poison pen letter, while "Helsinki G. Bathed" sent a clean bill from Finland. "Dextrous U. Lozenge," as always, tries to sell me (fake) drugs, while "Equivocally D. Curlicue" offers me a low-cost mortgage. But the best one so far recently has been the ethnically relevant "Schmucks U. Birthplace." For me, that would be Boston, Massachusetts.

Their subject lines are cryptic and as always with virtual entities, on the edge of meaning but not quite there: "Trachea result arisen mel," reads one. "Peak formatting georgia accrual," offers another. "It tall rubbery," writes Ada Rutledge. What was tall and rubbery? Lately they have been more enthusiastic, adding punctuation: "At domain hades able?" "With denizen learn oh?" Walker Lacey writes: "Islamabad hey tributary at singular!" And Erin McFarland writes: "Confocal hey dibble in isotopic!" Hey dibble dibble, isotopes are so exciting! If I were schizophrenic, these would mean something. I'm almost there.

Electron readers may be tired by now of my posts about spam and junk mail. They are my seasonal refrains, all of them tied to myriad multiplication of individual entities, whether snowflakes or petals or neutrinos. Our world, as calculus and quantum mechanics tell us, is made not of any smooth continuous substance but a texture wrought of uncountable particles which shimmer and flow, to our macroscopic perspective, together as one surface. The whole living world, both virtual and physical, is built from these infinitesimals. The flying petals, the whispering digital voices, the flutter of a thousand blackbird wings in the trees, the pixels on the screen, the name-labels which plead and cajole, make up our world, where solidity is an illusion sustained only by our distance.

Posted at 3:39 am | link