Twenty-Three, and the Man Who Counted It

There is a story William Burroughs told, and Robert Anton Wilson could not stop retelling, and now I cannot stop either — which is the entire point, and also the only warning you are going to get.

The story goes like this. In Tangier, sometime around 1960, Burroughs knew a ferry captain named Clark, who ran a little boat across to Spain. One afternoon Clark mentioned, the way men mention things they are proud of and pretend not to be, that he had worked the crossing for twenty-three years without a single accident. That same day the boat went down. All hands. And that evening, as Burroughs sat making a note of the grim little coincidence, the radio cut in with news of an airliner that had come apart over Florida. The flight number was 23. The pilot’s name was Clark.

Wilson heard that and was infected for life. He started keeping a tally. And the instant he began counting, twenty-three came for him — house numbers, the ages of strangers, the page a dropped book fell open to, the digital clock he happened to glance at, the change handed back to him at the register. It arrived constantly, relentlessly, the way your own name arrives the moment someone murmurs it across a crowded and otherwise deafening room.

The skeptic is correct, which is exactly how he loses

Here the reasonable man clears his throat. This, he explains, is confirmation bias — the oldest defect in the wetware. Set yourself to hunt for twenty-three and of course you will bag it, because twenty-three is everywhere, because every small number is everywhere, because a mind instructed to seek will seek and then mistake the seeking for a finding. Seventeen would have served as well. The number is not following you. You have simply agreed, without noticing the moment you agreed, to follow the number.

And he is right. Every word of it. And he believes, having said it, that he has refuted us — and that is the precise instant the door he has been leaning against all this time swings quietly open behind him, because we never once claimed the number was magic. We are claiming something stranger and far harder to shake off: that the attention is the magic, and the number is merely where it came down to land.

The skeptic thinks he has explained the coincidence away. What he has actually done is describe the mechanism of revelation in flawless detail and then mistake the description for a debunking. Of course you find what you look for. That is not the embarrassing flaw in the practice. That is the practice. It is the fnord working as designed — invisible until someone teaches your eye the shape of the gap, and then unmissable for the rest of your natural life. Twenty-three is a fnord that put on a number’s coat and went out walking.

Why this number, and why on this day

Take it apart. Two and three. Add them and you get five, and you have walked face-first into the Law of Fives, which holds that all things happen in fives, or are divisible by five, or are in some fashion directly or indirectly appropriate to five — a law that is, as the Principia admits with a wink, “never wrong,” for the simple reason that it has been carefully built so that it never can be. Two over three is the ratio your eye keeps mistaking for the golden one. There are twenty-three pairs of chromosomes, and one of those pairs decides, on a coin-flip, which of two things you will spend your life being told you are. The number is busy. It has a schedule.

And today — if you have come to this on the day it was filed — is the twenty-third of Confusion. I want to be clear that I did not arrange this. I arranged only to write about twenty-three; the calendar supplied the rest, unasked, the way it always does. You are free to make of the timing exactly as much as your training will permit you, and not one fnord more.

That is the whole of the teaching. The goddess does not hide in the number. She hides in the half-second between seeing the number and deciding it means nothing. Most people have been schooled to spend that half-second very quickly. A Discordian learns to live there.

Hail Eris. Count nothing. Notice everything.