Brain Food #585
Palindromes
Thoughts of the day
Today’s Brain Food number is a palindrome: a word, phrase, or sequence of characters that reads the same whether it is read forward or backward. The origin of palindromes dates back to Ancient Greece, although the purpose is left up to interpretation. They could be a means of playfulness, of teasing the brain with constraints.
Some dates can also be palindromes, triggering a search for significance or the expectation of a cosmic event to occur, which rarely does. Similarly, Brain Food has had many palindromic numbers before, which went unnoticed.
What if time could be a palindrome, too? Many films explore this, the most recent example being Tenet by Christopher Nolan, where the entire film narrative and the name itself work in two different directions, and dimensions.
“One step forward, two steps back” is not a palindrome, but could it be the closest our lives could come to being palindromes?
In her Palindrome poem, Lisel Mueller imagines herself in a parallel universe, where she starts from that same point in time, yet moves backward, beautifully describing how we go through life learning and unlearning, changing, but always remaining ourselves.
Palindrome
by Lisel Mueller
There is less difficulty—indeed, no logical difficulty at all—in
imagining two portions of the universe, say two galaxies, in which
time goes one way in one galaxy and the opposite way in the
other. . . . Intelligent beings in each galaxy would regard their own
time as “forward” and time in the other galaxy as “backward.”
—Martin Gardner, in Scientific American
Somewhere now she takes off the dress I am
putting on. It is evening in the antiworld
where she lives. She is forty-five years away
from her death, the hole which spit her out
into pain, impossible at first, later easing,
going, gone. She has unlearned much by now.
Her skin is firming, her memory sharpens,
her hair has grown glossy. She sees without glasses,
she falls in love easily. Her husband has lost his
shuffle, they laugh together. Their money shrinks,
but their ardor increases. Soon her second child
will be young enough to fight its way into her
body and change its life to monkey to frog to
tadpole to cluster of cells to tiny island to
nothing. She is making a list:
Things I will need in the past
lipstick
shampoo
transistor radio
Sergeant Pepper
acne cream
five-year diary with a lock
She is eager, having heard about adolescent love
and the freedom of children. She wants to read
Crime and Punishment and ride on a roller coaster
without getting sick. I think of her as she will
be at fifteen, awkward, too serious. In the
mirror I see she uses her left hand to write,
her other to open a jar. By now our lives should
have crossed. Somewhere sometime we must have
passed one another like going and coming trains,
with both of us looking the other way.
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