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The Cairo Affair Dancing in the Dragon’s Jaws

D. and S. Birks

October 2021

Editing contributions by Daniel Birks

Abstract: An allegory of modern science.

1

Dancing in the Dragon’s Jaws

If blood will flow when flesh and steel are one

Drying in the color of the evening sun…

Perhaps this final act was meant To clinch a lifetime’s argument

That nothing comes from violence and nothing ever could

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, his mind went back to that fateful afternoon

when he first realized the truth…

Right, Gabo: the “Weekend at Bernie’s” fake president, “The China Syndrome” weaponized

virus, and “The Sting” of the so-called “vaccine”? It’d be nice to know the truth.

They say it’s coming: a life under an open heaven where the unbounded truth will free both

you and me––God’s infinite intellect, love, justice, and joy flowing through us and all around

us. But ’til it happens––and the vision of heavenly secrets makes sense of and transforms

earthly reality––I can only make do, and muddle on through.

I’d walked over the same ground a thousand times...Genesis 11:6 :

If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this,

then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.

Pretty strong words: nothing impossible.

I know God confused the world’s language at the Tower of Babel…

But like they say, when God closes a door, he opens a window.

Can you feel the breeze? (Can you feel the rain?)

So maybe it’s we who have missed the point.

Maybe by confusing the spoken language, God was pointing out and allowing us to “hear”

the one true language we do have in common––one that could never be confused and would

always be with us––the language of our very existence: MATH!

2

I’m very well acquainted, too, with matters mathematical,

I understand equations both the simple and quadratical

Boring equations in dusty textbooks? Nah! I could never think of math that way!

Let there be light! Brother Sun, Sister Moon, the planets, and the stars––our DNA,

heartbeat, and body temperature––“every breath I take and every move I make”?

It’s all mathematical! Like a silver-headed monkey in an emerald sea...flowing through us

and all around us, we’re swimming in math! It’s the universal language of creation that

connects us all!

Though we might not share a common lingo, we do share a “common denominator.”

You could speak Babylonian; I could speak Portuguese: we may never be able to talk the talk,

but we can certainly walk the walk! Yep, strip away the babble of spoken and written

language, we’re all part of the same language of life––the math universal!

Put on your pants and do the dance? You could say, we all put on our math trousers one leg

at a time. It goes back to Adam, when “the world was so recent, that many things lacked

names, and in order to mention them it was necessary to point with your finger.”

Feed your wild side, Jack? So easy a caveman can do it? The core of existence?

Yeah, in order to walk through the Garden, to put one foot in front of the other, to be able to

reach out their hand and pick the fruit––even before original sin and the knowledge of good

and evil––for Adam and Eve and “Pinchme”

to go down to the river to swim, they had to

have an internal language of comparison and

calculation, a spatial understanding of the

mind that translates thought into action:

They had to have, and be, the math!

Hmm, that’s deep: the missing link that allows us to think!

Totally primeval, man! I think I just discovered a new species classification to add to the

nomenclature of science: MATHEMATICUS MAXIMUS! (or Math Max, for short!):

“He was a magnificent atavism, a man so purely primitive that he was of the type that

came into the world before the development of the moral nature.”

3

As I live and breathe? So, before their moral collapse, before they could tell right from

wrong, even before free will, Adam and Eve had to have a basis of existence, thought, and

function––the foundation of life and the intellect: math!

Yowza! I’m mathematical, therefore I am? (My sincerest apologies, Descartes!)

And God had to have this understanding before we did!

Wow! An understanding that preexisted our existence, an actual connection, a bond of

union between God and man, between the mind of the Creator and the created: math!

So they had within themselves the genius of the Divine:

The round ocean, and the living air, and the blue sky, and the mind of man; a motion and

a spirit, that impels all thinking things, all objects of thought, and rolls through all things.

“The principle of mathematics the principle of all things”?

Math––it’s here, it’s there, it’s everywhere! Waaah! This is like the birth of a new science!

Kind of sticky, gooey, slippery, and hard to get hold of…I’ll have to think about this!

On the edge of my thoughts, I hear the cry of the gulls. Made the mistake of feeding them

once––had a glorious, gregarious mob. Ah, but those white wings against the blue sky…

like being in a cloud of angels. Now, leaning on the rail, watching them glide over the water

to catch the currents of the air, to swoop, bank, plunge, and hover, to tip their wings, folding

tight and fanning out their tail feathers like señoritas with abanicos dancing a delicate

ballet…what a display! Life floats on the wings of math? The seagulls shrug and salute?

The blind man walks without seeing? How could I have missed it before?

When I think of all God’s creation: The angels of the air, the haunting song of the swan, the

mallard standing on the frozen pond, the monkey with his coconut, the ant burrowing

beneath the burning sand, the whale rising to a surface of lingering swells to exhale stinky

breath from its blowhole, Romeo on a Vespa rushing to Juliet, or Adam, rising from the dust

and taking his first step––in order to walk, jump, climb, fly, swim, or crawl out of the

primordial puddle of ooze, we all need a mathematics of existence, thought, and function!

Well, galloping Galápagos and doodlin’ Darwin! There’s a question for all the evolutionists

out there: Could a natural math evolve or would it have to be there from the start?

Bzzzt! Time’s up! Sorry, Charlie! The new facts of life? What could any of us be or do

without math? Math has to be there to be…Wow! So math isn’t just the disproof of the

Theory of Evolution, it’s also the proof of God! (Ha! As if we needed proof God exists.)