Maybe (Maybe Not) (19 page)

F
rom the personal finitude of navels to an infinite universal.

3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197 and so on, and on, and on.

Pi or π. The number of times that a circle’s diameter will fit around its circumference. Or, in other words, the distance around the outside of the circle divided by the distance across the middle of the circle.

So far as we know, this ratio cannot be calculated with perfect precision.

So far, no pattern emerges in the endless parade of digits.

Pi, therefore, is a transcendental number.

I am not now, nor have I ever been, a mathematics enthusiast. But given this information in junior high
school, I felt I had been handed the end of the fine thin string that was attached to infinity. This was not math, it was metaphysics.

In ninth grade, I entered a contest to see who could memorize the longest extension of pi. I got as far as thirty-nine decimal places. And took third place. Even now, somewhere in the filing cabinets of my head, thirty-nine places of pi remain—still attached to the inconceivable.

The infinitude of pi has intrigued students of mathmatics for almost four thousand years. The earliest written record is on a papyrus scroll from Egypt from about 1650 B.C.

In the seventeenth century, Ludolph van Culen, a German mathematician, calculated pi to thirty-five decimal places—a remarkable feat if all you have to work with is your head and a pencil and paper. Pi absorbed his mental energy for most of his life, and was so important to him he had it carved on his tombstone.

Though it is suspected that there is no pattern in pi and never will be, the hunt continues now that we have the power of supercomputers at our command. A trillion digits is possible. Working at 100 million operations per second, the latest achievement is 2 billion 260 million 336 digits, ending in 9896531. Printed in a single line, the number would reach from Seattle
to Miami. Looking very carefully, you will still see no pattern that suggests an end.

So what? Who cares?

Those who want to know what’s beyond present knowledge.

Those who wanted to know what the back side of the moon looked like.

Those who are driven by the same curiosity that launched the orbiting telescope, the Mars biosphere, cell engineering, cancer research, and the project to contact intelligent life in outer space. The same spirit that investigates belief in an afterlife and the nature of God.

Those who believe there
just must be an explanation.

We are not comfortable with untidy solutions and loose relationships. We want an existence built around a binary code. Yes or no. Black or white. True or false.

Much of the machinery of our time is binary.

The expression of most phenomena can be reduced to complex sequences of on-off, open-shut, yes-no dichotomies. The language of the computer upon which I am writing at this moment is based on a binary code. In the standard convention, each letter of the alphabet has an eight-bit code of ones and zeros.

Same as with Morse code of telegraph days—dot or dash. And now the thick/thin bar codes for product pricing. Something or nothing. Being or nonbeing.
Yin or yang. Even in Biblical days, decisions were made in the temple with two stones, the Urim and Thummin, cast to determine the will of God.

Pi doesn’t fit the program here. It’s a tangible star trek—a bridge between the known and the infinite. It is a puzzle that exists anywhere in the universe where round things exist. From the shape of planets to waves of energy in far space to the spiral of living DNA to the circle of the lens of the human eye and the shape of each person—the perfect roundness of the single egg each of us once was—just before the moment of conception. All a matter of pi. The elegant mystery of the relationship between
around
and
across
acting in concert.

Will we ever find a repetitive pattern to pi?

Will we ever exactly know the nature of God?

With ultimate questions, the answers always seem to hang in the balance.

The answer is always the same.…

I
t is the year 2050. In a large Eastern European city—one that has survived the vicissitudes of more than a thousand years of human activity—in an open square in the city center—there is a rather odd civic monument. A bronze statue.

Not a soldier or politician.

Not a general on a horse or a king on a throne.

Instead, the figure of a somewhat common man, sitting in a chair.

Playing his cello.

Around the pedestal on which the statue sits, there are bouquets of flowers.

If you count, you will always find twenty-two flowers in each bunch.

The cellist is a national hero.

If you ask to hear the story of this statue, you will be told of a time of civil war in this city. Demagogues lit bonfires of hatred between citizens who belonged to different religions and ethnic groups. Everyone became an enemy of someone else. None was exempt or safe. Men, women, children, babies, grandparents—old and young—strong and weak—partisan and innocent—all, all were victims in the end. Many were maimed. Many were killed. Those who did not die lived like animals in the ruins of the city.

Except one man. A musician. A cellist. He came to a certain street corner every day. Dressed in formal black evening clothes, sitting in a fire-charred chair, he played his cello. Knowing he might be shot or beaten, still he played. Day after day he came. To play the most beautiful music he knew.

Day after day after day. For twenty-two days.

His music was stronger than hate. His courage, stronger than fear.

And in time other musicians were captured by his spirit, and they took their places in the street beside him. These acts of courage were contagious. Anyone who could play an instrument or sing found a place at a street intersection somewhere in the city and made music.

In time the fighting stopped.

The music and the city and the people lived on.

A nice fable. A lovely story. Something adults might make up to inspire children. A tale of the kind found
in tourist guidebooks explaining and embellishing the myths behind civic statuary. A place to have your picture taken.

Is there any truth in such a parable other than the implied acknowledgment of the sentimentality of mythmaking? The real world does not work this way. We all know that. Cellists seldom become civic heroes—music doesn’t affect wars.

Vedran Smailovic does not agree.

In
The New York Times Magazine
, July 1992, his photograph appeared.

Middle-aged, longish hair, great bushy mustache. He is dressed in formal evening clothes. Sitting in a café chair in the middle of a street. In front of a bakery where mortar fire struck a breadline in late May, killing twenty-two people. He is playing his cello. As a member of the Sarajevo Opera Orchestra, there is little he can do about hate and war—it has been going on in Sarajevo for centuries. Even so, every day for twenty-two days he has braved sniper and artillery fire to play Albinoni’s profoundly moving Adagio in G Minor.

I wonder if he chose this piece of music knowing it was constructed from a manuscript fragment found in the ruins of Dresden after the Second World War? The music survived the firebombing. Perhaps that is why he played it there in the scarred street in Sarajevo, where people died waiting in line for bread. Something must triumph over horror.

Is this man crazy? Maybe. Is his gesture futile? Yes, in a conventional sense, yes, of course. But what can a cellist do? What madness to go out alone in the streets and address the world with a wooden box and a hair-strung bow. What can a cellist do?

All he knows how to do. Speaking softly with his cello, one note at a time, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, calling out the rats that infest the human spirit.

Vedran Smailovic is a real person.

What he did is true.

Neither the breadline nor the mortar shell nor the music is fiction.

For all the fairy tales, these acts
do
take place in the world in which we live.

Sometimes history knocks at the most ordinary door to see if anyone is at home. Sometimes someone is.

Most everyone in Sarajevo knows now what a cellist can do—for the place where Vedran played has become an informal shrine, a place of honor. Croats, Serbs, Muslims, Christians alike—they all know his name and face.

They place flowers where he played. Commemorating the hope that must never die—that someday, somehow, the best of humanity shall overcome the worst, not through unexpected miracles but through the expected acts of the many.

Sarajevo is not the only place where Vedran Smailovic
is known. An artist in Seattle, Washington, saw his picture and read his story. Her name is Beliz Brother. Real person—real name. What could an artist do?

She organized twenty-two cellists to play in twenty-two public places in Seattle for twenty-two days, and on the final day, all twenty-two played together in one place in front of a store window displaying burned-out bread pans, twenty-two loaves of bread, and twenty-two roses.

People came. Newspaper reporters and television cameras were there. The story and the pictures were fed into the news networks of the world. And passed back to Vedran Smailovic that he might know his music had been heard and passed on. Others have begun to play in many cities. In Washington, D.C., twenty-two cellists played the day our new president was sworn into office. Who knows who might hear? Who knows what might happen?

Millions of people saw Vedran’s story in
The New York Times.
Millions have seen and heard the continuing story picked up by the media.

Now you, too, know.

Tell it to someone. This is urgent news. Keep it alive in the world.

As for the end of the story, who among us shall insist the rest of the story cannot come true? Who shall say the monument in the park in Sarajevo will never come to pass? The cynic who lives in a dark
hole in my most secret mind says one cellist cannot stop a war, and music can ultimately be only a dirge played over the unimaginable.

But somewhere in my soul I know otherwise.

Listen.

Never, ever, regret or apologize for believing that when one man or one woman decides to risk addressing the world with truth, the world may stop what it is doing and hear.

There is too much evidence to the contrary.

When we cease believing this, the music will surely stop.

The myth of the impossible dream is more powerful than all the facts of history. In my imagination, I lay flowers at the statue memorializing Vedran Smailovic—a monument that has not yet been built, but
may
be.

Meanwhile, a cellist plays in the streets of Sarajevo.

R
OBERT
F
ULGHUM
’s books—
All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, It Was on Fire When I Lay Down on It, Uh-Oh, Maybe (Maybe Not)
, and
From Beginning to End—
have sold more than fourteen million copies in twenty-seven languages in ninety-three countries. He has four children and lives with his wife, a family physician, on a houseboat in Seattle, Washington.