[Joe Crocker]

Thanks James. The link did help. (I don’t know why I didn’t Google it any further after learning that Aenigmata was Latin for puzzles.) I had never heard of Symphosius or his hundred riddles.

Paterson’s 2 examples have the same answers as Symphosius’s.

In Aenigmata no. 2 Symphosius uses two senses of “Reed”. First the nymph chased by Pan and turned into a clump of reeds that Pan then used to make his pipes. The second meaning is of a reed used as a quill used with ink to record the teller’s thoughts. On my first reading of Paterson’s version, I could see there was a musical theme, but thought the reed might be a clarinet or oboe reed. A set of panpipes makes much more sense especially as they often come as a 13 note instrument.
Paterson also introduces another sense of reed, not Symphosius’s pen, but the reed used in a weaving loom to separate the warp strings.


Paterson’s essay presented as Aenigmata 90 is about the “Die” used in games of chance. If we already know the answer to his riddle, and are sure we are talking about a six-sided cube, for example, then the uncertainty involved is purely aleatory. Each face of the die has 1/6 probability of facing upwards and no more information is of any use to us. The generating function is wholly random. However, If we do not know that the answer is a die, and all we have are some examples of the outcome of rolling it, then there is epistemic uncertainty to be resolved.

The paragraph that follows between square brackets is simply me rehearsing some dim memories from years ago. Feel free to skip them [If, for example we are presented with outcomes of 3 rolls of the die and we observe 2, 4 and 5, we do not know that they are generated from a uniform discrete distribution from 1 to 6. We only know that at least 3 numbers are involved – it may be a 3 sided die.. We do not know that they are equiprobable – it may be a 4 sided die with two 4s.. If we were told that the outcome of another three rolls were 4, 5 and 3. We would know that there were at least 4 numbers, but we would still not know whether they were equiprobable. If we carry on rolling the die over and over again we will start to get something that looks like a uniform distribution between 1 and 6.ie a distribution that is best explained by rolls of a cube shaped die. But it is still at least possible that we are rolling a die with 1000 faces with equal numbers of 1s, 2s., 3s, 4s, 5s and 6s and also with a single face with, lets say, 173 written on it. There is only one chance in a thousand of turning up the 173 face, so it may take many throws before it appears. The more throws of the die, the more we can be sure of the mechanism used to generate the outcomes. This is an epistemic form of uncertainty which is reduced by increasing knowledge -- in this case by increasing the sample size (or rolls of the die). This is the kind of uncertainty that tends to excite statisticians. Sample size is a key factor in evaluating the degree of certainty that can be placed on scientific results.]

Has this got anything to do with Paterson’s Die riddle? Well, he does discuss aleatory and epistemic uncertainty. If we already know that the answer to the riddle is Die, then there is no epistemic uncertainty, the outcomes of rolling the die are purely random samples of a discrete uniform distribution between 1 and 6. If we do not know the riddle’s answer then the purpose of the poem ought to be to provide us with clues, to improve our information and reduce our epistemic uncertainty so that we arrive at a likely answer. Paterson’s discussion of aspects of probability/uncertainty is a big clue. But I’m less certain how the use of Perot’s spokes and the history of film set dressing semiotics helps us get to “Die”. Perhaps, in establishing that the mathematical symbols used as backgrounds have little or no relation to substance or plot of the film, then Paterson may be using the words ‘partial’, ‘spurious’,’ nonsensical,’ ‘pure invention’, ‘haphazard’, ‘meaningless runes’, as synonyms of the word “random” (used in the modern sense of arbitrary?). Interestingly, nowhere in this essay does Paterson actually use the word “random”. Could “random” be the subject of the epigraph -- that which is not named but whose power is among us? “Random” leads us fairly straightforwardly to “Die”.

A couple of other notes
1) There seems to be a typo in this carefully written piece. In Line 7 of the first paragraph there is the phase “will almost always often feature”. I think you may “often feature” or “almost always feature”, but both?
2) The original 100 riddles by Symphosius are each of only 3 lines of classical Latin poetry. The riddles given to us by Paterson are rather longer. “Reed” is, recognisably, a poem, but “Die” is not. I’m still wondering why.

[Matt Q]

I find Die interesting. Intriguing, in fact. It made me want to reread it. In part that was because I wanted to know what it was doing/saying, especially given that it was presenting itself as a poem. Is it saying something about anything other than itself – is it working figuratively? Does it resolve? Does it turn? Is the narrator reliable? And so on. So, I guess it was ridde-like in that respect.

One theme the poem takes up is pretence, appearance. The diagrams, we are told, are used, typically inaccurately, for dramatic effect. Curie's story is repackaged, slanted to serve the dramatics of the storyline. Though this is not explicitly developed in the latter half of the poem, it might well, as Joe says, lead us to ask to what to extent is Paterson doing the same thing in poem. Is Paterson playing with mathematics as a back-drop/scenery to his poem? Do these diagrams really appear as often, and in the contexts he says they do, or even at all. And if they do, they denote what Paterson says they do?

Another theme is the distinction between the potentially predictable and the truly random. The poem’s close does seem play off what's gone before with respect to this. The N asserts that the spokes diagram appears to reliably precede a dramatic turn in films' plots, and asks if this the result of pure coincidence (an aleatory factor) or not. The N’s uncertainty about this is epistemic: it's something that could in principle be established if he had more knowledge.

The reader’s uncertainty, above, is epistemic too. We could in principle, find Parsi’s notebooks and look. We may well try. (No spoilers, but I did, and maybe in this sense, solved the riddle). So, actually the question of whether this co-occurrence is predictable (epistemic) or not (aleatory), is itself epistemic in the sense that we could in principle ask the script writers, but also epistemic on another level, in that the poem's claims may be bogus anyway.

Is it poem? (Do we even have a universally agreed definition of a poem?) And does it really matter? Irrespective of how we’d classify it, this piece of writing is asking us to take it as a poem, not as the essay, or sociological or historical study that it resembles (its form), and we should read it in that light, I reckon. FWIW, my working definition of a poem is: the sort of thing one finds in poetry books and poetry journals, so I don’t have problem with this being called a poem. Others may have narrower definitions, of course. The border between prose poetry and related forms like short fiction, essays, reports etc., is often hard to pin down (and again, beyond the desire classify, there’s maybe no strong reason to try).

Is it a good/bad poem? I quite enjoy poems that are playfully puzzling or absurd and call themselves into question, and I don’t really really mind if there’s no deeper meaning. I enjoyed the ride. Different people want different things from a poem though. Some people want emotional heft, or an emphasis on sound or rhythm, or fresh/unexpected use of language, or some reflection on the human condition. I’m not sure the poem gives us anything like that. But still, it kept my interest and had me rereading, more so than many poems do.

If it were a bad poem (let’s say we all agreed on this), could I conclude from that Paterson was past his prime? I really don't see how. The sample size is way too small. Even in their prime, few poets only produce good poems. (By which I mean, of course, poems that I think are good!).

[Joe Crocker]

I have just now re-read the Paterson interview in LM and came across the following paragraph that I had missed earlier.

One is always writing a new collection, alas. Symphosius wrote one hundred after-dinner riddles, the Aenigmata, and I’m trying to write a hundred sixteen-line poems that use the solutions to those riddles as the titles. I expect I’ll fall short of the goal somewhere around the sixty-four-page extent zone. The book has nothing to do with riddles or Symphosius at all, but the list of pre-determined subjects that I’ve stolen from Aenigmata is weirdly comprehensive.

It helps a little, except that Die is not a 16 line poem, though it is a riddle.