Considering I enjoyed most subjects and had varied interests, choosing to study mathematics at university was a strangely easy decision. It felt like an inevitable outcome. There were a few contributing factors: I found symbolic manipulation quite restful, my parents weren’t opposed to it, it didn’t seem likely to leave me unemployable. The courses in maths seemed to draw me more than the other options. But the dominant feeling for me was that there was some dark secret at the heart of mathematics, and I wanted to know what it was.1
It turns out - or so I felt on leaving university - that the heart of mathematics is less a dark embryo; rather it is fragmented and blurry, with the odd bit of duct tape holding it in place.2
The term “dark embryo” is something I came across in a book about playwriting3 where it said that every successful play had at its heart a dark embryo. It may not be a coincidence that as I was losing faith in my love for mathematics I became obsessed with theatre. My final couple of years I spent a lot of my time developing immersive plays about cults, writing “ghost story” plays for campus radio, borrowing my theatrical housemates’ books about Stanislavsky, and making largely unsuccessful attempts to get into acting. So many of my good memories from this time involve watching theatre performances. I had a grand plan for an immersive performance of Waiting for Godot set on a resurrected ghost ship Titanic, which would be impossible to stage but trust me, in my head it’s awesome.
Anyway. It turns out I like things with dark secrets at their heart, I guess.4
I wonder how many of us are drawn to these secretive, inexpressible mysteries. It’s rarely what you hear about when people describe their work or their motivations. But I suspect this kind of wordless desire to reach the heart of the mystery is not rare. It may even be a universal part of the things people undertake from their own free choice instead of by necessity.
At the same time, mysteries are not always easy to keep a hold of. They can be shifting, fleeting; they can elude you only to appear again in a new guise. I’d like to think more about these mysteries. How our faith in them is found, and lost, and rebuilt.
It may be worth saying explicitly that I’m using the term “dark secret” without any of the negative connotations it sometimes carries. Except that being dark, it’s hard to see and there’s a chance you might fall and break your neck.
I no longer feel quite this way, but it’s complicated.
The spelling is playwright, and playwriting, what kind of a mess is that?
This is actually not the post I intended to write. I was planning to write about a thought that struck me this morning, that “the dark embryo at the heart of philosophy is misogyny”. I think there’s a case to be made for this, but it turns out I’m not in the mood.