X=Mr. Castricone/Math

This post really started way back with a man named Mr. Castricone. I never really knew his first name, and I'm pretty sure I'm spelling his last name wrong. Anyway. I'll get to him in a minute.

The way to really start this is through a post I recently really enjoyed over at the incomparable digs of John August. John observed something recently that I thought was quite nifty, with the spank of truth. An excerpt from his post "Vampires are the imaginary numbers of Modern Literature" follows:

Vampires do not exist. That is, they do not exist in the same way you or I do. You’ve never met an undead blood-sucker, and neither have I. Yet we can both agree on quite a few characteristics of these non-existent beings:

They drink blood.
They avoid sunlight.
They’re strong.
They are undead and undying, except by special procedures.
This checklist is by no means complete: different writers may choose to add or subtract abilities. Shape-shifting and hypnosis were once pretty common traits that have all but disappeared from the modern vampire. Likewise, flight and coffin-sleeping seem to be on the wane...

Neither vampires nor imaginary numbers exist, yet we treat them like they do, simply because it suits our purposes. Imaginary numbers let us posit hypothetical mathematical scenarios; vampires let us imagine hypothetical human scenarios. Want an addiction analogy? Vampires. Epidemic? Vampires. Alienation? Vampires. Need to have your protagonist exist both now and two hundred years in the past? Just make him a vampire.

I loved this idea, not just because of how much it's true, but because of my own tortured history with imaginary numbers, and Math in general.

Math and I started to part ways in ninth grade. I was in a class that was too advanced for me, with a teacher who didn't really know how to teach the few of us who weren't Rainman-level math prodigies. I dumbed down for Grade 10 and 11.

Then came 12th grade. It was tough. I went in for extra help. But things really hit the rails when we hit the unit on imaginary numbers. Because when we hit imaginary numbers, something in my head snapped. I couldn't grok it. I tried. I tried the homework. I went in every day and got help, from Mr. Castricone, my Grade 12 math teacher. He was a very gentle and a kind man. A very good teacher. He had a stutter, and some people made fun of him for it...and he was a swarthy guy who sweated, and other people made fun of him for that. But for me he was a life raft. I'd had three years of cold, uncaring math teachers. And this guy -- well, he was different. He loved math. You could see that. He wanted you to love it too. I felt so badly that I didn't. Lord knows I tried.

I never did get the imaginary numbers. I was so scared that I was going to fail math. I couldn't understand how I was defeated, laid low, and cast aside by this concept of imaginary numbers... if they were imaginary...why did I need to know about them? If they were imaginary, how could they fit into...math? WHAT the FUCK was going ON?

Mr. Castricone tried to explain the unit to me at least ten times. We went over the sample problems. We worked through the book. I didn't get a lick of it. I was clearly, irrevocably blocked. Broken. Math. Feh. It did this to me. I was done. It was the only time in my life that I've ever felt dumb. Great for character building, lousy for day-to-day life when you're a teenager.

I kept going back. I had drama to take care of, and the school paper, and I had a girlfriend, but I still kept going back to Mr. Castricone.

He never did get me to understand and be comfortable with math problems that involved the dreaded imaginary numbers - and I sweated terribly at the thought that I was going to fail 12th Grade Math. I'd never failed a course before.

But Mr. Castricone was kind. He told me, "Denis, show up. Write the exam. You have worked hard. You've come in for help. Do your best, and you won't fail."

And then he fixed me with what I still consider to be my first ever adult-to-adult stare. And he said this: "Now. That being said, I fully expect, I'm not going to see you in any math classes next year." (Back then, high school in Canada went to Grade 13. The Maths in Grade 13 included Calculus and Algebra and...I don't know...kill the Russians with Equations or something.)

I understood our bargain, and I kept to it. I passed. I did not take Grade 13 math.

I heard a few years later that Mr. Castricone died of cancer. I thought about him with respect and thanks, and then it receded as these things do, until John August's analogy brought the memory of him, and my problems with math, back.

After reading August's post about Vampires, I went back and looked at the imaginary number problems that had stalked me since I was sixteen, and maybe I didn't understand them totally...but they were no longer the Undiscovered Country.

These two competing strains -- My memory of Math and John's post about Vampires -- butted around in my head for a few days. And then I found myself in the Production office of Across The River To Motor City one day, and I was waiting on something and had time to kill. And I took one of those online tests -- spatial stuff and math stuff -- and I scored pretty highly.

I'd internalized the narrative of my failure in math for so long -- it had become such an article of faith for me -- that I'd not questioned it for years. I have trouble with everything beyond the basics. I'm not the guy for Math. I'm hopeless at it.

Except then I remembered conversations I'd had twenty years ago in high school, with people who were good in math. I remembered articles I'd read about chess prodigies. How they saw everything spatially -- not as problems on a board or on a plane, but how they imagined the concepts, the equations, almost hanging in three dimensional space. They "saw" the answer. I never got that. It was voodoo.

But now, I'd spent weeks getting into notes discussions, and defending and trying to understand and process changes to six hour long drama scripts. People get elements of the narrative confused. They want to change this and that for production reasons. They don't understand why this change can't be made. They're confused about the timeline. Can this be night? Can that be day? What if we move this here? What if this character says this earlier? What if this happens later?

With some of these suggestions, or fixes, I realized that I was the only one who was able to see how all these thread rippled through the whole six hours. How this setup and this payoff interrelated; how if you changed this thing in Ep.3, it would ruin something in Ep. 6. It sounds like crazy talk, doesn't it? It sounds like the delusions of Russel Crowe's character in A Beautiful Mind.

But then, suddenly, I realized something.

I was seeing the whole story spatially. Story points hung there, in space. I could see them in three dimensions, just hanging there. Of course if you disturbed one, it would knock into this and change that. I couldn't understand how the people asking the questions couldn't see what I was seeing.

It was math. But it wasn't numbers. Numbers were signifiers. These were concepts. Story ideas, beats, acts, flow, sequences -- but what are these things if not mathematical components adding up to a whole?

Oh Mr. Castricone. It wasn't that I didn't get the math. It's just that I didn't care about the numbers.

Thanks for everything you did. You helped me more than you know. I wish I could tell you that right now.

Today's my 38th birthday. I'm not scared of math anymore. I see stories spatially, in three dimensions. Life is good.