[page 9]9 This is the parable of the mysterious light beaming / much of this Atomic Age. There was no God...
9 There is the unmistakable—if, not surprisingly, difficult to interpret—thread of numerology woven throughout the manuscript. In particular, the number 9 (e.g., each poetic line numbers nine words; etc.). A pattern that holds even when linear logic does not. The number nine and its devisors place the text and its underlying structure squarely within the framework of various other mystical traditions (e.g., Dante’s nine circles of hell; nine innings and twenty-seven outs per side in a baseball game, ninety feet between the bases; the ninety-nine faces of God; 108 beads on the Buddhist rosary, etc.). Mathematics is, of course, the oldest order, the one threaded through everything, arguably the one most mystical of all.
TJ BEITELMAN 