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(#17.5) Goedel’s Psychiatric Cheat Sheets

This description appears on pages
85-87 of the guide to the G.R.”Joe”

Museum of the Imaginary and the Impossible*
The physical location of the collection is just south of Savannah
on Tybee Island, Georgia.

Catalogue #17.5 (maths)  Received by Museum:  2 January 1960 

Kurt Godel’s Psychiatric Cheat-Sheet;  The Logician’s
Notes on Surviving the 50-Minute Hour

Kurt Goedel, this
century’s greatest logician (inventor/discoverer of the uncertainty principle
and destroyer of what was thought to be the nearly-completed castle of Mathematical Finality) fled/escaped National Socialist Germany
in 1940 and settled in Princeton’s ’s Institute for Advanced Studies
(IAS).  Goedel’s remarkable logical
ability was followed closely by his collection of singularities—in a world of
uneven people at the IAS, Goedel’s Unusual Prominences were highly unusual, and
for many “odd” people Kurt Goedel was the definition of their three-letter
defining disclaimer.

On exhibit is a
collection of the intellectual paraphernalia that Goedel evidently assembled to
bring with him to a September 1949 therapy session with his Trenton
psychiatrist, Dr. R. Blister Kent. 
Goedel put together a number of thoughts on various scraps of material
that he must have used as “thought prompters”—their existence and purpose
was  revealed in a series of letters to
the Postmaster of Princeton describing these iconic objects “as Tibetan prayer
rags…they were supposed to assure me of a certain level of attention and
suffice to bring my mind to the business of the therapy session….without my
scribbled clues I would have found myself bored beyond the supplication of
mortal words.”

We see here the
contents of an aged manila envelope labeled “

Trenton 
Dr. Can Not Sep49” including the following, (with Goedel’s notations in quotation):

(Two)  Pressed flowers  with “ask about the laundry”; (three)
Ticonderoga pencils with penciled notes “at what time did I happen”;  matchbook cover (“Happy’s Coffee Happy
Restaurant”) with “I thought to stay and I stayed to go…”; a U.S. penny with a
penned “x” through Lincoln’s head and the tiny words “not to be The Eat”; a 2’
long and 1” wide rolled piece of paper with musings on the relationship between
memory, truth and imagination; a menu for a 1954 formal dinner introducing the
JOHNIAC computer at the IAS in which Goedel has drawn a self portrait next to
all  listed honorees names except his
own; and several other small, inscrutable items.

 In
Goedel’s collected correspondence from his uninvited letters to the Dead Letter
Office at the Trenton Post Office period it is can be seen that he was
intending to construct a puzzle of these objects and writings which were
believed to contain the key for his germinal theory on the mathematics of
boredom.

“There
is a small leap from genius to boredom; if that can be breached and the two
great concepts brought together I believe that I can accomplish truly wonderful
thinking” Goedel wrote.  “I believe in
boredom.  It is the Kind Devil that
allows thought to grow; it is the great emancipator of time.  Boredom always wins; if I can ally that great
heaviness with the energy of genius in pure form [i.e. mathematical formalism—editor] there will be no end to my
creation.” 

Curator’s Notes:  Goedel had (many would say “suffered”) a
life-long obsession with his health and the things that he thought impacted
negatively upon it.   He believed that
medicines that were given him by doctors were toxic, that water from the faucet
was toxic, that the sun was toxic, that most foods he received were poisoned or
toxic.  By 1970, when he was convinced
(and forced) to seek medical help, his weight was recorded as 86 pounds even
though he was 5’ 6’’ tall.  Goedel  had perhaps the world’s most singular
interest in numbers; he was also extremely interested in the minutiae of daily
life. 

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(#123.2) The Convict Letter Collection

Catalogue #123.2  Received by Museum:  5 July 1957.  Originator:  Eric Mintz
, born Erich Mintz in Paterson, New Jersey, 1830; died Archer City, Texas,
1913.]

Short Description:  Mintz’s
leather-covered wooden steamer trunk (ca. 1855), with its contents of of undelivered, stolen letters from convicts under prisoner warder Mintz’s charge.

• Trunk: 
  wood and leather with metal clasps (broken). 32x28x44”. 
  
• Trunk Contents: 2,412 letters, including 112
  self-folding envelope letters; 2300 letters in “modern” envelopes; 1 volume,
  “Diary”, with dated entries from 1850 to 1892..

Summary:

Mintz was a prison guard for more than
half a century and “collected” letters that were written by convicts and
entrusted to him for delivery to postal officials.  He performed the acceptance part but ignored
the delivery and simply kept all of the letters.  Over his many years Mintz accumulated some
402 letters.  All remained unopened.  Mintz’own diary–a scandalous affair of mostly repetitious, feverous, arithmetical nightmares in which he recorded his counting of one through ten many thousands of times–reveals that he stole the
letters because he “liked the way they felt”. In our experience we have seen that people can be committed to
deep and long-term heinous aberrations–like this–without very much
thought at all as to why they’re doing it.  Mintz may or may not have
collected money for postage; though even then the remuneration for
theft over such a long period of time–and committed in such a way as
to cause extended suffering for those waiting responses that were never
to come–would have been insignificant.  There is also no evidence that he held the email “for ransom”.

Mintz worked in 13 jails in 7 cities in two states, and collected
letters from felons convicted of crimes such as wire cutting, brand stealing,
chicken gutting, soil teasing, indiscretions with hoofed animals, stump mangle,
murder, arson-murder, fright-murder, and wanton abduction. The letters, dating
from 1850 to 1910, and ranging in locations from San Francisco to San Antonio, were found intact in a trunk in the
estate of Samul Wundt, a trunk collector. 
The letters–still unopened–are now all subject to inspection in a court of law to settle the question of ownership
resulting from multiple lawsuits between the Mintz heirs (to recover all of the
letters), the Wundt heirs (to recover the trunk with the letters), the
descendants of the persons writing the letters (to recover the letters), and
the state of California (saying that the letters belonged to the state because
they were stolen by a California resident of California residents).  All in turn sued the state of California for allowing the thefts to occur.  There was one lawsuit filed against New York City, which was deemed responsible for the
entire series of events because the city government invented the use of ships
as prisons. This puts the Museum in a frightful place; we will not be a party to any lawsuit and will abide by the court’s decision(s).

Mintz died in 1913, a suicide, in Archer
City, Texas, by swallowing a deputy’s badge.  

*Just to make sure, the Museum of the Imaginary and Impossible is my own fiction.  Everything else on this blog is factual. 

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(#156.2) Found Word Bibliopathology Poetry  [The following description appears on pages 67-69  of the guide to the G.R. “Joe” Gebors Museum of the Imaginary and the Impossible.]

Poetry from Found-Wordist and Book Pathologist Mr. Ignatio Norme

• [Catalogue #156.2  Received by Museum:  19 September 2006.  Originator:  Mr. Ignatio Norme [b. Boston, Mass, 1923; d. Hyannis, 25 January 1988.]

Short entry catalog  description: 

Ignatio Norme, Found-Wordist and Page Number Collector (Boston, Mass.; 1923-1988)

The man who found obscure phi-related connectivity between random word placement, page number and the poetic ideal.

 

 

 

Mr. Norme’s work first came to the attention of the literati in 1952 when Dallas Headman of Case Western described it as “a unique approach to approaching uniqueness”; this would be the only phrase ever used to evaluate Norme’s efforts in every review from 1922 to 1975, when his work stopped being noticed.  In a spectacularly prolific career Mr. Norme produced some 8,000 poems, most of which were produced on broadside sheets of paper or on large pieces of wood.  The combination of the materials of production and the many tens of  thousands of books led to Mr. Norme’s house being an internal castle, letting in neither visitor nor light, a friendly singularity for his pursuit.  As his utilities and taxes were paid decades in advance, Mr. Norme’s death, and the discovery of his corpse, was not discovered until 2005, seventeen years after his passing.

 

According to his unpaginated journals, Mr. Norme’s pattern of poetic creativity and discovery involved removing all page numbers from the book he was reading and then choose a number of the “poem lugs” at random.  He would then reverse the number, go to that page of the book, and then add the page number and go to that line of the book, and tear out the number of words as indicated by the page numbers ending numeral.  The bits would then be assembled, and the page numbers glued to the walls of his house.  (We estimate that there were some 60 million page numbers glued to all surfaces of Mr. Morme’s home.  The house itself has been purchased by the Museum of American Art, a full room of which will be on display in that museum’s Outsider Art collection in the Henry Darger wing.)

 

 

 

Mr. Norme found poetry everywhere he found it, seeing in the simplest verb the most compound noun; even when the poetry seemed not to find an external logical sensate, the internal phi-correlated word relations played in the mind behind all phases of knowledge, an unheard neuro-music that encapsulated the idea of unknown “correctness” in the vision of the poem.