Infinity loop

By Daniel Browning

As the fortunate among us mourn the eight-hour day, this relic of the trade union movement once held aloft in the May Day parades strikes a melancholy tone. When it was first inscribed, the glyph of the number eight is said to have derived its form from the entwined snakes of the Caduceus, a staff borne by Hermes, the winged messenger god in Greek mythology. The apparently frightening vision, of two animals of the same species devouring each other, is brutal and cannibalistic. But it has been supposed that the origin of the symbol may be attributed to the prophet Tiresias, who encountered two snakes copulating while walking in the mountains. Horrified, he struck and killed the female with his staff. As retribution, the prophet was transformed into a woman for seven years by the goddess Hera.

If you lay the number 8 down on its side you get the mathematical symbol that expresses infinity, an endless loop.

In the Pythagorean belief system the number eight or ogdoad was sacred because it constituted the metric form of the first perfect cube. And here you are, in the white cube. But here and there, in the Belvedere of our imagination you might be transported for just a moment. A shadow in the colonnades of de Chirico’s darkening piazzas or a bend in the Landwehr canal near the Tiergarten where Marx’s intellectual heirs Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were summarily executed by counter-revolutionaries in 1919.