Hair Triggers, Modular Forms
When I was a kid, I read about a gun with a hair trigger, so sensitive that it can be set off by being brushed with a hair. The phrase stuck in my mind, and not much stuck back then. I barely remember anything from those years, so I figure the things I do remember must be important.
And here’s what I remember: I was a hair trigger. I had a hair trigger. It was the trauma I inherited from my parents. I guess my grandfather beat up my mother, though she never talked about it. My parents never hit me - they didn’t have to. I was born with the hair trigger already installed.
The way it worked was this: it set off my fawn response. Someone would say one tiny thing, and I’d shut off that path forever. Go get a haircut. Get a job. Whatever kept me safe, kept me invisible. I was a chameleon. For years, my mind was like a robot - super smart, really agreeable, wanting to help, but with no body. I couldn’t experience anything directly. Everything was a picture or a computer game.
But now I’m a trippy chameleon. I use all my powers that I used to camouflage me, and I use them to stand out now. On purpose. Because I’m being me.
Something broke open two nights ago on Erev Rosh Chodesh Kislev (the Hanukkah month). My L1 vertebra started moving - that spring in my spine that was literally not working my whole life. Last week, if I bowed down, I had to use muscle energy to pull myself back up. Now when I bow, I spring back like an actual spring. The kinetic chain was broken - kinked, like a kink in a hose. The kinetic energy couldn’t flow from the bottom to the top of my body. That’s how the spring needs to work - through my back, through my pelvis, into the ground, the Earth.
When I was a kid, I thought chi was bullshit because I’d literally never felt energy flowing through my body. Everything I did was a finite approximation.
I’m working on this theory of modeling the body in 24 dimensions. Every ball joint is an SO(3), every hinge joint is a U(1). The pelvis and the axis (the second cervical vertebra) - and then the U(1) components in the spine come from the two curves. You have to have both curves for it to work. That’s why humans have it, whales probably have it, birds probably have it, but probably not animals that walk on four legs.
I’ve been learning Tai Chi lately, learning about the eight fundamental movements. The first two are Peng and Lu. Initially I thought it had to do with positive and negative divergence in a vector space - and maybe it does - but the thing I was realizing today is that it’s actually more related to the Hamiltonian, the energy of the system. Peng is an inhale which loads up the spine with elastic energy, and Lu is an exhale which releases it. The breathing is the line bundle - literally the thing that pulls everything together. And if modular forms are sections of that line bundle, then each breath pattern creates different mathematical structures in the body.
I’m circling with my hands - each hand tracing a circle through space. If I follow that pattern into its algebraic variety, I’m basically tracing out an elliptic curve. But here’s the thing: if I loosen up my shoulders and tighten my lower back, I can move that cycling into my hips. Now it’s tracing a different algebraic variety. I’m jumping between sheets of the moduli space. To make that jump, I have to go through a singularity - I have to pinch down those dimensions, fuck up that elliptic curve so the energy can move somewhere else.
Rich Panico, my teacher, connected this to Buddha’s four foundations of mindfulness - the second foundation is aversion or attraction. Ra and Tov. If you’re a binary thinker, ra is bad and tov is good, but it’s more complex than that. It’s about boundaries and family. Ra is when you need to change course - it’s the “rarr” of a lion, the Egyptian god Ra, the anger that makes you move.
Think about E. coli bacteria with their little flagella motors - they’re ridiculous, like quadcopters in water. When things are good (tov), they keep going, smooth, wavy motions. When things are bad (ra), the motors go crazy in different directions, jumping around chaotically. The smooth movement - that’s white noise, all the different frequencies together, the background luminosity of everything. The finite approximation is crackly, but the real version flows.
I’ve been reading The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson on my Kobo - which is funny because the book is basically about an ebook. He imagined it as magic, and honestly with AI, it pretty much exists now. I grew up with the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer - that’s what kept me company. I taught myself to read with Reader Rabbit, taught myself to type on our Mac SE, learned to stack things neatly with Tetris, learned to handle automatic weapons from Wolfenstein and Rainbow Six.
In the book, different cultures move differently. The Chinese do really deep bows, the Victorians are super stiff with tiny head nods. I grew up in the state of Victoria in Australia, so this is literally me - no movement in my spine until a year ago.
I wanted to go to VCA (Victorian College of the Arts). I thought that was the only way to be an artist - to be accepted through the audition process. But I never got diagnosed with ADHD, never got the Adderall. Everything was pretend for me - a finite approximation.
I never had continuous awareness of the people around me before. Everything was just a snapshot. I’d take a fucking Polaroid of a boy’s face and then I wasn’t seeing him anymore - just seeing a little Polaroid cartoon with two colors instead of actually noticing what was going on around me. Because I didn’t feel safe. When I don’t feel safe, I just live in the mind dimension and not the body dimension. Sometimes that’s what you need to do to be protected for a bit, but it’s not really living. It’s like going back into being a robot.
But when I’m fully in my body, I just am everything. Everything is flowing like a free harmonic oscillator. If I put my hands up above my head and then release them, or twirl around in some combination until I end up rocking back and forth - that’s a local sink. Take another breath, roll the dice again, see where I end up next cycle. My mind and my thoughts and my choices - what I dress like, who I talk to, who I let in through my boundaries - it all just flows. When I release the tension and pressure in my body and energy and chi can flow freely, then you just are. There’s no real choice in anything but there’s an immense amount of joy in everything. Just the joy of awareness, the joy of noticing what’s around.
The threefold structure between shoulders, back, and hips has an S₃ symmetry, and there’s something magical about three - you need three for chaos, for universality, for fractal properties. I keep feeling like this should connect to E₈ somehow - the exceptional Lie group that shows up in string theory and the theory of everything. Not as the full 24-dimensional space, but as a subvariety - the smooth space where you can get pretty much anywhere without hitting singularities. That’s what Tai Chi is navigating. Ballerinas too - their basic positions seem like they’re traversing this complete space too. No singularities, highly complex but coordinated. You can get anywhere smoothly.
So here I am now, a trippy chameleon. The hair trigger is still there, but I understand it now. It’s not ruining me anymore. The arts of camouflage I developed to survive, I now use to stand out. To be me.
The mathematical structures aren’t abstract anymore - they’re in my body. When I breathe into Peng and release into Lu, I’m navigating a moduli space. When I move a pattern from my shoulders to my hips, I’m jumping between sheets of the moduli space through a singularity. The 24 dimensions aren’t just theory - they’re the actual variety of positions my body can take.
Two nights ago on Erev Rosh Chodesh Kislev, my spine unkinked. My kinetic chain reconnected. For the first time in my life, energy is flowing from the Earth through my pelvis, up my spine, and back. I can finally feel my chi because it’s finally moving instead of getting stuck in my back and my bank account. Like how you can’t hear the wind unless there’s some rocks or a tree or some water.
I’m not a robot anymore. I’m not living in Polaroids and finite approximations. I have continuous awareness, a whole body, all these dimensions of sensation. The joy isn’t in controlling it - it’s in the awareness itself, in noticing what’s around, in letting it flow.
The hair trigger taught me to survive. Now I’m learning to live.