part one, part three 

Hamachandra grew up in a small poverty-stricken village in India.  His subsequent destiny was put in motion by two life-shattering events:  a deadly illness, and a mistaken mail-delivery.  Near Hamachandra’s home village was an affluent British colony of a similar name, and mail was often misdirected to one or the other.  What Hamachandra’s family received, one day, was about 40 books from a man’s library, being delivered all the way from war-ravaged England (the year was 1944).  Overjoyed to receive such an abundant supply of kindling, bed straw, and toilet paper, they put it to use immediately.  Hamachandra, a naturally curious 8-year-old boy, found these pages of printed symbols intriguing at first, but was very soon back outside playing with the other village children.  Only weeks later he fell terribly ill with an allegedly deadly disease (what disease this was is not known since Nogen’s remarks on the subject are vague) that left him bed-ridden for more than a month.  With nothing else to do, he spent his time gazing at the pages of the surviving books.  During his feverish delirium, he began seeing inexpressible patterns among the symbols on these pages (he was neither schooled in English nor in reading) and claims that he spent many long nights having nightmares concerning them.  His parents, wondering if the books were doing him harm, took them away.  However, at this point his condition worsened drastically, and they quickly returned them, at which point he started getting better. 

The day his fever broke, Hamachandra claims to have had an incredible epiphany, upon which he not only new how to read English and modern mathematical notation, but understood in depth the contents of several of the books, in particular Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica, Charlotte Bronte’s Villette, several textbooks of theoretical physics and Greek mythology, as well as an English translation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, the sizable fragment that was left of Marx’s Capital, and a bit of Freudian psychology.  His parents were convinced he had gone utterly mad, and promptly burnt all the books.

(Whether this account is entirely accurate is, of course, subject to doubt, but the British psychologist who examined him six years later confirmed that he had memorized many passage from these works and had an impressive knowledge of their contents.)

Following this experience, Hamachandra became more and more reclusive, and began suffering more and more intense migraines.  Without anything on which to read or write, he began thinking in earnest about both Hegelian philosophy and the foundations of physics.  To him there seemed to be some kind of deep unseen connection between the two, and he spent many a sleepless night in intensely concentrated contemplation.

At the age of 14, feeling an outcast and a freak of nature, Hamachandra fled home in search of the man whose books he had absorbed those six years ago.  Arriving at the nearby British colony, he shocked a certain bookshop keeper, Thomas Warren, when, seizing a pen right out of his hand, he began scribbling furiously in tensor notation right on the surface of his desk.  Even more surprising, the boy didn’t know a word of English.   He quickly became the town wonder.  They assigned him a schoolteacher, a nurse, and an interested psychologist (Robert Nogen) who examined him daily and took copious notes (see Nogen, 1968, p. 58-69, for a summary of his findings).

Soon it was realized that Hamachandra had completely outstripped their instructional resources, and since India was descending into civil war anyway, Nogen took him to Oxford, at the age of 16, to continue his studies in physics.  The year was 1952.

*

Two years later, after earning his Ph.D. by locking himself in a room without books or writing implements and thinking about quantum fields, he published his groundbreaking article, “A Theory of Hadrons.”  Termed obscure by even the most prominent quantum physicists, Hamachandra’s theory was smashingly vindicated by subsequent developments in the theory of the residual nuclear force, and in 1958 he was offered a position at Caltech.  During the meantime, however, having emerged from his seclusion, he became infuriated at the discovery that there were Hegel scholars at Oxford, when in fact he had been assured upon arriving there that “no one studies Hegel anymore.”  During the four year period between 1954 and 1958, Hamachandra went back into seclusion were he wrestled not physics problems, but philosophical ones, suffering terribly from migraines and the raging moods that came with them.  He dared not share his philosophical ideas with anyone, so great was his fear of ridicule, and by Caltech’s invitation in 1958 he was actually relieved to find a new distraction from his inner turmoil. 

At Caltech, leaving resident giants such as Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann unimpressed, Hamachandra began studying the less glorified physics of phase transitions and stars, while emitting frequent unfounded “prophesies” of the physics to come, in particular on what would become the Standard Model.  Though his predictions were surprisingly accurate, his lack of rigor destroyed his reputation as real scientist. 

In time word of his work reached Princeton, and the controversy left the faculty deeply divided for several days, before the fact that the year (1961) read the same upside-down became the new favorite topic of conversation among the symmetry-minded intellectuals there (for an account, see Wheeler’s autobiography).

Flavia, however, could not shake the thought, and was in Pasadena by that November.

*

In order to meet the recluse, Flavia had to literally camp outside his apartment and wait for him to emerge.  When he did, she was impressed by his handsomeness and genial manner, and after a couple of meetings, she was complete bowled-over by his (according to her) profound and revolutionary understanding of Hegel.  Hamachandra, for his part, instantly fell in love with the woman, who seemed to him the only person in the world that understood his mind and its travails. 

By Christmas the two were practically living together, and by February of 1962, 35-year-old Flavia realized that she was pregnant.  At first she was infuriated.  Her idea had been to give birth to a new philosophy, perhaps, but not a child.  Soon however, the idea of a biological Apollonian offspring started to grow on her, and she secretly determined to have a child by Lewis as well.

Twenty-five-year-old Hamachandra, totally ignorant of Flavia’s ongoing affair with Lewis, had secrets of his own.  Flavia had always insisted on using condoms, but Hamachandra, who was completely in love and saw child-bearing as the sole essence and goal of love, had been discretely poking holes in them.

*

Within the span of one year Flavia had chanced upon her two Prophets and conceived a child by one of them.  But the actual dawn of the Blacktail Circle was not to occur for another four years.  In 1962, Flavia officially married her Apollo, whose interests (which couldn’t be dictated by his career or intellectual surroundings) had turned to mathematical puzzles, cryptograms, and ancient languages.  Having already deciphered the English written language from scratch at the age of eight, he found himself immensely talented at such pursuits, and by 1963 had dropped his physics researches altogether.  By this time, the CIA was becoming mightily interested in his talents, and soon he was their star code-breaker.  Meanwhile, Flavia had given birth to healthy baby boy, who they named Bharadwaj (meaning “lucky bird”) in the Indian tradition.  Flavia decided that he would inherit his father’s lack of a last name.  Also, being a trained philologist herself, she easily followed Hamachandra into the fields of ancient languages and cryptography, and was in fact offered a job by the CIA along with her husband, which she accepted—hiring a nanny for the child.

But in March of 1963, mere months after giving birth to her first, Flavia was pregnant with a second, by Lewis, who would spend his time between tours living with the married couple, never showing any signs of jealousy.  (Flavia made sure that it was Lewis by timing her intercourse with the two to take full advantage of her menstruation cycle.  This is never 100% effective, of course, but Flavia had unshaking faith that fate would make it work.)  Though Hamachandra was still unsuspecting, he found Lewis not only boring but irritating, and frequently questioned Flavia as to why this “vagrant” was receiving their charity.  Flavia, of course, gave highly theoretical answers to this question, alluding to a new era in Western civilization brought on by the blues aesthetic.  This would plunge Hamachandra instantly into a silently contemplative mood, though he still had the nagging feeling that some piece wasn’t fitting together right.

That August—as Flavia became “fully determined” to tell him the truth “soon”—Hamachandra, after one of his longest and most intense migraines (during which he reported that “sounds became colors and colors became explosions”), intuited it on his own in a sudden flash of clarity.  According to him, his new understanding was so profound that he almost decided to stay with Flavia for the sake of her project.  But he left, he said, because he perceived a fatal flaw in her philosophy that would spell doom for them both.  Unable to kick her out of the house (which was now in Washington D.C.), he quit his CIA job and went back to Caltech, where he continued his now blossoming research in information theory as well as ergodic and non-ergodic sequences.

Flavia’s distress and pregnancy prevented her from doing further CIA work, but she did receive ample support for herself and her baby from Lewis, who had now achieved moderate popular success with his third album, “Poor Baby Child!”  During the next few years their friendship became much closer, and the blues guitarist began reading literature—something he had never done before—including French aphorists, existentialism, and poetry from antiquity.  Flavia also gave birth to her second child, which turned out to be Lewis’s indeed.  They named it Gray George.

The time was almost ripe for the inception of the Blacktail Circle.  But first, Flavia had to overcome the “fatal flaw” in her philosophy, and Hamachandra and Lewis had to become reconciled.  Both these events would happen two years later in mid-1966.  To understand how this happened, we’ll need to take a closer look at the biography of George Lewis.