Fractal Yin and Yang

A guest post from my favorite almanack maker, Bill Felker.

And so we see in Plants and all of Nature the Word of God.  Like any Scripture, Earth’s Matter is subject to our Doubt.  But to the one who listens closely to its Cadence, it reveals the sweet hidden Truth.

Reginald Johnson, On the Shapes of Leaves 1697

For the past 25 years, I have kept track of the waves of barometric pressure that pass over my Ohio home.  I have compared their configurations on my graphs and have found similarities in the rises and the falls of the pressure from year to year.  These resemblances are consistent enough to produce reliable weather history forecasts, which can predict likely conditions on any day of the year.

While I have done little with my graphs but reinvent the wheel first discovered by 16^th century almanackers, I have been surprised that modern meteorology has been so reluctant to embrace barometric regularity as a means of long-range forecasting.  Recent research on the El Nino phenomenon is the first sign that academic meteorologists are beginning to take atmospheric rhythms seriously.

Post-chaos theory physicists (who belong to what has been called the “Universal” school) are also looking at patterns in nature and have come up with notions that support the ancient use of barometric patterning in tracking and predicting likely weather scenarios.  In the late 1970s, an IBM research scientist named Benoit Mandelbrot looked at fluctuations in all kinds of phenomena, from the stock market to cloud formations.  He came to the conclusion that these very different occurrences were related to one another, and that they revealed an underlying force that pervaded every aspect of life on earth.

In each of the events he studied, Mandelbrot found “self-similar” systems, which he called fractals.  It is probably easier to picture a fractal than to define it.  Imagine an electrocardiograph analysis of your heartbeat.  The ups and downs are arranged on the paper in an orderly fashion, but never at exactly the same intervals.  Or picture a month or two of a graph of the Dow Jones averages.  That’s a fractal pattern.

Although a weather graph of temperature or barometric pressure may chart very different activities and show much greater variability than the electrocardiograph record (and is much less depressing than a stock market graph), Mandelbrot would posit that all of the records are showing us a life principle, not unlike a yin-yang law, that underlies not only weather, stocks, and heartbeats but almost everything from the shape of ferns and fiords to the filigree in lungs and leaves.

That there is a relationship between heart rhythms, barometric rhythms, temperature rhythms, and the patterns of clouds, the stock market, and even shape of frost on the windshield of my truck in winter, is apparently not a matter of too much debate, at least among post-chaos theory physicists who belong to this “universal” school.  All of the systems mentioned can be charted as fractals, and a visual analysis of their designs reveals their broad similarity.

The real issue, however, is whether the designs have meaning.  If fractals reflect some universal designing set in nature, and if they are, in fact, the signatures of nature, then what are we to make of them?

During the Middle Ages, the Doctrine of Signatures held that the shape of any natural object, such as a leaf or root, held the key to its medicinal use.  Thus, the hepatica leaf, reminiscent of the shape of a human liver, indicated its application in the treatment of liver ailments.  Modern fractal theory posits a not so dissimilar view—that patterns observed in such diverse phenomena as the stock market and barometric pressure might not only hold the key to understanding the rhythm but also the ultimate meaning of those phenomena.  Some analysts believe that fractals could hold the secret key to the universe, explain the causes not only of our personal decisions but also of the outside forces that influence them.  Science writer Mark Ward even conjectures that fate itself might be fractal.

In organizing barometric patterns from the past quarter century, I have found that my charts allow for weather predictions which are unavailable from any other source.  This practical aspect of fractal records is intriguing to me less for its meteorological implications, however, than for its psychological implications.  Always eager to jump to conclusions, I wonder what new fractal highs and lows remain to be discovered, and I wonder if they will really tell us the “sweet hidden Truth” promised by Reginald Johnson in 1697.

Bill Felker studies his barometer, writes essays and creates almanacs and hand-bound journals, great for keeping track of natural changes, in Warm Springs, Ohio.

Flower of March: Daffodil

Daffadowndilly has come to town
In a yellow petticoat and a green gown.

I always think of the daffodil as the flower for the month of March. That’s because I always look for the daffodils on the first of March, and for the past ten years, with one exception, I have always found them in bloom by this date in Seattle.  Lucky for me since I want to wear a daffodil on March 1st  to show my allegiance to Wales (thanks to my ancestress, Nesta, the mother of the first Fitzgerald, who flourished around 1100).

The daffodil is the national flower of Wales which is why you should wear it on March 1, the feast day of St. David, the patron saint of Wales. Or you can eat a leek on this day and become an honorary Welshman (Cymru as the Welsh would say it). I try to do both.

The David Morgan site in its entry for St David’s Day
http://www.davidmorgan.com/stdavid.html
implies that the daffodil was imposed as a symbol of Wales by the English who wanted to downplay the political implications of the leek (worn by wild Welshmen in battle with the Saxons). Julie Ardery’s article at the wonderful Human Flower Project web site
http://humanflowerproject.com/index.php/weblog/comments/the_leek_and_the_daffodil/
mentions David Lloyd George, the Prime Minister of Britain during World War I, as the person who popularized this custom but he was Welsh himself so it seems more likely he was bringing to the forefront an authentic Welsh custom. The creators of the French Revolutionary calendar must have known of the association of the daffodil with St David’s Day back in 1792 when they designed the calendar and assigned the “narcisse” to March 1 (the 11th day of Ventose, or Windy). (The daffodil appears later in March on the 8th of Germinal)

Daffodil is a common name for a narcissus. It may be derived from the plant name asphodel, known to the Romans. Pliny wrote that it grew on the banks of the Acheron, delighting the spirits of the dead. The Romans planted it on tombs, perhaps because it was said to grow in the Elysian Fields. It was the sight of a daffodil that lured Persephone into the Underworld.

Perhaps it is the way they droop that evokes death. It also gave rise to the myth of the beautiful boy, Narcissus, who fell in love with his own reflection. I will let my favorite garden writer, Paghat, tell you all about the Narcissus myth and the secret rites of Echo practiced during the Eleusinian mysteries
http://www.paghat.com/narcissusmyth1.html

The narcissus common in Greece, Narcissus tazetta, is called Little Tear Drops. In Germany, daffodils are called Osterglocken, Easter bells. They are also called Lent Lilies in England. They are favorite decorations for Easter tables, for Nawruz (Persian new year) celebrations and for Chinese New Year.

Gabi Grieve of the World Kigo database
http://europasaijiki.blogspot.com/2005/04/daffodil-and-narcissus.html
mentions a new holiday in Ireland, Daffodil Day, March 24 which is sponsored by the Irish Cancer Society. Resonating as it does with connotations of both death and hope, the daffodil is used as a symbol by cancer societies around the world.

All daffodils have a central trumpet-shaped corona surrounded by a ring of petals. The traditional color is yellow but hybridizers have bred all sorts of fanciful variations, including daffodils with multiple layers of petals or frilled petals and daffodils with contrasting coronas and petals, or elongated or compressed coronas.

Daffodils come from the Mediterranean but there is one particular daffodil, Narcissus obvallaris, which grows only in a small area around Tenby in Wales. The Narcissus pseudonarcissus is also native to Wales. Julie Ardery writes about the way the winter daffodils bloom in January at Quarrelton in Wales, possibly due to the fires still smoldering beneath the surface in the abandoned tunnels of the mines there:
http://humanflowerproject.com/index.php/weblog/comments/daffodils_for_the_miners/
She also describes how Welsh scientists are cultivating daffodils because they contain galanthamine, which is used in the treatment of Alzheimers.
http://humanflowerproject.com/index.php/weblog/comments/the_mind_of_a_daffodil/

However don’t try this at home. Daffodil bulbs are poisonous. Mrs. Grieve says they are a powerful emetic. Even the flowers are slightly poisonous. However, both bulbs and petals have been used medicinally. The Arabs used an oil of daffodil to cure baldness and as an aphrodisiac.

The oil of Narcissus jonquilla and Narcissus Campernella are used to make a sweet-smelling oil used in perfumes, but Mrs. Grieve warns against being in a closed room as the Narcissus poeticus, or Poet’s Narcissus, as the scent of these daffodils has been known to cause headache and vomiting.

The daffodil is also called the goose leek. In the Isle of Man it is considered unlucky to bring them into the house until the goslings are hatched. In Maine, they say that if you point at a daffodil it will not bloom. And in Wales, if you find the first bloom of the season, you will have more gold than silver this year.

May you find the first bloom of the season.

References:
Wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daffodil
Mrs. Grieve’s Modern Herbal:
http://www.botanical.com/botanical/mgmh/n/narcis01.html
Leach, Maria, editor, Funk & Wagnall’s Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend, Harper & Row 1972