The paper arrived in my email this afternoon.
Dr. Eleanor Hayes from Trinity College. The mathematician. She'd warned me it was coming but I still wasn't prepared for it.
I read it. Well, I read it in the way someone reads something they don't understand — slowly, carefully, going back over sentences three times and still not getting them. There are equations. Graphs. References to fractal sequences and Fibonacci spirals and something called the "cumulative iterative pattern."
Most of it is beyond me.
But I understood the conclusion.
She'd mapped the song's cumulative structure — each verse building on the last — to a mathematical model. Fibonacci sequences, she said. Natural growth patterns. And when you plot those coordinates, when you apply the mathematical positions of each verse to actual geographic coordinates, you get a location.
The location is a bog in County Clare.
And here's what made my stomach drop: it matches almost exactly with the coordinates from the @bog_remembers video.
Almost exactly.
Close enough that they could be referring to the same place. Close enough that it seems like something more than coincidence.
I'm trying not to panic about this.
I'm trying very hard.
Dr. Hayes included a note with the paper: "I hope you'll forgive the leap, but I thought you should know. Whether it's intentional encoding, folk memory, or simple mathematical coincidence, I cannot say. But the song remembers something. And it's pointing you toward it."
Pointing me toward it.
As if the song itself is directing me somewhere.
Which is ridiculous.
But I can't stop thinking about it.
I don't know what to do with this information. I don't know if I should do anything with it.
Part of me wants to get in the car and drive out to that bog and find out.
The other part is terrified of what I might find.
—Seamus