Got an email today that's made me sit very still for about an hour.
Dr. Eleanor Hayes from Trinity College Dublin. Mathematician. She's written a paper — an actual academic paper — about the cumulative structure of the Rattlin' Bog. Says the way the verses build, the way each verse adds a layer to the song, mirrors patterns found in natural growth sequences. Fibonacci-type structures. Fractals. Mathematical things I genuinely don't understand.
She's suggested that the song's architecture is too perfect to be accidental. That whoever composed it — or however it evolved through oral tradition — encoded something intentional into its structure.
I read it three times and still don't get most of it. But the conclusion unsettled me a bit.
She's publishing the paper next month. She asked if she could cite my website. My website! The thing I made in my bedroom in 2002 with a copy of Dreamweaver and the kind of pure confidence only a 24-year-old lad can have.
I emailed her back saying I was flattered but also "listen, Dr. Hayes, I just like the flea verse, I didn't do any maths. The song's just there, I don't know how it got made."
She replied within an hour: "That's precisely the interesting part."
I'm trying not to think about what that means. I'm trying very hard. It's just a song. An old folk song. Nothing strange about it.
But my hands are a bit shaky while I'm writing this, if I'm honest.
—Seamus