A Celebration of Forms – by Ada Reinthal

Celebrations!

Find a community and organize a celebration. Sounds simple enough, right?

Totally doable in a few weeks. Especially when you’re new in town, don’t really know anyone nor any venues. Well, that was what we were tasked to do anyway. In a way, it was a very nice first assignment because it forced you to go out and explore the city.

”It’s research!” you’d tell yourself as you checked out another venue in town over a biertje.

Vrankrijk, founded and run by squatters!
Sound Garden, home of the alternative musos.
De Nieuwe Anita, a cozy cafe with poetry nights and live music – not to forget the vegan restaurant in the back on Wednesdays.

The place I ended up focusing in on was a coffee-shop called 137. Not for the cannabis, or the coffee, or the music or vibe inside but rather for the number it was named after. I had specifically avoided coffee-shops moving to Amsterdam as I had come to realize over the years that weed just doesn’t agree with my anxious mind, but, the number intrigued me on a personal level.

How can a number hold a personal relevance to someone other than superstition, you might ask? Lucky numbers like 7 or unlucky ones like 13 are a common enough occurence but one might wonder how the 33rd prime number would come to mean something in particular to a person.

On my first day in Amsterdam I was without roaming data and thus made my way toward the air b’n’b where I’d be staying for a few days using the WiFi at the central station, landmarks and gut feeling. On the way there (which was not the straightest path but I made it there eventually) I walked past this corner and was assaulted by three big numbers.

I say assaulted as it brought up both painful and beautiful memories of a life I thought I had left behind. You see, the number one three seven, I had gotten to know as my (by now) ex-fiancé’s favourite number. When she had told me about it, I had recognized it but not been able to place it. Her connection to it was due to the significance it held in one of her favourite films growing up.

At the time we met, I was on my way to dropping out of a double degree in Science and Arts. It wasn’t until a lot later that I realised that I had dealt with that number every day at uni. Or rather, I had dealt with its inverse, as the fine structure constant. This, seemingly synchronistic, coincidence I found rather romantic as the product of these two numbers made the product of one.

With all these thoughts in mind, I set out to investigate this coffee-shop after other venues and communities had turned into dead ends and the date of the celebration drew nearer. I went once, the guy behind the counter told me he just worked there and was not sure about the origin of the name but if I came back the next evening the owner would be there and could tell me the story. So, I came back the next day. As I sat at the bar, sipping a coffee and smoking the weakest weed they had (hoping it wouldn’t do too much to my mind while at the same time helping me blend in) the owner told me his story.

A few years ago, a person had come in and sat down where I was sitting then. The guy had, much like myself, brought up the number over the door. At that time it was just the street number and the venue was run under a different name. They had struck up a sincere friendship over a few weeks and the guy had even lent the owner a big some of money when the venue was not doing very well. Eventually they had rebranded the place as 137, it started picking up again and then one day the guy was gone, never to be seen again.

His story got me wondering, what makes a community? Are there other people in Amsterdam who hold this number in their hearts for one reason or another? I decided to try and found a one-three-seven appreciation society. My first course of action was to research the various places this number shows up.

Biology: chlorophyll-α has a total of one hundred and thirty seven atoms.
Kabbalah: the sum of the numerical value of the letters add up to 137.
The one hundred and thirty seventh psalm is By the Rivers of Babylon.
Shakespeare’s 137th sonnet is about love…

In order to found a society you need to define it, and a common way to do this is through forms or questionnaires. But which questions would you put on a form surrounding a subject with such varying connotations, some highly esoteric, some highly personal, some purely scientific co-incidents…

The more I focused on this number, the more I dredged my own emotional memories up to the surface from years ago, and the more I started to doubt whether it was a good idea at all. But I powered on, determined to make something. The night of the event was only a few days away and I had decided to hold the celebration at the coffee-shop of this as the owner said he’d be there that night. Which he wasn’t. My celebration of forms ended up with a very small test sample, much to small to draw any conclusions about the attendants.

Find a community and organize a celebration. Sounds simple enough, right?

Totally doable in a few weeks. But maybe try not to define a community as esoteric as ”people who appreciate this number”, especially not when the few people you had met who did all had highly personal stories with the only common denominator being that it involved a number and people.

”It’s research!” you’d tell yourself as you descended upon a coffee-shop with a stack of forms for any interested parties to fill out…

I guess the research part was true though…

Did you know that the artist Anna Banana has done some amazing forms relating to her Specific Research Institute relating to people’s relationship to bananas? Or that cyanobacteria, the first bacteria to use chlorophyll and carbon-dioxide to break down sugars, ended up causing the first global holocaust, known as the Great Oxygenation Event? Or that there is a class India called ”freedom fighters”?

This summer, I will revisit the draft forms I constructed for the appreciation society celebration and readjust them for more narrow sets of data to be collected. As much as I consider this project as a failure, I learnt about forms and how to deal with my disdain for bureaucracy – apparently it can be quite useful too. Who would have thunk?

Speaking of which, for further reading on the topic of forms I would recommend David Graeber’s ”The Utopia Of Rules”.