Number 5?

An Intro of Sorts

The most important thing to know about me is I’m married and a dad of three.

Another thing is that about 23 years ago I finished a BA in English—then (without really meaning to) I managed to parlay that into a longish career in education, which has included:

• a stint as a Peace Corps education volunteer

• teaching ESL in San Diego

• Title I tutoring at an alternative high school

• coordinating an academic support center at a Catholic high school

• and (somehow) becoming an Associate Director in an institution of higher ed.

Somewhere along that line I started a thing on Tumblr called Number 5. It was essentially a place for me to collect things that I had some connection to—images, quotes, ideas, historical tidbits, people I like, or any other thing that struck my fancy. In 2019, that thing migrated to the more respectable Wordpress, where it lived until the end of 2023.

Before moving to Substack, Number 5 never had many actual readers. (Paul G, I said not many. I see you.) Now that there are more than just a couple of readers, I feel obliged to explain: What’s up with the name Number 5?

Five is special to me since it is the number of people in my family (see shadows above). But that’s not where the name came from. Number 5 was just a placeholder, a name that would hold no meaning to pretty much anyone outside of my wife Kortney Garrison and me.

Here’s the story:

We’d been married a little more than two years when we headed out to the South American country of Suriname in 2003. We spent two years in the tropics, sweating it out in a two room house (minus electricity or running water), doing community work, and teaching English in a remote rural village. Most of the time it was miserably hot, but there was some relief to be found at the nearby creek and in the Suriname River, where we paddled in our custom-made dugout canoe in the cool of the evening.

Number 5 and One Deep Drawer on the Suriname River in 2004

Every 4 to 6 weeks we’d make the day-long trip by boat and truck into the capital city of Paramaribo. For a few days, we’d enjoy the comforts of air conditioning, showers, Popeye’s Chicken, and cold beer. (We rarely got a cold beer in the village, though we did learn the clever but ultimately unsatisfying trick of sucking on a menthol cough drop while drinking warm beer.)

Our ride to and from town.

A liter bottle of the locally brewed Parbo Bier is called a “djogo”, roughly pronounced ‘juggo’. They are ubiquitous, available in every market and restaurant in town. One evening, we were walking around town with friends when we happened upon an unmarked building with a single, windowless door in the middle of a brick wall. One of us, probably unadvisedly, poked a head in to see if anything was happening inside. There definitely wasn’t much happening. It was a mostly empty room with a counter and a proprietor who sat behind it, protected by a re-bar cage.

Djogo

As it turned out, the man behind the counter sold very cold djogos, for cheap. When you live on a volunteer stipend, you always look for deals. We got a few bottles and took a seat at the one table in the room. After enjoying our cold beverages, we said goodbye, and moved on.

But as we left, we took note of where we were so we could find this place again. The only distinguishing mark on the whole building was a hand-painted sign above the door: “No. 5”. Was that the name of the place, an address, or what? We never knew, but we and our friends returned to No. 5 every time we were in town after that. It rarely had any other customers, so we thought of the place as our little secret. A valuable hidden gem, if only a bit underdeveloped.

When I started the Tumblr diary in 2011, it needed a name. For no reason at all, the underutilized, unappreciated, hole-in-the-wall bar on an otherwise empty street in Paramaribo, Suriname suggested itself, and I went with it.

If you peruse the earlier iterations of Number 5, you may notice that the aesthetic skews to the somewhat bizarre, dark, and macabre. (For example, see the first-ever post at Tumblr, a photo I took of one of my high school students in her Halloween costume.) I quoted people I like, and some I don’t like. Many of the posts highlighted the disasterous and the traumatic, things that are never in short supply.

By late 2023 I was ready for something a bit different, perhaps due to the overload of anguish and upheaval delivered by the early 2020s. I felt a need to combat my own cynicism, to turn deliberately away from the confusion offered by the kingdoms of this world, seemingly by default.

This turn coincided with our introduction to Dr. Timothy Patitsas: We first found Dr. Tim on youtube; then in his miraculous book The Ethics of Beauty; and then finally in person when we had the good fortune of catching a screening of his film, Amphilochios: Saint of Patmos.

Dr. Tim observes that in the ordering of the Transcendentals (that is Beauty, Goodness, and Truth) the West has tended to give primacy to truth. But what we have meant by truth has increasingly become a reduced version of it—the merely rational, the abstract, and discursive. One of the results of this ordering and emphasis has been an undue deference to the authority of science, which has become not just a method of inquiry but the lens through which we in the West view all of reality.

Dr. Patitsas asks, what might happen if we put beauty first? What if beauty is a sort of portal that opens onto the way that leads through goodness, and only then to the truth? He has said,

…the way we were created by God, and are meant to be re-created, is by an encounter with beauty, or theophany, within which we discover a life-giving morality (goodness). And a devotion to that beauty, and a practice of that goodness—makes us become true. There’s less a focus on knowing truth, and more a focus on becoming true…

So I decided to focus on beauty, insofar as one can do that on an internet blogging site. I would start each day with an encounter with beauty: an image and some words. That’s what Number 5 became for me in 2024.

After hitting a full year of daily posts on Valentine’s Day, Ann Collins from Microseasons was kind enough to say, “I would love to hear what you've been most inspired/surprised by while doing this work. And I wonder how it evolved and changed for you?” The main change or evolution for me was just making the choice to look for beauty, as opposed to what I was doing in previous years. (I’d have to think more about what changed over the course of the past year—perhaps in another post.)

But there were surprises and inspirations aplenty. Because I had limited myself to featuring only work by a person born on the given day, sometimes I ended up having to dig and dig for material. This could be frustrating. There were times when I would despair of finding a single person born on a day who had said or made anything beautiful, or even mildly interesting.

But then, something would pop up, someone totally unknown to me would magically appear. In this way I discovered many artists, poets, philosophers, and writers that I would not otherwise know. One of my favorite examples of this is this image (and this whole treasury of paintings) by Marianne von Werefkin.

Andenken (Souvenir), 1907-08

There’s something unspeakably beautiful about this painting of a woman sitting at dusk on the stoop of her cottage. The colors, the curve of road next to the straight lines of fence and house, a small boat in silhouette against moonlight reflected in the pond. These sorts of discoveries have been surprising and inspiring.

This project of the past year has served as a daily reminder that beauty has not gone from this world. We humans are capable of both attending to and creating great beauty. And though at times it seems that it can be elusive, beauty will be found when you look for it. And sometimes (like an ice-cold beer on a desolate Paramaribo street) even when you don’t.

I hope to keep sharing what I find on some sort of schedule, even if I’m unable to maintain the daily-ness of it.

In the meantime, you are invited to follow along as I post installments of a screenplay I wrote a few years back, a modern-day retelling of Shakespeare’s problem play, Measure for Measure. Here is the opening: Measure for Measure.

Thanks again for being here.