Museum of the Impossible: The Basis for Goedel’s Attempt to Formalize the Logic of Boredom?

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(#17.5) Goedel’s Psychiatric Cheat Sheets

This description appears on pages 85-87 of the guide to the G.R."Joe"

Museum of the Imaginary and the Impossible*
The physical location of the collection is just south of Savannah on Tybee Island, Georgia.

Catalogue #17.5 (maths)  Received by Museum:  2 January 1960 

Kurt Godel’s Psychiatric Cheat-Sheet;  The Logician’s Notes on Surviving the 50-Minute Hour

Kurt Goedel, this century’s greatest logician (inventor/discoverer of the uncertainty principle and destroyer of what was thought to be the nearly-completed castle of Mathematical Finality) fled/escaped National Socialist Germany in 1940 and settled in Princeton's ’s Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS).  Goedel’s remarkable logical ability was followed closely by his collection of singularities—in a world of uneven people at the IAS, Goedel’s Unusual Prominences were highly unusual, and for many “odd” people Kurt Goedel was the definition of their three-letter defining disclaimer.

On exhibit is a collection of the intellectual paraphernalia that Goedel evidently assembled to bring with him to a September 1949 therapy session with his Trenton psychiatrist, Dr. R. Blister Kent.  Goedel put together a number of thoughts on various scraps of material that he must have used as “thought prompters”—their existence and purpose was  revealed in a series of letters to the Postmaster of Princeton describing these iconic objects “as Tibetan prayer rags…they were supposed to assure me of a certain level of attention and suffice to bring my mind to the business of the therapy session….without my scribbled clues I would have found myself bored beyond the supplication of mortal words.”

We see here the contents of an aged manila envelope labeled “

Trenton  Dr. Can Not Sep49” including the following, (with Goedel’s notations in quotation):

(Two)  Pressed flowers  with “ask about the laundry”; (three) Ticonderoga pencils with penciled notes “at what time did I happen”;  matchbook cover (“Happy’s Coffee Happy Restaurant”) with “I thought to stay and I stayed to go…”; a U.S. penny with a penned “x” through Lincoln’s head and the tiny words “not to be The Eat”; a 2’ long and 1” wide rolled piece of paper with musings on the relationship between memory, truth and imagination; a menu for a 1954 formal dinner introducing the JOHNIAC computer at the IAS in which Goedel has drawn a self portrait next to all  listed honorees names except his own; and several other small, inscrutable items.

 In Goedel’s collected correspondence from his uninvited letters to the Dead Letter Office at the Trenton Post Office period it is can be seen that he was intending to construct a puzzle of these objects and writings which were believed to contain the key for his germinal theory on the mathematics of boredom.

“There is a small leap from genius to boredom; if that can be breached and the two great concepts brought together I believe that I can accomplish truly wonderful thinking” Goedel wrote.  “I believe in boredom.  It is the Kind Devil that allows thought to grow; it is the great emancipator of time.  Boredom always wins; if I can ally that great heaviness with the energy of genius in pure form [i.e. mathematical formalism—editor] there will be no end to my creation.” 

Curator’s Notes:  Goedel had (many would say “suffered”) a life-long obsession with his health and the things that he thought impacted negatively upon it.   He believed that medicines that were given him by doctors were toxic, that water from the faucet was toxic, that the sun was toxic, that most foods he received were poisoned or toxic.  By 1970, when he was convinced (and forced) to seek medical help, his weight was recorded as 86 pounds even though he was 5’ 6’’ tall.  Goedel  had perhaps the world’s most singular interest in numbers; he was also extremely interested in the minutiae of daily life.