The Pirate Who Does Not Know The Value Of Pi

THE PIRATE WHO DOES NOT KNOW THE VALUE OF PI, PART I is a nine-poem, eleven-image extravaganza about communication challenges affecting the relationship between a pirate and a parrot. Can they work it out? Never mind them! Can you work it out? Do you like visuals made of parts whose some is less than the all? Can you handle multilevel multilingual punning and mesostic action that keeps hitting below the borscht belt? The Eugenes—past collaborators on INFINITE RECURSOR and THE LIFE AND OPINIONS OF DJ SPINOZA—have again got your number.


“We only say that someone speaks to himself if, in the ordinary sense of the words, he can speak. And we do not say it of a parrot.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein, PI, 344.

“He… had heard of such an old parrot when he had been at Brazil… When it came first into the room where the Prince was, with a great many Dutchmen about him, it said presently, What a company of white men are here! They asked it, what it thought that man was, pointing to the prince. It answered, Some General or other. When they brought it close to him, he asked it, Where do you come from? It answered, Petropolis. The Prince, Whose are you? The Parrot, I’m with a Portuguese guy. The Prince, What do you do for him? Parrot, I look after hens. The Prince laughed, and said, You look after hens? The Parrot answered, Yeah, and I’m pretty good at it, too... The parrot spoke… in Brazilian… The Prince… had taken care to have two interpreters by him, the one a Dutchman that spoke Brazilian, and the other a Brazilian that spoke Dutch; that he asked them separately and privately, and both of them agreed in telling him just the same thing that the parrot had said.”

John Locke, Human Understanding, 2:27:8, with French parts translated.