Hidden message in Don Quixote
I believe there is a hidden message in Don Quixote. The key for decoding it can be found in the full title of the book - El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha. La Mancha is a central region in Spain, but it’s almost identical to French “La Manche” – the English Channel. It suggests that we should apply English language for deciphering the meaning of the names used in the book. Right away, we can try that key on the book title to see if it makes sense using it - it’s a kind of key validation. Taking into account the original pronunciation of “Don Quixote” as “Don kiˈʃote” and using anagrammic approach, the title could be read in macaronic language the following way, from right to left, starting right after (better say, right before) “La Mancha”: “Donkey Shot hid algo (something) oio en Ingles (in English)”. What could be “oio”? May be, it’s the hidden message itself, and we have to find out its meaning from the book. At first glance, the only thing we can tell about “oio” is that it has some symmetrical structure and resembles digits “010". The initial guess is that it might be some word that has a double meaning in English translation.
What’s “Donkey Shot”? It might look like a weird name, but somehow the notion of “donkey shot” is quite popular in modern culture. The search for “donkey shot” with Google renders about 323 000 results, including a paraphrase of Alexander the Great quotation “Veni, Vidi, Tiré a dos burros”, which subtly means “I came, I saw, I won by shooting two targets at once”; Swedish psychedelic music project dOnKey sHot; and a rather peculiar sex practice: “A Donkey Shot or "Don Quichotte" is when someone's doing a chick from behind and as he's about to bust, punches the chick in the side so she clenches up" (taken from Urbandictionary website). There is also a classic scene in the movie Patton, based on a true life event: during a battle on a bridge, General Patton shot a donkey which blocked the way forward for the Third Army. Thus, in modern culture “to shot a donkey” basically means to decisively remove the nonsensical obstacles in order to fulfill the bigger mission.
As to “oio”, in the whole opus magnum, electronically searched both in Spanish and English versions, there is no such combination of the letters as “oio”, and it seems that to decode “oio”, we should understand the extra-linguistic significance of the Cervantes’s book. It’s not only the first creation of modern literature, with the most published copies after the Bible, but it also laid the foundations for modern science, as Cervantes introduced the concept of relativity 17 years before Galileo and more than fifty years before Newton. In chapter XLI blindfolded Don Quixote and Sancho Panza ride a wooden horse Clavileño the Swift, which is moving relatively to the wind created by the duke, the duchess and their majordomo. As Sancho said, “…such a strong wind comes against me on this side, that it seems as if people were blowing on me with a thousand pair of bellows”; which was the case; they were puffing at him with a great pair of bellows”.
As to Newton, there is a mystical connotation of his name with the name of Don Quixote’s horse Rocinante. “Ton” is a unit of measure derived from “tun”, the term applied to a barrel of the largest size. So Newton’s name means “new big barrel”. “Rocinante” also has two parts: “rocin” means “nag (low-quality horse) or rough man”, and “ante” means “before” either in space or time. But “rocin” is also similar to “rosin” (colophony or Greek pitch), which is made from resin, used for insulating barrels in form of tar (basically, tar and rosin are differently cooked resin). So, combining Newton with Rocinante we get “a new big barrel with old tar”. By the way, Sir Isaac Newton was knighted by Queen Anne – he was a knight like Don Quixote, but the real one.
Then there comes the famous fight with the mills. In Spanish it’s “molinas” which can be playfully interpreted in English as “mol in ass”, and “mol” is widely used as a short name for “molecula”. This way we come to the microcosm, and it makes perfect sense: collapsing the central part of Quixote & Rocinante, we obtain “quant”, as well as “exotic” from the inner leftovers. By the way, in physical reality quants are represented by quarks, whose name comes from another magnum opus widely recognized as the greatest book of the 20th century – Ulysses, which is quite opposite in its genre, but is very similar in its plot as an epical journey (“quark” is derived from the book’s quotation “Three quarks for Muster Mark!”, which goes by without explanation of the meaning of quarks). There could be a hidden allusion to the quarks in the mills. There are six flavors (types) of quarks (up, down, charm, strange, top, bottom), and taken at 45-degree circular increments, 4 blades of a mill may have at maximum as many possible states as the quarks: at any given moment they can be only in 2 positions, visually represented by + and ×. Besides, in each position the blades can be found in 3 motional states: static (S), spinning clockwise (CW) and spinning counter-clockwise (CCW). So, in total there are as many states of the mill blades, as the types of quarks: +S, +CW, +CCW, ×S, ×CW and ×CCW.
The whole fight with the mills can be likened to the quantum mechanics in action: when you throw a stone at the spinning blades (and the quanta also have a “spin”, though they are not actually spinning), you can hit a blade with a certain degree of probability, depending on the speed of rotation. Similarly, the whole quantum theory is based on probability, as the location of the particles at any given moment of time can be adequately described only as a matrix of probabilities. To raise the probability of hitting the blade, you should throw at it not a round stone, but some elongated object, as Don Quixote did by throwing a lance at the blades. His horse Rocinante also can be helpful with solving the quantum puzzles, because rosin is used by musicians for conditioning the strings of the bowed instruments to make them speak, and Rocinante can be interpreted as “resonante”, which means “resonating”, and all of that alludes to the string theory, the latest version of which is called “M-theory”, backfiring to the molinas and mills. And the last but not least, as was said before, “ante” means “before” either in space or time, as “before” means either “before” or “before”, but not the both at once. So, the hidden message is that the vibrating elementary particles can exist either in space or in time, but not in space and time simultaneously, and it is in conformity with the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics.
There is also something very similar to quanta in the mills, which is not visible from outside and is not even mentioned in the book – it’s what the mills are made for, i.e. flour. Flour can serve as a perfect model of the matter in general, as it can be in all the main states of the latter: gaseous (dust), liquid (suspension in water), amorphous (dough) and solid (baked or dried dough). And it has flavor, just like quarks! Seriously, it acts as if it has a corpuscular-wave nature, as in case of quanta: it consists of small particles, but when you drop a stone on it, you can see a wave on its surface radiating from the center of the impact.
Interestingly enough, in Spanish flour is “flor de harina”, and Don Quixote regarded his beloved Dulcinea as a “flor” (flower): "O lady of my soul, Dulcinea, flower of beauty, come to the aid of this your knight, who, in fulfilling his obligations to your beauty, finds himself in this extreme peril" (chapter VIII).
Considering all of the above, oio could be the sublime meaning of “flor” (“flor de harina”) as a quantum realm, which is substantiated by the connotation between identically sounding “flour” and “flower” in English.
Anyway, the mission of Don Quixote failed: he did not defeat his enemy, because the latter was not really in the mills, and it means that if you “shoot the donkey”, i.e. eliminate the seemingly nonsensical aspects on your way to the main goal, you are doomed to fail. On the other hand, Don Quixote in his role of a knight is quite nonsensical himself, so even as he fails in space at any specific location, his mission progresses in time through aeons and beyond.
