We have trouble hearing a full five-beat sequence because the number five seems to lack symmetry in time as well as in space. Twenty-nine authors hold the idea up to the light and look at its refractions. They find fives lurking everywhere in both nature and iconography. Faust had painted a pentagram on the floor and the Devil had to struggle to get around it. Fivefold symmetry is shot through tile making, architecture, basket weaving, fortifications, and Christian, Islamic, and Egyptian iconography.
Fives seem to rise like mist out of our subconscious sense of balance.
They're almost never in our mental forefront. World Scientific, 1992. I am grateful to my colleagues Lewis Wheeler and N. Shamsundar for their help with this episode.