Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

What is it that I'd give the rest of my exhausted savings to say to him, now that I can't? I want to tell him what I've learned. Todd: I have taken on science, spent the year acquiring terms, doing a blitz Berlitz in the same grammar our friend was once after. The same, only with all particulars changed. And here is the sense, if not the specifics of what I've picked up.

"There is, in the Universe, a Stair." Small, too small for me to see the steps, even with the best current optics, too small to be floor-planned except through experimental analogy. But large beyond telling, a single epic verse five thousand volumes long, three billion years old. It is smooth, spiral, aperiodic, repeating. Within the regular frame is a sequence so varying that it leaps over the complexity barrier and freely adopts any of an inexhaustible array of possible meanings.

But meaning does not reside in the enormous molecule, the reservoir of naked data. The Stair Dr. Ressler was intent on climbing is not rolled up in the nucleus like a builder's blueprint. The plan does not map out the organism in so many words. Nowhere in DNA is there written the idea or dimensions of "tentacle," "flipper," "hand." Nowhere does it describe the shape or functioning of nerve or muscle. Tissue is not modeled to scale. Yet shape, structure, functioning, even the range of behavior: everything originates here, the repository where all significant difference is jotted down, held in place, passed along perfectly, but never twice the same.

I would tell Todd, spell it out in a five-thousand-volume letter. I would say how I have seen, close up, what Ressler wanted to crack through to. How I have felt it, sustained the chase in myself. How the urge to strip the noise from the cipher is always the desire to say what it means to be able to say anything, to read some part of what is written here, without resort to intermediaries. To get to the generating spark, to follow the score extracted from the split lark. I would tell him, at last, sparing nothing, just what in the impregnable sum of journal articles sent Ressler quietly away, appalled, stunted with wonder.

I would tell him everything I have found. I would lay my notebooks open to him. How the helix is not a description at all, but just the infolded germ of a scaffolding organism whose function is to promote and preserve the art treasure that erects it. How the four-base language is both more and less than plan. How it comprises secret writing in the fullest sense, possessing all the infinite, extendable, constricting possibilities lying hidden in the parts of speech. How there is always a go-between, a sign between signature and nature.

I would tell him of nucleic acid's nouns, its cistrons. I would show how stretches of the supercoiled chromosome are simple substitutions for polypeptide chains. Even Todd would see how breathtaking it must have been to be the first to connect metaphor to chemistry, to find the genes, those letter-crosses nesting like flocks in family trees. But I'd make the airtight case that nouns were not what Ressler was after.

I'd show him the speaking string's conjunctions, interrogatives, and prepositions — operator and promoter sites where proteins clamp, qualifying the noun, turning the cistron on or off in subordinate clauses and prepositional phrases. I would show him how Ressler lived at the moment when the ravishing, intensely cybernetic system, after millennia of theorizing, at last laid itself open. But Franklin would be the first to agree that prepositions alone would never have fed our friend.

I would tutor him in the verbs, set in animation the enzymes, programmed molecules that act, cause, do, command things to fly upwards from equilibrium. I could touch upon the adverbs and adjectives, the modifying sea inside the cell wall singing "brightly," "langsam," "con brio." I could deliver an overview of how the five thousand volumes produce their own lexicon of translators for reading their own messengers (transcribed by enzymes of their own synthesis) at sites of their own devising. The complete predication, the weird collaboration of disparate parts of speech into whole utterances, is now within my working vocabulary.

If Todd could sit still for this explanation, if my translation of a translation meant anything to him, he would see that none of this was what the professor was after; despite the brute beauty of the system, none of these parts of speech would have had the power to cripple the man. Then I would say what I know: that an accident of private history left Ressler, for a single, prohibited, unrecoverable moment, hearing not what the grammar says but what it means.

I would tell you, straight out, what I've spent the year and my savings to verify, how language makes it impossible to receive the exact message sent. I would tell that anecdote Ressler told me, the day I went to say goodbye, in bitterness over you. That account of a boyhood experiment with a friend and a tin-can telephone: how he had yelled along the muffling string, "Calling Timmy, calling Timmy." Then, dispensing with the ingenious medium and calling out directly across the twenty feet of more expedient air: "Could you hear that?" Only here, there's no jumping outside the medium to verify transmission. Only the tinny tin.

I would make metaphors for you until I became almost clear. Words are fairy tale, not a court transcript. They are those PA announcements on public trans where all you can make out is the irrelevant filler. "Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We're experiencing severe sdklh dhfj hryu e ahj ajd astue for alarm." Words are those slides they constantly fed you in art history, the blurred, color-poor angels of annunciation meant to stand in for the trip to Bruges. But I have no other means to tell it to you.

Ressler, when all molecular inheritance took shape in outline before him, saw it: the closest he would ever get is simile, literature in translation, the thing by another name, and never what the tag stood for. The dream that base-pair sequences might talk about themselves in high-level grammar vanished in the synthesized organism. Science remains at best a marvelous mine, not a replacement for the shattered Tower. Even at his death, despite the unstoppable advances in the state of decoding art, the human genome defies interpretation.

And yet, a man's speech should exceed his lapse, else what's a meta for? The manufacture of these working terms, names and the rules for manipulating them, the accuracy of their fit as fired in îhe crucible of environment, gave him a way in that mere possession of the thing never would have allotted. Names let him toss arrangements around, examine the implications of the message from angles that did not exist in negotiable reality. There is, in this Universe, a Stair.

If I have read the texts correctly — and who knows how wide of the mark my grasp of the blurry words is — then the grand synthesis that ten years ago today pulled all biology into a single tenet is this: a living thing is a postulate about where it finds itself. But that living thing postulates, deep in its cells, in a language that is itself also just a rough guess, a running, revisable analogy. The intermediary of language alone makes it possible to run trials, load experiment. Only by splitting the name from the thing it stands for can tinkering take place. Language, however faulty a direct describer, can get to the place, even change it, by strange ability to simulate, to suppose, to say something else than what is.

A given stretch of the epic verse, the sequence AACGCTA, may start life as a part of speech, emblem noun or imperative verb; "add this, then a bond, then another." By fault in the sentence-making system, the original utterance becomes AACGCGTA. Not much, I hear you dismiss. So what? So everything; you must see it. The whole parade depends on seizing mistakes. The accidental change of a single base pair can ripple through the reading process, accounting, after eons of accretion, for every implicit structure never mentioned in the string: stems, leaves, hair, hands, and— most hypothetical — brain. Evolution, the first arrangement of living things that doesn't commit the post hoc fallacy, lays it out: invention mothers necessity.