Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

This song's second part also enters the contrapuntal fray:

Hätt mein Mutter Fleisch gekocht, so wär ich länger blieben. Had my mother cooked meat, I would have hung around longer.

High-spirited, but as steady as creation gets. The musicologist Mellers quotes the best explanation of the effect in words. Thomas Browne again, the Doctor's religion:

Even that vulgar and Tavern Music, which makes one man merry, another mad, strikes me into a deep fit of devotion, and a profound contemplation of the first Composer; there is something in it of Divinity more than the ear discovers. It is an hieroglyphical and shadowed lesson of the whole world….

But there is another joke coded in the text, wrapped inside the tavern music. I've been away from you for so long. Cabbage and beets did it. Had my mother cooked up meat…. The complainer is the sarabande Base, back at last, in unmistakable outline underneath the flurry of simultaneous quotes. I've been a great distance, a long time gone. Sometimes unrecognizable. But it's not my fault; had my mother served up more than thin fare, all this circumlocution would never have been necessary. Bach's apology for not being a better cook. Molecular evolution excusing itself: had I been a little more skilled, I might have spared the world all this terminal variety.

Now no matter: the theme is back for good, in the left hand of the quodlibet, incarnate in the material of this last, apologetic child whose parent in no way could have foreseen it. The quodlibet changes all the previous variations after the fact. The irreducible is now less important than the irrecoverable. There comes a time in the search for the plaintext when even a chance rendezvous with the still encrypted cipher seems a glimpse, a real step in the hard passage on. The sense of all tune is to continue singing, in as many simultaneous melodies as possible. Come here, come here.

I'm home. In the innermost hive, inside the cell's thread, I never left. Was always there.

Quote of the Day

I stood on the sidewalk, gathering a crowd, alerted bystanders in a jaded city closing an amazed ring on the pavement around me. He had said, once, that it's infinitely curious that people are not infinitely more curious than they are. Here it was, his private lesson in inquisitiveness, remarkable enough to draw an audience, even in midtown.

Monophonic speaker playing its own harmonies: he had explained to me a long time ago how that might be done, how Bach himself had done it in the solo partitas. Just hit the right notes at the right time. With a little programming, everything is possible. But I couldn't in all of creation take in what was happening. Even while this bankteller automaton spewed its music out into the city soot, I couldn't see how he, a year dead, could be lodged inside this circuit, playing to me. I clutched at the keypad of the machine, as if I could reply to him there. I felt the tunes running out and was powerless to keep them from reaching the last measure. They cadenced together, joke, chorale, folk song, Base. In the return of silence, the screen displayed: "Machine adaptation by SR." It cleared and wrote one more quote to compound the quodlibet: "He is a man. Take him for all in all." Another thirty seconds later, it changed again to read, "Please enter your transaction."

I yanked my card out in a daze. All the glands in my face opened and ran, without so much as polite consultation. I could still hear that music; it had never stopped. Something of divinity in it, beyond the ear. I stepped away from the machine, reaching a pitch of synthesis I will never recover. I took in the entire block in a single, vertical moment. The ring of bystanders in front of me blinked, grinning that ridiculous grin city people use in those few seconds when the danger of surviving lifts. A heavy man, medium height, thick glasses, indeterminate race, spoke for everyone. "What on earth was that?"

I was in the middle of such a convulsed colloid of sob and laugh that I could only get out the words by shouting. "I couldn't begin to tell you."

A Walking Tour of the Known World

I had to tell someone right away. But there was only one man I could possibly tell: the one I was supposed to take for all in all. Where was he in this world? How could I get there? Like an arctic tern on moving day, I swung uptown, toward that other information booth, the place where he had once told me, "Meet me here if we ever get separated."

I cut through the Park. My walk took forever; it didn't last long enough. The Park was just a simulation, a mere children's zoo of the full system. But I had been away from the real thing for so long that even this thin intermediary stood in nicely. It had been a long time since I had felt any sort of real link to chitin and chlorophyll. I had thought that words, the distraction of language, enforced a separation, banished me to the nowhere of descriptions. Crossing the Park, I realized that no living piece of tissue could keep its head up above the Second Law without the power of speech. In shape, function, unfolding: they were all shouting, speaking, feasting on words like lichen on rocks. Everything was a grammar, and we might come back in if we wanted.

I reached the Met at last, made my contribution, and practically ran to the wheatfield. He wasn't there. Of course not. But I had to go through the motion, for the time-lapse singing telegram Dr. Ressler had sent me was still an inch from my ear and I had to tell Todd while I could still hum. The painting, at least, was still around. I stood in front of it for a long time, thinking of the day we two had come to see it. It seemed a different object now, a completely changed composition. I had never seen it before. I looked at the harvesters, the gatherers, those just stopping for a meal, the man sprawled asleep under the tree, the two birds lifting up over the inlet of grain, the distant figures deep in the background, children at games again. Somewhere in my head, scattered by later atheism, a poem the nuns had once forced me to memorize tried to break the surface, an equation relating wheat and sleepers and time and reapers.

I wandered through the galleries, knowing I could not expect to find him there, having to content myself with the go-between of paint. I played with the idea, the inverse of the one that had struck me while cutting across the Park: everything ever painted— tree-catalogued landscapes, still lives with fish, flesh, and fowl served up with a sprig of sliced lemon, interiors, abstractions, all backwater genres — was an attempt to classify, backdrive the alluvial branching, locate the common term of natural history. Even the endless crucifixions seemed more about anatomy — the suffering capacity of the body, the way the thumbs curved in toward the palm when the tendons were severed — than they were about metaphysics.

After a while I stopped noticing the paintings altogether, so much more diverse was the international, drifting crowd trying to decipher them. This sampling of people, muddying the halls from Egyptian to Expressionist, had been specially selected for extremes of characteristic. The varieties of human face began to seem almost comical. This random assortment of particulars had nothing at all in common. Each one had a privacy that defied and redefined all the others. My texts had it right: we differ more from one another than man does from ape.

I left in late afternoon, not knowing where to go, with the bank machine's message still in me, pressing to be ported. I stopped at another automated teller, but got nothing except the usual cash. I turned home, walking the whole way, miles, taking my life in my hands through the dangerous bouquet of neighborhoods, across that beautiful bridge, finding that slower, less accurate steps prolonged the afternoon message sprung on me.