But how to get there: how can I find it? All at once it is clear, clear as the first, aperiodic crystal. The double helix is a fractal curve. Ecology's every part — regardless of the magnification, however large the assembled spin-off or small the enzymatic trigger— carries in it some terraced, infinitely dense ecosystem, an inherited hint of the whole. He said only what the texts say: the code is universal. Here, this city, me, the forest of infection on my hands, the sea of silver cells scraped from the inside of my mouth. Every word I have I knock out of its component letters. Every predication, every sculpted metaphor, sprung from the block. Let's save what life cannot. Play me, he asked, all he ever asked: play me one of my variations. What could it hurt to carry that tune a little longer? Perhaps I might be up to it after all.
XXX
Today in History
6/23: Midsummer Eve. Everything and nothing happened: one day, one gene, one enzyme, one reaction, one island in the perpetual calendar. I feel, with reasonable professional confidence, that I could extract if not the sum of the day's doctored console log at least a rough transcript. After a long while, one hits on the illuminating idea of building the room around the moonlight.
Today caught up with me a week ago. Last Monday. I had closed the notebooks and started in on the job search. My main problem in putting myself on the block was how to account for my year off without seeming to host some secret pathology that might flare up again at any moment. I tried to pass it off on the resume as a school year, but my inability to claim any accredited course of study seemed conspicuous, to say the least.
But that did not stop me exploiting my old employers for my own purposes. On Monday, early, I went downtown to 40th Street and began researching the registers. I was looking for a certain kind of outfit — conservation, public awareness. Places that worked to preserve those stakes now dissolving. It seemed the career change of choice, whether or not there was still time left for it. By midafternoon, I had a dozen addresses. It was slow going, culling them by hand. The next time I job-search, the whole world will be on-line.
I broke for packed lunch and in the afternoon decided that I would need an interview suit to restore some of the credibility my resume now lacked. I needed cash, and stopped at an automated teller that would take my bank card. I punched in my four-digit sequence and watched the screen flash "Incorrect code.
Please try again." Before I could reason with the machine, it cleared its screen and posted a new message: "Hello old friend. Here's an easy one." And out of that simple, vibrating speaker, designed to make no more than a few inarticulate flutes and beeps, came music. More than easy: I knew the piece before it even started. I knew the melody at once, both melodies as they entered, all three, four. A gathering of old friends, as easy to me, as familiar and close as my own name.
The Quodlibet
The Bach family, gathered at home, would begin with chorales and proceed to feats of extemporary combinatorics. One would start in with a popular tune, eighteenth-century radio music. Another would add, transposed, augmented, or diminuted to nestle down in perfect counterpoint, an older folk melody. A third would insert something racy, suggestive, even obscene, and a fourth might lay on top of all these a hymn. The words would fly in all directions, as would the piled-up melodic lines. But the whole would hang together, spontaneous, radiant, invented. Discovered harmony.
This is how he ends the set. No canon at the tenth, as the variation's position demands, although the snippets of trivial folk tune enter imitatively, in double counterpoint. No last flash of virtuosic brilliance. Just home: solid, radiant, warm, improvisation night with the family. Two of the folk strains — as recognizable as snatches of bus-stop melody heard this morning — have been identified from out of the thicket:
Ich bin so lang nicht bei dir gewest. Ruck her, Ruck her, Ruck her I've been away from you for so long. Come here, come here, come here!
Kraut und Rüben haben mich vertrieben… Cabbage and beets drove me away__
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."