In the beginning Man had fur. And his stomach hurt. It hurt and in a way mostly foreign to now. And there was sound and noise and even Music but when your stomach hurts, if it hurts enough, then sound is just sound and it doesn’t arrange into beauty or meaning. What you want then is for the pain to stop. For it to not follow you wherever you go and for it to not reduce everything to need and fear.
Turns out opposable digits help do this. They eventually hold tools and it is tools that will ultimately tame the world.
In this world birdsong now registers, the accidental melody of wind through gaps in wood is for the first time truly heard and it is pleasing and pleasure that consists of more than mere pain-avoidance is then seen as a good to be actively sought and the discovery that man need not wait for happy accidents but can himself replace the bird and the wind of course not only results in a great increase in that kind of pleasure but also by necessity gives prominence to those who best produce and arrange the pleasurable sounds so that significant human energy is now devoted to improving the production of these sounds initially focused on the necessary tools but later includes the realization, a big one, that the sounds have essentially hidden relationships to each other and thus to their listeners, relationships that can be broken down into kind of loose rules that while loose cannot be overstated when it comes to importance because it turns out that knowing these relationships/rules even if only intuitively and even if only to disregard them is like possessing a key (sorry) that opens precisely the doors you want opened and all this makes Music the kind of thing that can be studied and preserved, which activities give more of that prominence I mentioned to those who have skill or ability or talent or however you choose to denote the ineffable quality that allows some to order the sounds of our world into magic and it turns out, perhaps surprisingly, that a sole magician is preferable, in terms of not only effectiveness but certainly mystique and similar concerns, to collaboration, so that things like collective chants without an identifiable sole author would have to defer to the individual striving to order our chaos by sweetening our air.
And in Eisenach, Germany, in an ordinary house, on March 31, 1685, to a family steeped in Music, Johann Sebastian Bach was born.
III. In Which Painstakingly Restored Aphorisms Are Aired After Dormant Decades
A word here about what was in the box and how I’ve chosen to present it. First, the contents of said box are highly relevant to the instant investigation and as such I have decided to not merely catalogue and voucher said items but rather to present them here in their entirety. The works are here presented in chronological order, meaning in the order they were written with oldest first and most recent last. Of the chronology established and that the items represent the willful sum of Writer’s effort is beyond meaningful doubt but a brief word on the methodology used in dating the works seems warranted.
So what most directly follows is taken from the significantly aged marble notebook recovered. The manufacture date of the notebook is helpfully listed as 1970 and this date has been generally confirmed by various analyses. More significantly almost all the writing contained therein is in pencil. Contrary to generally accepted belief (yes, again) it is absolutely possible to date lead pencil markings as will be conclusively demonstrated in a forthcoming monograph that was initially underwritten by the Smithsonian Institute then only generously completed out of a sense of professional obligation in the absence of explicitly promised funds. This dating confirms that the contents of the notebook predate the three other works recovered from the box and does this by quite a bit.
Thus the notebook can be seen as a kind of warming up to the subsequent works that form the greater part of this report. The short story, play, and either unfinished novel or novella that follow in many ways result from the notebook. That the gestation depicted therein appears to have taken decades while certainly highly suggestive does not alter the fundamental relationship between notebook and offspring.
Lastly, the sad fact that only a portion of what was placed in the notebook has been recovered. Various forms of damage, over time, befell the notebook. It was never the highest quality paper to begin with and pencil starts fading the moment it hits such paper. In many cases what is displayed here is the result of various techniques designed to uncover the lost. So, for example, the many instances where what was once clear and distinct devolved into invisibility but not quite because the impressions remained: tiny canals dug into the sheets and still readable once magnified and interpreted. Predictably the result often feels fragmentary or inchoate, perhaps heightening the effect that what we have here are halting steps towards future cohesion. All by way of maybe apologizing for the imminent lack of symmetry, narrative propulsion, cheap suspense, or any of the other décor generally sought by eyeballs like yours:
… write because of an aesthetic impulse to order the world into greater attractiveness, which ordering… English is richer than Spanish, just is, and I want primarily to be rich. Art seems at least a subspecies of Love because in Art we sense Love’s greatest response yet to Life’s inherent cruelty. I do not like to talk about what I’ve written, I do not like to talk about how or why I write, I do not like to talk about myself, what I’ve seen and done or what it’s like to be me now, I do not like to talk. Joseph Conrad was twenty-one before he even heard English. Twenty-one! Conrad! Now that you’re found, I’m lost.Now that you feel love, I don’t…. the selfsame beauty runs through it. Okay just off the top of my head because life is brief and real work beckons. Take out your copy (Cien años de soledad) and follow along. What follows is mine (with crucial differences sometimes italicized) and therefore what a just world would have received: Many years later, in front of the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to recall that remote afternoon in which his father took him to discover ice. Macondo was then a village of twenty adobe houses constructed on the edge of a river of diaphanous waters that flowed over a bed of smooth stones, white and enormous like prehistoric eggs. The specific sounds of the letters, word order, relative incidence, line length, syntax; if you can preserve these and maintain fidelity to meaning shouldn’t you? Moving on: The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and to mention them one had to point with a finger. It was necessary to is so terrible here, though maybe not as bad as in order to just before it. If this was GGM’s intent there were perfectly valid and expected Spanish equivalents. If you don’t know them your Spanish isn’t good enough, if you know them and ignore the above reasoning it’s your English that’s likely the problem. Every year, in March, a family of derelict gypsies would stake its tent near the village and with a great commotion of whistles and bells display the latest inventions. Stake, derelict, and commotion are just plain better; whistles just plain correct. First they brought the magnet. Hard to mess that up so no one did. A corpulent gypsy with an unkempt beard and sparrow hands, who introduced himself as Melquiades, made a truculent public demonstration of what he himself called the eighth wonder of the sage alchemists of Macedonia. Heavy and bold are so unjustifiable in light of the above options that I lose all faith in the endeavor. Yet somehow, like eyeballs to a gruesome car accident, I skip ahead past insufferable clunkiness and inartistry to: In March the gypsies returned. This time they brought a telescope and a lens the size of a drum, which they exhibited as the latest discovery of the Jews of Amsterdam. They