This is code and a musical piece combined into a story, notated in poetry. Meaning on so many levels, in so many mediums, into one. Coders, programmers, this is for you!
Ah, poor Bach is a criminal,
clad in stripes.
His pacings across white cell block,
would turn the guards’ brains dark.
The iron bars twist and bend
and break with glassy tones,
barbed wire snaps like the castinet
as the wind blows pipe trombones.
Soon the sleeping villagers leap
Out of their beds, both lout and learned.
Not one eye has known a sparkle,
At least not since the timbrel burned while
The race of the tortoise and the hare,
Abrogates with the hare’s despair.
HARE: “No more asymptotic infinities of small!
Halving the half exhausts me;
sweet death draws me to its pall.
J.S. Bach once played to me infinities of canon,
but BACH is CAGED,
my mind enraged
by unfulfilling Mammon.”
Poor hare, the tortoise mourned his loss
as he paced across the floor.
For without Bach, he understood,
old Zeno was a bore.
The universe futile crumbled into ash and puffed away,
For without Bach seated at his harpsichord,
paradox twisted the world into a dangerous place,
and far away the men in ties gave a program a fellowship,
Then gave the programmer a link and put him on the web for free.
The oldest villager stares at a painting on the wall
as his ceiling shakes,
and plaster crumbles,
as the prison explodes,
and the ground stone rumbles.
OLDEST VILLAGER:
“Leci n’est pas une pipe.
Envision it one way, and of course it is a pipe!
But the mind twists and curdles until you can’t but see:
Leci n’est pas une pipe.
That is double vision –
The hammering and the pounding of one image at another –
‘But then my mind was never worth much.'”
Ricocheting madly, a piano speeds down the stairs with crumbling marble,
Ebony shattering to slay music’s captors.
Cold BACH alone is untouched in orange,
As prison guards bloodied run and wail
Passing like smoke, shouting babbles of bail.
The wind blows pipe trombones,
barbed wire snaps like the castinet
and breaks with glassy tones.
The iron bars twist and bend,
turning the guards’ brains dark.
His pacings across white cell block –
clad in stripes –
Ah, Bach is a criminal.
EXPLANATION:
A crab cannon is a musical round (often sung) in which the theme comes in again later, backwards. This poem is a crab canon because the stanza it ends with is the introductory one backwards, the second and second to last stanzas are both acrostics, and the third and the third to last are both dialogues. In the middle is a bridge stanza.
At the same time, on a different level, BACH CAGED is a sonata. What sets a sonata apart from other pieces is that it always takes the form ABA – theme, development, then recapitulation. BACH CAGED can be split up with its first and last two stanzas as “A” and its middle five as “B”.
Thirdly, BACH CAGED is actually a musical piece. The way we write down music, we use ABCDEFG to denote the 8 whole pitches in our Western musical system. In Germany, “H” also was added on to denote “B natural” while B stood for “B flat”. So the title, BACH CAGED is actually a set of musical notes! Additionally, I took the liberty of counting the letters in each word of the first stanza and from that assigning each word a musical note (e.g. “pacings” is “F” because “pacings” has six letters and “F” is the sixth note). From this code I constructed a melody.
Here is the title + first stanza song: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B6h9pUyD7UPxeGVPMmZxVUNMaDA
These three “double meanings” of BACH CAGED summarize the essence of Godel, Escher, Bach which discusses how systems acquire meaning despite being made of “meaningless” elements. The book also discusses the meaning of communication, how knowledge can be represented and stored, different kinds of symbolic representation, and even picks at the fundamental notion of “meaning” itself. I wanted to show by this poem how one medium can hold multiple meanings through different systems of knowledge storage, in other words: coding.
I additionally paid tribute to Godel, Escher, Bach by my format. The book is organized in a series of dialogues/monologues followed by chapters of the traditional sort. In the same way, I stuck in some scripting for “HARE” and “OLDEST VILLAGER.” I also make numerous references to the book by including BACH, the tortoise, Zeno’s paradox, recursion, “Leci n’est pas une pipe”, and the confusion of the program with the programmer. So both format, content, and purpose reflect Hofstadter’s.
Of course, in the end, it is also a poem lauding music and portraying my confusion about the complexities of the world.
So, in the end, BACH CAGED has 5 meanings:
A traditional poem
A tribute to Hofstadter
A literary crab canon
A literary sonata
An actual sonatina
Hope you enjoyed! If you are interested in the book, there is a good explanation of some of it here: http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/node/10416