|
|
Romy the Cat
Boston, MA
Posts 10,478
Joined on 05-27-2004
|
Post #:
|
5
|
|
Post ID:
|
29814
|
|
Reply to:
|
29799
|
|
|
|
|
Written, during the week of Dima's death as a Chapter in Book 5 of Mutation Mythology "The Glass Beads"
Chapter VIII "Dima"
Death appeared to Amaranta and ordered her to sew her own shroud. She told her that she would die at dusk on the day she finished it. Amaranta began to sew as slowly as possible.— After Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
Life is imperfect, and God does not exist. But it depends on how you look at it.
If you look from the standpoint of my life, an interesting thing emerges: perfection, perhaps, is not quite as utopian as it seems at first glance. Everyone I learned from would not merely agree with me. They would sit down together, light their pipes, and say: interesting, isn't it?
Nietzsche and Poincaré sat by a large fireplace, smoked their pipes, and from the height of their genius, with a smirk bordering on indifference, discussed the state of affairs in human life. Nietzsche was occupied with eternal return. Poincaré had just proved his celebrated recurrence theorem. They both felt that something was missing for final perfection. They needed a third God.
There was no question about the name, and they sent a boy for the organist of the local church. On learning who was calling him, the organist came running, breathless. He was pouring sweat, trembling, and understood that what was about to happen would be the most important event of his life, a life that would end, and of whose existence no one would ever know.
Nietzsche began first:
— My friend, if you would be so kind. My colleague and I have felt that we need to hear Bach's Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue. Can you play it for us?
The organist did not need sheet music. He knew Bach not with his brain but with his heart. He sat down, closed his eyes, and began to play considerably more slowly than Bach intended. He wanted his presence in this room to last longer, but he was a real musician, and therefore slowed the tempo in such a way as not to destroy the original structure.
Poincaré stretched out in his chair, closed his eyes, and said:
— Now we are home.
The gods sat on their Olympus, listened to the music of their colleague, and wondered what else in this world they had not comprehended…
I woke up. The morning was ordinary. Sunday. The last day of Dima Kireev's life.
I do not know what exactly he thought that day. No one knows. But if you spend your whole life speaking with someone not about the weather, not about business, not about health, but about the very structure of reality, sound, consciousness, circuit design, philosophy, about where engineering ends and art begins, then sometimes after a person's death you continue to hear his voice. Not mystically. Not like a ghost. But like a working instrument that no one has yet had time to turn off.
And this is how I hear him.
Several years ago I bought, for almost nothing, a ribbed piece of metal. I did not know then that I was buying the most important thing in my life. Who the hell knows why, I thought. Let it lie there; maybe it will come in handy someday. And it lay there. Sometimes I took it out of the drawer, put it on the table, turned a bright light over it, and looked. The metal was heavy, ribbed, astonishingly calm. It did not ask, promise, persuade, or comfort. It simply existed with such absolute honesty, which rarely happens in people and almost never happens in words.
In my laboratory there were two objects I trusted unconditionally. The first was an old analog Tektronix. It showed truth where my imagination began to lie. It did not argue with me, humiliate me, or praise me. It simply drew the line between signal and fantasy. The second object was this ribbed metal. It did not lie either, only its truth was of another kind. The oscilloscope said: this is what is. The metal said: this is what will be if you finally stop bargaining with reality.
I love philosophy, physics, and electronics. Or electronics, physics, and philosophy. No, electronics should come first. Although that is wrong too. I do not know who belongs in first place there. They are so organically interwoven in my head that I do not know where one begins and another ends. They live together.
I know circuit design perfectly. I have taken apart the most complex circuit design created by the human brain, and for me it was a primer. I have seen brilliant solutions, technical executions of intentions at the level of Rembrandt's painting, and for me it still remained a primer. The problem is not complexity and not genius. The problem is language.
I have seen brilliantly thought-out and calculated circuits. Taking them apart, I felt the effort of their designers, fine calculation, the peaks of engineering thought. But far more rarely did I see engineering revelation at the level of Bach, at the level of God, where circuit design is not the realization of an idea but a revelation of consciousness.
In the whole big country I know maybe two or three people with whom it is interesting for me to talk about electronics as philosophy. All the rest are cannon fodder of unconscious soldering and artistic bullshit on the internet.
When I think about when my fall as a practicing engineer began, I remember Auditorium 2D. First semester. Course: Introduction to Electronic Physics. Final exam. The question on the board was simple, almost insultingly simple: a resistor lies on a table alone, doing nothing. Why does it produce barely perceptible electrical noise even when no current flows through it, when there is no battery, no signal, nothing at all?
Most classmates wrote two paragraphs and moved on. I wrote five answers.
First I wrote the ordinary truth: heat is the disorderly trembling of atoms and electrons, happening always, in everything and everywhere. In this resistor too. The trembling generates a tiny flickering voltage at its ends. The higher the temperature, the stronger the trembling. The greater the resistance, the greater this noise. The formula is correct. It matches the readings of any working instrument in an ordinary room. This is the first floor.
Then I wrote where this truth breaks. If you understand the simple formula literally and add up all the noise over all frequencies, you get infinite power coming from a resistor lying peacefully on the table. Absurd. Quantum mechanics corrects this. Energy does not arrive smoothly, but in portions. At extremely high frequencies, near absolute zero, noise stops behaving as the simple formula promised. The quantum formula contains the ordinary one inside itself. In a normal room they converge to one number with incredible accuracy.
Then I wrote that at the deepest level the resistor is not alone. It touches an immense invisible sea of other oscillating bodies. Noise is the eternal exchange of tiny portions of energy with this sea. The mathematics of this picture returns the quantum formula, and inside it — buried but alive — the formula of the first answer.
Then I wrote about the question behind the question. Truth changed form three times, and each time the previous truth was not destroyed but absorbed by something larger. Nietzsche wrote that there are no facts, only interpretations. Not because reality does not exist, but because every truth is a view from a certain height, until a higher view appears and absorbs it whole without refuting it. The classical formula is the view from the valley. The quantum one is the view from a height from which the whole valley can be seen. The first duty of a higher truth is to prove that it can exactly reproduce the lower truth. This is self-overcoming according to the rules.
Finally I wrote the fifth answer. I wrote that this sheet of paper itself is also a resistor. It lies on the examiner's table, apparently doing nothing: ink on fiber. And yet it radiates noise: my trembling, my doubt, my excessive diligence, all the disorderly heat of thought put into it at three o'clock in the morning. This noise cannot be eliminated with a red pen. It can only be measured. But for that one needs a working instrument. And the instrument's being in working order is not something to be assumed by default.
I received the lowest grade in the group. I came to the professor and asked: why? He said my answers were ridiculous.
I asked slowly, giving him every chance:
— Can you point to even one sentence, even one specific statement, that is factually wrong?
He said no. He did not know which part was wrong. He simply did not feel that it was right.
And then I truly looked at him, for the first time all semester, and saw not an enemy, but a measuring instrument with a worn-out scale. A man who for twenty years had checked other people's answers for conformity with the key in the manual and had forgotten how to recognize thought if it had not already been caught, tamed, and signed by someone.
I told him that he does not read answers, but searches in them for the echo of his own, once someone else's, memorized youth. And when he does not find the echo, he calls the silence ridiculous. I said his office is not a place where physics is born, but a place where it dies quietly, on schedule, semester after semester. He was silent. And with that silence, it seems, I caused him more pain than I could have with any shouting: I did not call him an enemy. I called him a victim. A victim who all his life guarded the door against people like me instead of opening it.
Then I turned and walked to the door. I opened it. Stopped on the threshold.
— I changed my mind, — I said. — You are not a victim. You are a fucking idiot. And this is not an insult. It is your exact place under the sun in the coordinate system of my values.
He jumped up from behind the desk. I went out and closed the door. Behind it he continued shouting something into an already empty room. Going down the stairs, I thought that his shouts were simply indecent noise that did not need to be either understood or proved.
Only much later did I understand that the professor was wrong not because he did not understand physics. Perhaps he did understand physics. He did not hear the form. I had written not five answers to one examination question, but a fugue on the theme of a resistor. The first theme was simple and thermodynamic. The second lifted it into the quantum domain. The third unfolded the resistor into an ocean of fluctuations. The fourth turned the formula into a question about truth. The fifth returned the theme to the paper, to the ink, to the hand, to the exam itself as a noisy body. He graded it as an answer. It had to be listened to as Bach.
I worked all my life taking apart and constructing circuits. My devices worked without adjustment, without calibration, without modifications. It was the direct transformation of abstract consciousness into an absolutely precisely working problem of electrical engineering. I reveled in that feeling. When I assembled my own invention, deliberately turning off my brain and turning on intuition alone, and the circuit worked exactly as it had to work, I felt: this is what I am.
Many years ago I stopped calculating my circuits. I simply draw them with a pencil from left to right, from top to bottom. Without thinking, without counting. I feel every electron, every millivolt, every thermal resistance physically, with my whole body. My circuit design is my heart, my consciousness, my limbs, my blood.
Bach was a genius. What he wrote makes all composers who came after him cry at night from envy and the recognition of their own worthlessness. I do not compare myself to Bach. But it seemed to me that I could do something Bach did not do. Contrapunctus 14 from The Art of Fugue broke off at the most critical place, where the sun sets not beyond the horizon, but into the center of a black hole from which there is no exit. For thirty years I thought about how I could finish this fugue in the only language I possess — the language of electronics.
Maybe that is why Contrapunctus 14 would not let me go. Once already, without understanding it myself, I had written a fugue where an exam answer was demanded of me. I took one theme and carried it through five layers of reality, and then some stupid measuring instrument gave me the lowest grade in the group. Since then I tried to do it consciously: to take Bach's theme and carry it through electronics, through currents, voltages, resistances, noises, phase shifts, through everything I knew about the world and about myself.
And today I understood how. One simply has to stop perceiving fugue as music and electronics as a profession. One has to turn music, electronics, physics, philosophy, and everything else I know into life. Into real, lived life.
But cancer was not killing me. Cancer was canceling me. These are different things. I could endure pain. I could endure weakness. I could endure the humiliation of the body, because the body was never my main instrument. But when cause-and-effect links began to get confused, when memory began falling out in chunks, when hands stopped being the continuation of thought and became badly fastened tools on someone else's table, I understood that this was no longer illness. This was the dismantling of the laboratory from inside.
In the morning Roma called. He was agitated and very worried. I had never told him I had cancer; someone told him. He spent a lot of time explaining that I needed to see a doctor. I refused. Roma insisted that he was not forcing me to undergo treatment, that it was entirely my choice, which he respected. But he believed I needed to know the condition of my cancer at least in order to understand what would happen next.
I listened to him and looked at the drawer where the ribbed metal lay. That morning I had already taken it out, put it on the table, shone a bright light on it, and known that it would not go back. I did not tell Roma either about this or about the fact that I was no longer interested in what would happen next. I asked:
— Give me one reason why I should do this.
Roma said that he loved me. That he loved my thoughts, my brain. That he had a million reasons to disagree with me on hundreds of problems about which we had argued and fought, but he had always bowed before my ability to see in something what others did not see.
I taught him physics and electronics. He taught me psychology and philosophy.
We talked for a long time. I listened to his arguments and agreed that he was right. I agreed to go to the doctor on Monday at nine in the morning. Roma was pleased with himself. He did not know that on Monday I would no longer be there.
Then Andrei came. We sat, drank coffee, chatted about life. I told him I was not feeling very well, and if I suddenly, by accident, had a heart attack or something like that and died, I wanted him to know what to do with my unique instruments: whom to give them to and how I wanted them to be used.
— Are you planning to die? — Andrei asked.
— No, I am not exactly planning to die, — I said. — But the ways of the Lord are mysterious. I have no heirs, no relatives. I do not want all this to be thrown into a dump if something happens to me. I love my instruments. They are like children to me. I want them to live after me.
Closer to midnight I began to make a round of the laboratory. Not to say goodbye — I do not like the word "goodbye"; it is too human, too theatrical, too calculated for a witness. I simply went from table to table and touched things that were part of my nervous system: the oscilloscope, the generators, the measurement bridges, the microscope under which my hands made assemblies that the best Japanese production lines could envy. I touched boxes of components, shelves of instruments, folders with my circuits, hundreds and thousands of sheets where there were my designs, my corrections of other people's designs, my comments on the circuit design of amateurs, professionals, enormous corporations, my notes in the margins, my attempts to explain how someone else's thought could become more exact, cleaner, higher.
I do not know why I did this for years. I understood that no one needed it and that it probably would never be used. But I could not not do it. It was who I am. It was how I breathed. It was how I made contact with the outside world. I became the recluse of my loneliness, and in this loneliness, in this ability to do what I did, I was happy.
I remembered that Rachmaninoff's last words were, I think: "My hands. They will never touch the piano again." I do not know whether he said it exactly that way; now it does not matter. I looked at my hands. These hands will never again touch a soldering iron. Never again draw a pencil line from the left edge of a sheet to the right and turn emptiness into a working circuit. Never again place a probe on the right point of a board and hear reality answer with the correct waveform.
I laid both hands on my old analog Tektronix. I knew every millimeter of its circuit. It was the only instrument I trusted in the low-frequency range. It never lied. And if it showed something incorrectly, it somehow explained to me where my fantasies began and where reality ended.
Thank you, my dear friend. You were the only one who protected me from my narcissistic
madness. I am just a talented fool. You and I are a perfectly balanced system of perfection.
Then I took the ribbed metal from the table. It fit perfectly in my hand. It had the right weight — not heavy and not light, but exactly the weight that an object should have when it is not going to persuade anyone. In this it was like the oscilloscope. The oscilloscope showed truth with a line on the screen. This object carried truth without a screen, without a scale, without a needle, without the possibility of interpretation.
I left the house and closed the door. Not locked. Now it no longer mattered.
A courtyard cat came up to me and began purring at my feet. I went back inside, took everything I had from the refrigerator, and brought it out to her. I stroked her while she ate meat.
— This is all yours, kitten. Forgive me, I will not be able to feed you anymore. You must find another place. The world is full of good people. They will not let you starve to death.
Then I stood up and went behind the house. Behind the house began a long road that led to a huge ravine at the edge of the city, where as a boy I played war. I chose this ravine because at night there would be no one there. I wanted to decide the question of my life myself, without harming anyone.
Here it is, my ravine. I know every little bush here. I remember where I hid when I was a boy. I lay down on the ground, spread out my arms and legs, and looked at the stars. The night was absolutely transparent. Planets, moon, stars, the Milky Way — everything was clean and bright as never before.
I lay and looked at the universe. In the universe we are not just stardust. Stardust is planets and stars. We are microscopic microbes who travel across their planets, inventing science, philosophy, religion. We are nothing to the universe. But I never felt loneliness in that. On the contrary. I felt the triumph of human reason in it. We, being no one and nothing, by the force of our consciousness try to understand the consciousness of the universe.
What did I do in my life? I did not receive the Nobel Prize. I am not an engineer, philosopher, or anyone else people will talk about, repeat, or quote. But I did the most important thing. I lived my life as I wanted. I did not allow anyone or anything to stand between me and my refusal to agree to simple answers. I climbed out of my own skin to defend the right to see life as I see it, and I won. Naturally, cancer defeated me. But cancer is merely one additional parameter in the complex form of the world's existence, into which I tried to write my chapter.
And then the philosopher in me suddenly evaporated. In his place came the engineer. He asked a simple question: are you sure?
I smiled. Even here, at the last minute, the engineer could not allow the philosopher to dispose of reality without supervision. Even here one had to check the assumption, evaluate the system, understand where thought ends and iron begins. I did not want to leave lying down. I wanted to leave standing on my feet, just as I had lived my entire life.
I could no longer finish the fugue in a circuit. The circuits remained on the tables, in folders, on shelves, in thousands of sheets that would outlive me and, perhaps, remain forever misunderstood. I could no longer finish it with my hands, because my hands were leaving me. I could no longer finish it with memory, because memory was already beginning to tear. Only life remained. The final theme had to sound not in music, not in electronics, not in a formula, but in my own departure from a world that never learned to hear what I was trying to say.
I looked at the stars for the last time. At that moment the ribbed metal finally became a grenade. Not a metaphor, not an instrument, not a philosophical argument, not the last component of a circuit, but precisely a grenade: a simple, crude, mortally honest thing in which there was no longer room for music, theory, or beauty. I did what I had decided to do. I pulled out the safety pin and threw the grenade in front of me. Time compressed into three seconds and became all the time in the world. I raised my hands to God, in whom I did not believe, and began to fall forward — not from weakness, but from exact engineering calculation, bringing my heart to the grenade.
Somewhere in the middle of my fall, I heard the explosion.
Dima Kireev ended his life at three o'clock in the morning, on Monday, August 10. Poincaré was first to break the silence:
— What do you think of the tragedy of this Russian, whether engineer, inventor, or philosopher, who blew himself up with a grenade on August 10?
— I do not consider it a tragedy, — Nietzsche answered, squinting. — It is the triumph of consciousness over being. It is all the work of my life, all my theories and assumptions, embodied in real life by a real person.
— You think so? — Poincaré looked surprised.
— I do not think so. I am certain of it.
Nietzsche stood, walked to the fireplace, and threw on some wood.
— He will live in a hundred and fifty years and will fight with his life against all the same things that torment us. And it is entirely logical that metal became the final answer.
At that moment the organist finished the fantasia and opened the fugue. Poincaré was silent, listening to Bach. Then he waited until Nietzsche sat back down in his chair and said:
— You know, what you are talking about had already been written in this music in the seventeenth century.
Nietzsche answered:
— Of course. Gods have no time. Time is what people invented so they would not be alone. That is why God gave Bach to humanity, so that people would know the answers to all questions.
Poincaré nodded. They smoked their pipes and listened to Bach's fugue. The organist thought that if by the end of the fugue he fell dead right in front of the instrument, it would be the perfect ending to his life. He thought something else too, but I no longer remember it.
Dear Dimochka, my dear friend, sleep peacefully. I loved you as I loved life. And for as long as I live, I will remember your example: the force with which you lived, argued, despised simple answers, refused to be convenient, refused to reduce yourself to the size of someone else's understanding. You were an insanely strong person. Even in your last act, you stood firmly on your own feet.
Thank you for the education. For kindness. For understanding. For that exquisite height on which you always stood and toward which you forced everyone who communicated with you to stretch.
Your physical death is not the end of your mind. For those who knew you closely, your mind remains a working instrument, a standard, an example, a cruel and beautiful reminder of the height human consciousness can reach if it refuses to bargain with vulgarity.
Rest in peace, my dear friend.
"I wish I could score everything for horns." - Richard Wagner. "Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts." - Friedrich Nietzsche
|
|
|