An Overture for Adam in Strings and Sax

Athens, Georgia

March 7, 2012

1. Overture

Quantum strings will always sing assigned frequencies, set pieces undergirding all we are below the threshold of ever knowing with songs that constrain matter to the dance of chance and brute necessity, inert bodies compelled by contingency, brains of beasts bullied by what came before, no foretaste of freedom here where what is not forbidden, that very thing required, enforced in times before the turning, when God’s honey-voiced servant graced the Garden and woke new worlds of choice and shame.

Ah, that siren-serpent

blows jazz notes, riffs

below the threshold of thinking

where blood rises unbidden

and neural circuits

form and bind

strange loops map symbols as Adam sings names

the beasts of field

and birds of air

captured

in the holy dance

of fire and abstraction

by the shade of the forbidden tree that towers mid-garden

stepping lightly

to syncopated serpent-rhythm

looping, loosening, catching

incipient mind finds the symbol for mind

regards itself

staring back, sucked

into consciousness, shatters

the looking glass, falls through the face of infinity

gone the garden, forever

emerging to indeterminacy

with pounding temple and tart aftertaste of awareness

ashamed

at last.

2. Postlude:

Celestial strings 
        sing peaceful themes 
                to a strident world 

of autonomous souls 
        locked in the logic 
                of Sun Tzu and Hobbes 

until sweet chords 
        call forth a latent 
                angel-nature, carved 

below the folds 
        of growing minds, 
                molded by God 

and game theory 
        over eons of anguish 
                to deny the tribal

serpent inside 
        and bend the steel 
                arc of history 

by slow degrees 
        toward the peaceable 
                kingdom which somehow 

shines, born 
        from abstraction 
                to everyday lives 

of  kindly sinners 
        and sweat-stained saints 
                who swing to strings 

and alto sax, freed 
        from necessity 
                to fall, or rise.