to wound the autumnal city.
So howled out for the world to give him a name.
The in-dark answered with wind.
All you know I know: careening astronauts and bank clerks glancing
at the clock before lunch; actresses cowling at light-ringed mirrors and
freight elevator operators grinding a thumbful of grease on a steel handle; student riots; know that dark women in bodegas shook their heads last week because in six months prices have risen outlandishly; how coffee tastes after you’ve held it in your mouth, cold, a whole minute.
A whole minute he squatted, pebbles clutched with his left foot (the
bare one), listening to his breath sound tumble down the ledges.
Beyond a leafy arras, reflected moonlight flittered.
He rubbed his palms against denim. Where he was, was still. Somewhere else, wind whined.
The leaves winked.
What had been wind was a motion in brush below. His hand went
to the rock behind.
She stood up, two dozen feet down and away, wearing only shadows the moon dropped from the viney maple; moved, and the shadows
moved on her.

The power that governs the destiny of all living beings is called the Eagle, not because it is an eagle or has anything to do with an eagle, but because it appears to the eye of the seer as an immeasurable jet-black eagle, standing erect as an eagle stands, its height reaching to infinity.

The Eagle devours the awareness of all the creatures that, alive on earth a moment before and now dead, have floated to the Eagle’s beak like a swarm of fireflies to meet their owner; their reason for having had life.

The Eagle disentangles these tiny flames, lays them flat, as a tanner stretches out a hide, and then consumes them; for awareness is the Eagle’s food. The Eagle, that power that governs the destinies of all living things, reflects equally and at once all those living things. There is no way, therefore, for man to pray to the Eagle; to ask favors; to hope for grace. The human part of the Eagle is too insignificant to move the whole.

Every living thing has been granted the power, if it so desires, to seek an opening to freedom and go through it. It is evident to the seer who sees the opening, and to the creatures that go through it, that the Eagle has granted that gift in order to perpetuate awareness.

To cross over to freedom does not mean eternal life as eternity is commonly understood– that is, as living forever. Rather, warriors can keep their awareness, which is ordinarily relinquished at the moment of dying.

At the moment of crossing, the body in its entirety is kindled with knowledge. Every cell at once becomes aware of itself and also aware of the totality of the body.

The Eagle’s gift of freedom is not a bestowal. Its a chance to have a chance.

In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true is true or becomes true, within certain limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the mind, there are no limits.

Introduction: A Musico-Logical Offering. The book opens with the story of Bach’s Musical Offering. Bach made an impromptu visit to King Frederick the Great of Prussia, and was requested to improvise upon a theme presented by the King. His improvisations formed the basis of that great work. The Musical Offering and its story form a theme upon which I “improvise” throughout the book, thus making a sort of “Metamusical Offering”. Self-reference and the interplay between different levels in Bach are discussed: this leads to a discussion of parallel ideas in Escher’s drawings and then Gödel’s Theorem. A brief presentation of the history of logic and paradoxes is given as background for Gödel’s Theorem. This leads to mechanical reasoning and computers, and the debate about whether Artificial Intelligence is possible.

Six-Part Ricercar. This Dialogue is an exuberant game played with many of the ideas which have permeated the book. It is a reenactment of the story of the Musical Offering, which began the book; it is simultaneously a “translation” into words of the most complex piece in the Musical Offering: the Six-Part Ricercar. This duality imbues the Dialogue with more levels of meaning than any other in the book. Frederick the Great is replaced by the Crab, pianos by computers, and so on. Many surprises arise. The Dialogue’s content concerns problems of mind, consciousness, free will, Artificial Intelligence, the Turing test, and so forth, which have been introduced earlier. It concludes with an implicit reference to the beginning of the book, thus making the book into one big self-referential loop, symbolizing at once Bach’s music, Escher’s drawings, and Gödel’s Theorem.

The beginning. . . . If I am only a story now, I must have a beginning. Shall I begin by being born? Is that a beginning? I could begin with that silver glove you wear; that silver glove, and the ball . . . Yes, I will start with Little Belaire, and how I first heard of the glove and ball; and that way the beginning will be the ending too. I would have to start with Little Belaire anyway, because I started with Little Belaire, and I hope I end there. I am in Little Belaire somehow always. I was created there, its center is my center; when I say “me” I mean Little Belaire mostly. I can’t describe it to you, because it changed, as I changed; changed with me as I changed. But you’ll see Little Belaire if I tell you about me — or at least some of the ways it can be.

St. Roy — I mean Little St. Roy, of course, not Great St. Roy — said that Path is drawn on your feet. Little Belaire is built outward from a center in the old warren where it began, built outward in interlocking rooms great and small, like a honeycomb, but not regular like a honeycomb. It goes over hills and a stream, and there are stairs and narrow places, and every room is different in size and shape and how you go in and out of it, from big rooms with pillars of log to tiny rooms all glittering with mirrors, and a thousand other kinds, old and changeless at the center and new and constantly changing farther out. Path begins at the center and runs in a long spiral through the old warren and the big middle rooms and so on to the outside and out into the aspen grove near Buckle cord’s door on the Afternoon side. There is no other way through Little Belaire to the outside except Path, and no one who wasn’t born in Little Belaire, probably, could ever find his way to the center. Path looks no different from what is not Path: it’s drawn on your feet. It’s just a name for the only way there is all through the rooms which open into each other everywhere, which you could wander through forever if you didn’t know where Path ran.

The theme of this book is that a universe comes into being when a space is severed or taken apart. The skin of a living organism cuts off an outside from an inside. So does the circumference of a circle in a plane. By tracing the way we represent such a severance, we can begin to reconstruct, with an accuracy and coverage that appear almost uncanny, the basic forms underlying linguistic, mathematical, physical, and biological science, and can begin to see how the familiar laws of our own experience follow inexorably from the original act of severance. The act is itself already remembered, even if unconsciously, as our first attempt to distinguish different things in a world where, in the first place, the boundaries can be drawn anywhere we please. At this stage the universe cannot be distinguished from how we act on it, and the world may seem like shifting sand beneath our feet.