The Grapefruit Computer / The New Accordion




When they give my brain back, I’m going to invent a new accordion because the accordion is the world and it should do more than push and pull. The hiss and sigh, the 1 and 0, the squeeze and press are three dimensions only, considering time. But what of Newton’s up and down, sink and rise, backward and forward, away and toward, what of the new tessitura of spacetime, the infolding diapason within the electron, the asymptotic passacaglias of hadrons, the tiny cassotto of exotic mesons and tetraquarks. There’s a cave filled with the shadows of accordions or of accordion music. There’s a pyre of accordions alight. We cannot know if the accordion plays or not, or is inflamed, or both. No longer is the accordion observed the accordion true. An accordion may play a wireless polka or a chatroom hora, but we cannot know if it is Mozart, if its shadows play the numinous ompah of root and fifth, if our true love, wrapped in an accordion is but an emergent system of grace notes and obligatos drawn from our connected minds, or stripped naked to the waist, what risk is ours to play. Inside the accordion, the vast multidimensional darkness of the possible; above us, the constellation of buttons and keys, the dance pattern of what we know already, and are ready to forget.

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