a )
Later there would be
questions asked; but at
the time few people paid
much attention to the
small group standing off
to the side at the wake
that followed Trotsky's
funeral. Certainly
the two men at the centre
both had bodyguards; but that
was normal here & neither
had famous faces like the
Hitchcocks & Hemingways
that the press were
much more interested in.
*
0)
A few people. A strange pairing.
But Octavio Paz the only one
to see the energy
flowing & that it was
not just sexual. Always the
astute metaphysician. “The one
wanted to unravel the moon
by using recursive &
mechanical algorithms; the other
to recreate the sun with a
continuous chain reaction. I
saw the future in them.”
Islas en llamas en mitad del Pacifico
Mundos de imágenes suspendidos de un hilo de araña
(Islands in flames in the middle of the Pacific
A world of imagining suspended from the web of a spider)
*
1)
Perhaps the mescal, perhaps
the Mexican warmth, but Turing
was expansive on the day,
eschewing the cyphers he
usually talked in & of. “If I
can paraphrase Hegel, the
thing we learn from history
is that we do not learn from it.
But we are dreamers, & have
chosen to ignore that lesson. da
Vinci designed flying machines
in a flightless age; Babbage
computed a difference engine
far beyond the loom
that knitted Jacquard sweaters. I
have this idea of a machine
whose answers to a set of
questions are indistinguishable
from those of a man. & you,
Robert, you dream of a
Fabergé egg that conceals
a controlled fusion that
will level cities or turn
the desert in glass. Conceit &
concept – we have them both.
It is the world that lacks
the technology to make them
practical.” Oppenheimer smiled.
*
R)
One of the first things
Oppenheimer did as
director of Project Manhattan
was to invite Diego Rivera
north to Los Alamos to
paint a mural of
Trotsky's funeral over-
shadowed by a
mushroom cloud that bore
the face of Shiva. It was
amongst the first things
destroyed by the first
successful testing of the bomb.
*
b )
Instead of a long chain
of nucleotides, think of
the body as being
comprised of an infinite tape
that is divided into cells,
a finite number of which
contain a symbol drawn
from a finite vocabulary. To
breath life into it
add a moving head to scan
the cells as they pass; &
depending on the present state
& the symbol that is present
to overwrite or delete what it
finds there & move one cell
further on. It is not
a sequence of purine or
pyrimidine bases but of
ordered quintuples. Birth
is the initial state; the subset
of final states includes
suicide through cyanide
& assassination with an icepick.
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