translated10
killing time/waiting for the formula
By this morning it had been a week since my meeting with the metaphysician. I was getting nowhere. Hours had drifted by looking at photographs of the stones, measuring their images, copying them, tracing their shapes, aimless doodling. Sometimes I worked with scientific curiosity; sometimes with aesthetic detachment; sometimes abject boredom - always with a view to divining their secrets.
At 9:38 a call came in from an unfamiliar Long Island number and, this being primary season, I expected a robo call from one of the campaigns, but it was her. Begging to keep things simple amused her and she teased me for my mathematical insecurities: how fast something falls due to gravity is determined by a number known as the "acceleration of gravity", which is 9.81 m/s^2 at the surface of our Earth. Basically this means that in one second, any object's downward velocity will increase by 9.81 m/s because of gravity. This is just the way gravity works - it accelerates everything at exactly the same rate. I liked the clarity of her explanation.
And the line went dead.
I waited for her to call back. I called her back. Nothing. Then, engulfed by a feeling of emptiness, watched the film of the stones falling into the caisson for the hundredth time and listened to the strange subdued rumbling as they fell. Without hope of the formula I now looked at the film with new eyes and it dawned on me that the rumbling sound was the slow motion splash as the stones hit the groundwater.
Had the caisson been dry, there would have been data for the different intervals it took the stones hit their termini: the older ones would fall longer. If they all hit the groundwater, which in this part of the Bronx was probably at about 20' below the top of the caisson, there would be no usable data to differentiate the stones from each other. For all I knew the oldest stones might still be plummeting down through the black water; through the abyssal depths of history. The formula was now irrelevant.
What had the anxiety of the last few days been for? I had been waiting for the woman to give me a formula, a formula that couldn't be used, but it was only with the realization that it couldn't be had that I discovered I didn't need it.
I stepped out into the evening. There are no leaves on the trees yet so the rumble of traffic on Route 9 is quite audible. Somewhere a siren wailed. Looking towards the setting sun the words of a song came drifting from the neighbor's car as it pulled into their driveway and the door opened - If I could make the world as pure and strange as what I see, I'd put you in the mirror, I put in front of me. My inchoate thoughts were drifting back to the woman: her command of physics, the useless and incomplete information she had given me, her dark blue nails holding the straw as she sipped the coke, her tiger tattoo and the Lincoln Navigator. And then my phone buzzed: Where are my stones? I scratched my cheek. Where indeed were his stones? I had nothing. I knew nothing.
Which wasn't technically true. I looked at the number from which the text had originated: 507 20045. Panama. 507 is the international code for Panama. My mind wandered uninhibited and two words jumped into my consciousness: Mossack Fonseca. In an instant I cheered up. If Dürer was entangled in an off-shore tax avoidance scandal, a few missing reproductions of stones from The Four Horsemen of The Apocalypse were the least of his problems. Perhaps I, and the stones, would be forgotten.
And yet there was a perhaps more pressing question: could I forget?
killing time/waiting for the formula
By this morning it had been a week since my meeting with the metaphysician. I was getting nowhere. Hours had drifted by looking at photographs of the stones, measuring their images, copying them, tracing their shapes, aimless doodling. Sometimes I worked with scientific curiosity; sometimes with aesthetic detachment; sometimes abject boredom - always with a view to divining their secrets.
At 9:38 a call came in from an unfamiliar Long Island number and, this being primary season, I expected a robo call from one of the campaigns, but it was her. Begging to keep things simple amused her and she teased me for my mathematical insecurities: how fast something falls due to gravity is determined by a number known as the "acceleration of gravity", which is 9.81 m/s^2 at the surface of our Earth. Basically this means that in one second, any object's downward velocity will increase by 9.81 m/s because of gravity. This is just the way gravity works - it accelerates everything at exactly the same rate. I liked the clarity of her explanation.
And the line went dead.
I waited for her to call back. I called her back. Nothing. Then, engulfed by a feeling of emptiness, watched the film of the stones falling into the caisson for the hundredth time and listened to the strange subdued rumbling as they fell. Without hope of the formula I now looked at the film with new eyes and it dawned on me that the rumbling sound was the slow motion splash as the stones hit the groundwater.
Had the caisson been dry, there would have been data for the different intervals it took the stones hit their termini: the older ones would fall longer. If they all hit the groundwater, which in this part of the Bronx was probably at about 20' below the top of the caisson, there would be no usable data to differentiate the stones from each other. For all I knew the oldest stones might still be plummeting down through the black water; through the abyssal depths of history. The formula was now irrelevant.
What had the anxiety of the last few days been for? I had been waiting for the woman to give me a formula, a formula that couldn't be used, but it was only with the realization that it couldn't be had that I discovered I didn't need it.
I stepped out into the evening. There are no leaves on the trees yet so the rumble of traffic on Route 9 is quite audible. Somewhere a siren wailed. Looking towards the setting sun the words of a song came drifting from the neighbor's car as it pulled into their driveway and the door opened - If I could make the world as pure and strange as what I see, I'd put you in the mirror, I put in front of me. My inchoate thoughts were drifting back to the woman: her command of physics, the useless and incomplete information she had given me, her dark blue nails holding the straw as she sipped the coke, her tiger tattoo and the Lincoln Navigator. And then my phone buzzed: Where are my stones? I scratched my cheek. Where indeed were his stones? I had nothing. I knew nothing.
Which wasn't technically true. I looked at the number from which the text had originated: 507 20045. Panama. 507 is the international code for Panama. My mind wandered uninhibited and two words jumped into my consciousness: Mossack Fonseca. In an instant I cheered up. If Dürer was entangled in an off-shore tax avoidance scandal, a few missing reproductions of stones from The Four Horsemen of The Apocalypse were the least of his problems. Perhaps I, and the stones, would be forgotten.
And yet there was a perhaps more pressing question: could I forget?