The Time of Our Singing (2003)

One of the most beautiful books I've ever read. An intricate interweaving of music, physics, and history; race, science, and religion. Time beyond time. Family stories written outside of time wrapping around and about and into themselves. Follow the music. Sing your song. Listen/look for all the frequencies wherever you point your telescope.

I only wish I could ask each of the Daley-Strom family members what they think of President Barack Obama.
I also wish the book came with a soundtrack CD.
Amazing. ( )

In the fifth century B.C., the Greek philosopher Empedocles wrote, “Come now, hearken to my words; learning will enlarge your mind…. I shall tell of a two-fold process.” The two-fold process of Empedocles is the mind-enlarging weave of ideas that run through the novels of Richard Powers: the struggle between Love and Strife, of Aphrodite versus Thanatos, of remembering and forgetting, of music and science. Powers writes his two-fold vibrations with intense lyricism, fierce intelligence, and the improvisational pacing of a free jazz combo: masters of their instruments, the riffing interplay of sentences is always challenging the reader to keep up, pay attention, read more to fill in the gaps in learning the novels expose.

In The Gold Bug Variations (1991) the two-fold vibration consists of a double helix of love stories set twenty-five years apart. These twined stories are the strands of a code, and stranded stories in as much as the characters abandon themselves to memory and grief. One love story is between a hot-shot molecular biologist unraveling the “four-note” DNA code (Poe’s “Tale of the Goldbug,” a story about a code) and a married woman; the other between an art historian who rediscovers the molecular biologist, long since having quit science, working as a computer programmer (or “coder”, as such professionals are sometimes called) and a librarian (who works with the encoding of knowledge) who helps the historian unravel the biologist’s mysterious life story. The theme that twines the two stories together is the simple aria of Bach’s four-note Goldberg Variations as played by the young Glenn Gould, the pianist who also did a disappearing act. In The Gold Bug Variations, Powers translates music into science, and history into the living breath of the present. He writes, “Translation, hunger for porting over, is not about bringing Shakespeare into Bantu. It is about bringing Bantu into Shakespeare. To show what else, other than homegrown sentences, a language might be able to say.”

With Galatea 2.2 (1995), Powers grows more intense (an amazing feat after the fire that fuels his first three novels, culminating in the masterpiece of The Gold Bug Variations), and more philosophical. “Galatea” refers to the statue that came to life in the Pygmalion legend; in the novel, the coming-to-being takes place in a computer named Helen. The novel opens up a vast terrain of speculation about the nature of consciousness. Can a machine really be trained in the “Great Books” to the extent that it can outwit a student on a literature test? There is, of course, a none-too-subtle grief-filled joke here (as all humor, as some philosophers theorize, is based on pain): do students, do we, actually read enough any more to hold a candle to even a rudimentary artificially intelligent machine? The two-fold process emerges through flashbacks in which the protagonist of the novel, a character named Richard Powers who has been appointed Humanist-in-Residence at the Center for the Study of Advanced Science, recalls, reconstructs and tries to redeem his dashed love affair with a woman known only as C. Where The Gold Bug Variations is uplifting and joyous, even as—or because of—its grief and desire, Galatea 2.2 is so burningly introspective that it nearly drowns in a pool of its own tears.

Plowing the Dark (2001), Powers’ seventh novel, is his most difficult. Difficult, not because of the subject matter, but because of the way the subjects are presented. We get two empty white rooms: canvasses of desire. In one room, somewhere near Seattle, artists and scientists again meet (as in so much of Powers’ work), this time to create a virtual world so real it passes a kind of Turing Test (Alan Turing was a computer scientist of the mid-twentieth century who posed a test: a computer can be deemed “human” if, in a blind conversation with it, a “real” human cannot tell that the interlocutor is a machine). The brilliant imagination Powers brings to this white room is stunning: the reality is not the quotidian one we see walking down the sidewalk or driving on the freeway, but the reality of dreams. Rendering Van Gogh’s room at Arles, for instance, is the obsession of the novel’s artist-protagonist. Meanwhile, there’s another white room, this one in some unnamed Mediterranean country where an English teacher is held prisoner by terrorists. Blindfolded, isolated, the teacher’s mind wanders, to say the least, through virtual terrains of horror and hope. The book is a masterpiece—one of several in Powers’ oeuvre—because of the author’s ability to plumb the depths of despair and desire that are the propellants of human imagination.

Powers’ latest novel, The Time of Our Singing (2003) is a hopeful song of love against all odds. The odds are only long, though, because we never look for the events portrayed in the novel to happen. At a civil rights march in Washington DC, a black woman singer from Philadelphia meets a white physicist from Germany. They fall in love with a look and a grace note: we shall overcome. The odds are long and subject to Heisenbergian uncertainty: although Powers’ novel is deeply historical and precisely geographical, these two young lovers could be any place at any time in which the deck is stacked against them. The book has been mistaken for a literal portrayal of certain events in particular places, but the history here is a cloud chamber of interacting particles highlighting the possibility of love.

The brilliant and daring thing about The Time of Our Singing is that it reduces everything to music. But since music is irreducible—every physical, every performed note resonates with some other—this is no reduction. That is precisely the same contradiction as with time: both feel everywhere and sourceless (the deaf can dance because floorboards sing; time flies, as we say, when we’re having fun, drags when we’re not), but our reasoning ability can’t quite get a handle on either time or music because our story-telling minds insist on a source. As Powers writes, “With each step that he pulls away from me, Jonah’s clock slows down. But if his clock slows, it only makes him more impatient. Jonah races and slows; Da dawdles and speeds up. He’s still talking, as if we can follow him. ‘Light, you see, always flies around you at the same speed whether you run toward it or away. So some measure must shrink, to make that speed stand still. This means you cannot say when a thing happens without saying where, in what frame of motion.’”

Music is to time as race is to human: it’s all about motion and perspective. As Nicholas of Cusa wrote six hundred years ago, “we apprehend motion only relative to something motionless.” Cusa was arguing against the Ptolemaic concept of the geocentric fixity of the Earth. Powers argues against the fixity of race, and in favor of the fluid motion of changing perspectives: “Past and future both lay folded up in the misleading lead of the present. All three are just different cuts through the same deep map. Was and will be: All are fixed, discernible coordinates on the plane that holds all moving nows.” Powers’ argument isn’t the dread relativism of post-modernism, but an advanced ethics based on quantum mechanics. Joseph, the backup-piano playing second son (to his older brother’s lieder-singing lead) says of his physicist father: “Da liked to say you can send a message ‘down into time.’ But you can’t send one back up. He never explained to me how you could send any message, in any direction, and expect it to reach its mark. For even if the message arrives intact, everything it speaks about will have already changed.”

Because the center will not hold, at least not for long, The Time of Our Singing is a study in entropy, in the slow demise of narrative universes. But it is also a study in the cyclic nature of the universe: death and regeneration and the “dual time” of the physicist father’s scientific studies. Oldest son Jonah, “whose voice could make heads of state repent,” is on a collision course with fame: he becomes a world-class singer of lieder, the art songs of the nineteenth century. And crash he does, only to recover and regenerate himself as the leader of a group of “early music” (i.e., medieval) in which no voice takes the lead but all harmonize to transport both listeners and singers into the sublime. Joseph, the middle child and the narrator, is also on a collision course: he’s Jonah’s accompanist until he, too, abandons their duet for jazz and teaching. The youngest child, Ruth, despairs of her parents’ naïve hope to raise their three children “beyond race,” and joins a radical Black liberation group.

In the end, the “color” of music—the timbre of instruments, the emotional weight of intervals—is entwined with the laws of physics—laws much more forgiving then those of humans. Therein lies the gift of Powers’ imagination, an imagination that suffuses and translates his gifts to us: the power to transcend the grinding wheels of human injustice, the ability (as literally portrayed in Plowing the Dark) to think “outside the box.” “We will overcome,” shout the works of Richard Powers: not through conversion by proselytizing, but through the energy of example.

Originally published in Curled Up with a Good Book ( )

The Time of Our Singing
Richard Powers
FSG 2003

This is only my second outing with Powers but it's left me wanting to go on a binge. The first, 'The Gold Bug Variations', I read entirely by happenstance. It was a gift from my librarything secret santa whose name I've forgotten but to whom I'm deeply grateful. In that novel he used one of the story elements, Bach's Goldberg Variations, to structure the entire novel. He does the same thing in this novel telling the story of three generations of Daleys' (and Stroms') struggle to come to terms with family, race and identity, by twisting time, the specialist of physicist David Strom, into a labyrinth.

The novel is narrated from the family's center, by Joseph, the middle child of the middle generation and ripples out in time from him. Joseph is the child of David Strom, a German Jew who has barely escaped Nazi Germany, and Delia Delaney, a child of the Black upper class. These two, bound together by music and hope for a color blind future, try to raise their children, Jonah, Joseph and Ruth, for that future by raising them beyond race, by forcing them to take no identity but the one each chooses for him(her) self. Though the children don't see it, it's a powerful gift from their parents. Mankind has long recognized that to name a thing is to have power over it. Adam named creation and was given dominion over it, Calaph gifted Turnandot with his name and in doing so gave her the power of life and death over him, Rumpelstiltskin was vanquished by his name. Delia and David recognize what will take their children decades to see, that naming one's own self is the ultimate power.

All three children, like their first and best teacher, their mother, are musically gifted, the eldest and perhaps the youngest, are prodigies. Jonah has the most success at carving out an identity for himself and is constantly revising and recreating that self. To be honest, he reminds me of Madonna, but with substantially more substance. Ruth, the youngest, seems more intent on vehemently denying that any part of her is white (technically she's more white than black) than on getting any true sense of self, going so far as to join the Black Panthers. Joseph, the narrator, defines himself as brother to his siblings. The outside pressure on them is tremendous, from both family, Delia's family and Ruth herself, and friends and colleagues, to define themselves as Black and behave accordingly. (Though the novel is set in the post WWII era, I couldn't help but recall all the debate early in the Obama campaign about whether he was 'Black' enough or too 'Black' to be elected and wonder what Powers made of that debate). Added to this pressure is the need to reconcile themselves to the tremendous grief caused by the early death of their mother.

Opposite the sibling triptych is their father David, a physicist who has been set adrift in time. My only major peeve with the novel is the fact that we don't get to see more of him. I'd trade David for 20 Ruths any day. His family (most of it) has been wiped out during the Holocaust and he himself has suffered tremendous prejudice both in Europe and the US, but we learn very little about it. Yet in spite of this he maintains a heartbreaking innocence and humanity, this is a man who still converses with his dead wife going so far as to pour coffee for her. David is the only truly color blind character, he sees only time twisting itself in knots, each person traveling through at his own speed. It is his obsession with sending messages down the strands that ties all themes of this dense and complex novel together.
Powers manages all this gracefully while at the same time producing some truly moving prose (and some not so much, to be honest.) Definitely worth reading. ( )

http://spwebdesign.livejournal.com/676729.html ( )

Erst kein Zugang, dann Trauer beim Abschied:
Eine detaillierte Inhaltsangabe möchte ich an dieser Stelle nicht mehr geben, da dies in den vorangegangen Rezensionen gut und hinreichend geschehen ist.

Die übergeordneten Themen dieses Buches sind Musik, Physik, insbesondere die Zeit, und die Rassendiskriminierung in den USA. Das ist der Makrokosmos. Im Mikrokosmos geht es auch um eine große Liebe, ohne welche die Protagonisten nicht wären, und ein ambivalentes Geschwisterverhältnis. Ein Fisch und ein Vogel verlieben sich, ein weißer Mann, deutscher Jude, und eine schwarze Frau mit sehr heller Hautfarbe. Ihre drei Kinder sind fast weiß, milchkaffeebraun und kaffeebraun. Auf jeden Fall aber nach gängigem Recht in den USA farbig, und so steht es auch in ihren Geburtsurkunden. Die Eltern hoffen auf mehr Toleranz in der Zukunft und möchten sie fern von Rassenfragen erziehen. Sie sollen sie selbst sein und ihre eigene Identität finden. Deshalb geben sie ihnen den Rat, ihre eigene Rasse aufzumachen. Der Vater, der deutsche Emigrant und Physiker, sieht die Farbe gar nicht und erweist sich in dieser Hinsicht als weltfremd. Die beiden Brüder werden erfolgreiche Musiker, wobei der jüngere, Joseph, der Erzähler, immer im Schatten des Älteren, Jonah, bleibt und sein Leben viele Jahre dessen Bedürfnissen und Wünschen unterordnet. Für Jonah, den Hellhäutigen, spielt in seinem Erwachsenenleben die Farbe keine Rolle. Joseph, eindeutig farbig, sitzt zwischen allen Stühlen. Einzig Ruth, die Schwester, bezieht eindeutig Stellung und schließt sich den Black Panters an.

Ich empfinde die Konstellation schwarz und jüdisch nicht als Überfrachtung, wie an anderer Stelle angemerkt, sondern glaube, dass nur ein europäischer Immigrant, als Jude selbst ein Gejagter, die Brisanz dieser Verbindung unterschätzen konnte, weil ihm das Leben in Amerika fremd war. Es macht nichts, wenn man sich im Einzelfall nicht mit den Protagonisten identifizieren kann (auch dies wurde an anderer Stelle formuliert). Man muss noch nicht einmal zwingend Sympathie für sie empfinden. Deshalb kann das Buch trotzdem gelungen sein. Positiv hervorheben möchte ich die ausführliche Zeittafel im Anhang, die so manche nicht für jeden verständliche Anspielung im Text erhellt und oft den Blick ins Lexikon erspart.

Ich habe dieses Buch noch lange nach Beendigung der Lektüre nicht aus meinen Gedanken bekommen, obwohl mir der Einstieg schwer fiel. Man könnte also sagen, zuerst kam ich nicht rein, dann kam ich nicht raus. Am Anfang braucht man Zeit für dieses Buch. Es genügt nicht, kurze Passagen zu lesen (was, je nach Textstelle, lange dauern kann). Dann fühlt man sich nicht ein und wird nicht mit den Personen und vor allem nicht mit dem Stil vertraut. Es gibt Passagen, die sehr dicht sind und einem Personen und Handlung sehr nahe bringen, indem sie große Empathie erzeugen. Von diesen Textstellen wünscht man sich, dass sie nicht enden mögen. Es gibt aber auch Textstellen, die sich seitenlang mit Musikgeschichte und Musiktheorie befassen oder auch mit der detaillierten Beschreibung von Auftritten der Protagonisten. Das kann ermüdend und sogar langweilig sein. Sicher nimmt man auch viele Informationen gar nicht wahr bzw. kann sie nicht einordnen, wenn man in dieser Richtung keine Vorbildung mitbringt. Details betreffend habe ich Etliches nicht verstanden, doch was die Handlung im Großen und Ganzen angeht, schließt sich am Ende der Kreis. Das Buch hat es verdient, zweimal gelesen zu werden, weil dann sicher noch manches deutlich wird, was man bei der ersten Lektüre überlesen hat.

Trotz meiner anfänglichen Schwierigkeiten hat mir dieses Buch sehr gut gefallen, und ich werde wieder etwas von Richard Powers lesen. Bei diesem Buch ist es besonders wichtig, den richtigen Zeitpunkt für die Lektüre zu finden, damit man am Anfang die nötige Geduld aufbringt. Dann hält man es auch durch und hat am Ende viel gewonnen.