The Octave and the Lattice

The Book of Life and Music

A Story Told in Octaves

Prelude — On the First Page

Everything that is alive is moving, and everything that moves has a pitch.

You will not hear most of it. The blood in your wrist keeps a tempo. The membrane of every cell trembles at a rate that has a name in a book somewhere. The earth itself hums — one long note, far too low and slow for an ear — and around it the moon answers in a slower one still. We are surrounded, always, by an orchestra tuning. Most of us live our whole lives in the rehearsal and never once think to listen.

This is the story of a man who listened. His name was Asa, and he spent his life building a single instrument, and the instrument was not finished until he was. I am going to tell it to you the way he told it to me, which is to say in octaves — for he believed a life, like a melody, does not move in a line. It returns. It comes back around to where it began, the same and not the same, one turn higher each time, until the last turn lets go.

If you love music, this is a book about the secret hidden inside the simplest thing you know — the octave, the doubling, the note that becomes itself again.

If you love a person, it is about that too. It was always about that.

They turn out to be the same secret. That is the whole book; the rest is only how he found it out.

I. The Fundamental

He was seven the first time the world spoke to him on purpose.

His grandmother kept a long wire fence at the back of the property, strung taut between two iron posts to hold the goats, and on a still afternoon Asa reached up and plucked it the way you'd pluck a thing simply to see what it did. It said a low word. He felt it more than heard it — a note that went down into the post and into the ground and into the soles of his bare feet.

He pressed his thumb to the exact middle of the wire and plucked again. And the wire said the same word, but higher. The same — he was sure of it, certain in the way only a child can be certain — and yet lifted, brightened, as if it had stood up.

He did not have the word octave yet. What he had was the feeling, and the feeling was this: I have cut the thing in half, and instead of breaking it, I have sent it home.