When Music Truly Comes Alive
Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY
I love how Philip K Dick is now so casually mentioned in literary reviews in publications like the New York Times and the London Times, and a cacophony of publications across Japan, China and South East Asia.
In the example below, Dick is referenced extensively for a review of another’s writer book, not one of his own. Where once Joyce, Melville or Conrad might have been mentioned, now it’s Philip K Dick’s name you see over and over again. This level of acknowledgement for the power of his ideas, and this kind of literary fame and respect, was something Dick long dreamed of during his lifetime, and he saw only a little of it before his death in 1982. It’s remarkable how many of his ideas, and many of them are already 40 or 50 years old, still excite readers and other writers today. It’s a kind of immortality granted to only a handful of American writers.
Here’s the relevant excerpt :
In Philip K. Dick’s 1953 short story “The Preserving Machine,” an impassioned inventor creates a device for “preserving” the canon of classical music — the sacred and, he fears, impermanent beauties of Schubert, Chopin, Beethoven and so forth — by feeding it into a device that transforms the compositions into living creatures: birds, beetles and animals resembling armadillos and porcupines. Outfitting the classic pieces in this manner, then setting them free, the inventor means to guarantee their persistence beyond the frailties of human commemoration, to give them a set of defenses adequate to their value. Alas, the musical-animals become disagreeable and violent, turn on one another and, when the inventor attempts to reverse-engineer his creations in order to prove that the music has survived, reveal themselves as a barely recognizable cacophony, nothing like the originals. Or has the preserving machine revealed true essences — irregularities, ferocities — disguised within the classical pieces to begin with?
Pieces of music transformed into living creatures. It’s a beautiful idea. And as we stand on the brink of creating entirely new lifeforms, no doubt some geneticist, somewhere, who also happens to be a big Philip K Dick fan, is thinking seriously about how this remarkable concept could be turned into reality.
I wonder what sort of creatures would be produced if you fed Slayer and/or Britney Spears into that preserving machine?
