Counterpoint

Art to the scientist: that slurring half-drunk midnight sound, confusing but familiar as the stream of images that precede sleep. A song, a drink, a memory of a moonlit street. Then gone. Dispelled in an instant by the steel of reason. Machine of hard-formed logic bolted together, humming with consequence and power. Art's drunk ballad the swish of cars outside the air-conditioned office window, the mumbling of the half-mad cleaner who vacuums the carpet beneath the giant, gleaming machine. To be inside that stainless place, painless place, all that fury of ambition and thought lasered into clarity and purity and light like coal crushed into diamonds, like particles smashed into being by a supercollider. The greater the power the sharper the probe. And art, what is art? The gypsy accordionist who holds out his dirty palm to passengers on the tube. A drunk, a bum, a moment's confusion in a mental lull.

Science to the artist: a steel-barred prison of pedantic reason; a joke constructed in logical stages; a geek with his tee-shirt tucked into his jeans, taking his pale pleasures with infantile delight, hill walking, game playing, finishing things off completely. Joy in chaos, squalor; beauty in decay. They cannot see that. Madness, the infinite boundary between night and day. Science to the artist is a dark house on a sunny day, a boy inside doing his homework with the sun so bright on the outside walls that the interior can hardly be seen. Or the sun rising behind the curtains of a drunken orgy, the streets being cleaned and the day people washed and shaved and on their way to work, despising all life and love and joy, despising the machines that rolled across their childhood, tore them from their Eden.