Magnificently Wrong About Everything (Athanasius Kircher)

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
You descended into Vesuvius
while it was actively erupting
because the question
of what the interior of a volcano looks like
could not be answered
from a library in Rome
and the library in Rome
was where you lived
and contained more answers
than any library in Europe
and none of them
were sufficient
when the mountain was right there
offering to show you
The somatosensory cortex
registered the heat
as a polite suggestion to leave
and you overruled it
with the Jesuit confidence
of a man who believes
God will not kill him
before the observation
is complete

[Verse 2]
You translated the hieroglyphics —
or you believed you did —
with a system so elaborate
and so internally consistent
and so absolutely wrong
that the wrongness
took a hundred and fifty years
to untangle
because a sufficiently beautiful error
resists correction
the way a sufficiently beautiful building
resists demolition
The orbitofrontal cortex
assigns value to patterns
and yours assigned cathedral-grade value
to patterns
that were not there —
you saw language
where the stone held only pictures
and the pictures
did not complain
about the mistranslation

[Chorus]
You built a museum in Rome —
the Kircherianum —
filled with magnetic clocks,
speaking tubes,
a megaphone shaped like a dragon,
optical illusions,
fossils you misidentified
as the bones of giants,
and a cat piano —
an instrument
that produced music
by pressing keys
that pulled the tails
of cats arranged by pitch
which you drew in meticulous diagrams
and may or may not have built
and which is either
the most disturbing idea
a Jesuit has ever had
or the most creative thing
anyone has ever done
with cats and carpentry

[Verse 3]
You mapped the interior of the Earth
as a system of underground rivers
and underground fires
connected by channels
like the ventricles of a brain
scaled to planetary proportions —
the thalamic relay
of the planet's own nervous system
and you were wrong
about the rivers
and wrong about the fires
but the shape of the wrongness
was a nervous system
and the nervous system
turns out to be
the right metaphor
for everything
including the things
you were wrong about

[Outro]
Forty books you published —
on magnetism, on music,
on plague, on China,
on the tower of Babel,
on the acoustics of churches,
on universal language —
and in every one of them
the ambition
exceeded the evidence
by exactly the margin
that makes a book
worth opening
three hundred years later
You were magnificently wrong
about everything
and the magnificence
is what survived
because correct is common
and spectacular error
is the Broca's area of discovery:
the part that produces the sentence
before it knows
whether the grammar is right