The Itch in the Algorithm (Alexander Grothendieck)"

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
You rebuilt
mathematics
from the ground up
because the ground
everybody else
was standing on
had the thin
cracked feel
of a sidewalk
poured
over something
nobody
had bothered
to excavate
and you
were the kind
of person
who excavates.

You went down
through the concrete
through the gravel
through the fill
until you hit
the part
that was
not resting
on anything else
and you said
*here,
build on this,*
and the room
looked down
and could not
see the bottom
and you
could.

[Verse 2]
Your mother
survived Auschwitz.
Your father
did not.
You grew up
stateless
in the south of France
in camps
for displaced persons
and the mathematics
you invented
later
had the quality
of a man
building a house
so solid
that no government
on earth
could knock on the door
and find him
not home.

[Chorus]
You won
every prize
the century
had to offer
and then
you stopped.
You walked
away
from mathematics
at forty-two
because
the department
was funded
by the military
and the military
had funded
the math
that had funded
the bomb
that tasted
like the same
green glass
a different man
on this album
is still
standing in
and you
would not
stand in it
and you
left.

[Verse 3]
You went
to a village
in the Pyrenees
and you stopped
answering letters
and you grew
vegetables
and you wrote
twenty thousand pages
of mathematics
that you
showed
to no one
and the pages
had the cool
damp weight
of a conversation
a man
is having
with the only person
left in the room
who can
follow him
and the only person
left in the room
was the room.

[Outro]
The twenty
thousand pages
are still
in the village.
The mathematics
is still
ahead
of the department
that lost you.
The vegetables
are still
growing
in the garden
you planted
when you decided
the garden
was a better
foundation
than the one
the century
was offering
and the garden
has not
asked you
for a security
clearance
yet.

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