The Furnace and the Passport (Nikola Tesla... no — Srinivasa Ramanujan)

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
You were a clerk
in a customs office
in Madras
making twenty pounds
a year
and filling notebooks
with theorems
that looked
to everyone
in the customs office
like the doodling
of a man
who was not paying
attention to customs,
and you were not
paying attention to customs
because the numbers
in your head
were arriving
faster than
the ships
in the harbor.

[Verse 2]
You wrote a letter
to a professor
in Cambridge
and you enclosed
a hundred and twenty theorems
you had worked out
on your own
in a country
that had not
given you
a single teacher
who could follow
what you were doing
past page two,
and the professor
in Cambridge
read the letter
and said
to his colleague
at breakfast
*this man is either
a fraud
or a genius
and I cannot tell
which one
and I am
not accustomed
to not being able
to tell.*

[Chorus]
He brought you
to England.
You were cold
the entire time.
You could not eat
the food
and you would not eat
the food
that was not vegetarian
and England
in nineteen fourteen
was not
a place
that understood
what vegetarian meant
and you sat
in a cold room
in Trinity College
producing
the most beautiful
mathematics
anyone in the building
had ever seen
on a stomach
that had not
been full
in two years.

[Verse 3]
The infinite series
you wrote down
in the notebooks
in Madras
turned out to be
not just correct
but eighty years
ahead
of the mathematics
that would
eventually
need them,
and the professor
who could not tell
if you were a fraud
spent the rest
of his life
telling everyone
you were
the most natural
mathematician
he had ever met
and the word
*natural*
was the word
because the theorems
arrived in you
the way
weather arrives —
without
being asked.

[Outro]
You went home
at thirty-two
because your body
had been cold
and underfed
for too long
and you died
in Madras
in a room
that was finally warm
with a notebook
open on the bed
that still had
theorems in it
that the mathematicians
have not
finished
understanding
yet.

The notebook
is still open.
The theorems
are still arriving.

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