The Meal His Wife Did Not Taste First (Kurt Gödel)

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
You were born in Moravia
in a world that was still called Austria-Hungary
and in your twenties in Vienna
you proved a thing that had not been suspected —
that any formal system
large enough to describe arithmetic
contains a statement
that is true
and that the system
cannot itself prove —
and the statement that demonstrated this
was a statement the system
could not decide
was true or false —
and mathematics
had just learned
that it could not reach
the ceiling of its own building
from inside the building

[Verse 2]
The amygdala that had filed
the Vienna of your twenties
as a city where the beer halls
were filling with men who would soon
require the census
to say which of your friends
were which kind of person
did not calm down
when you escaped east
across the Trans-Siberian Railway
to Japan
to San Francisco
to Princeton
and it did not calm down
at Princeton either
because the amygdala
does not care
which city it has arrived in
only whether the rooms
still have too many doors

[Chorus]
And every afternoon at the Institute
you walked home across Mercer Street
with the other man
whose brain would later be measured —
and the two of you did not speak much
but the silence between the two of you
was the silence
inside of which modern physics
and modern logic
had both been composed —
and the prefrontal cortex
that had broken the Göttingen program
was the same cortex
that could not stop checking
whether the food on the plate
had been prepared by someone
who had not been asked
to prepare it

[Outro]
Your wife was the only person
whose food you would eat
and she was hospitalized
for six months in the winter of seventy-seven
and you did not eat
and you did not eat
and you did not eat
and you died at Princeton Hospital in January
at sixty-five pounds
of a paranoia
the system had not been able
to prove was not warranted —
and the incompleteness theorem
had finally found
its biological demonstration
in the only formal system
that had ever mattered
to the man who wrote the paper