Kekulé's Snake

Lyrics

[Intro]
(a fire in a grate, a chair creaking, a pen set down)
Ghent. Eighteen sixty-something. A chemist dozing by the fire.

[Verse 1]
He had the formula for benzene and the formula was wrong.
Six carbons and six hydrogens and no way to arrange them,
he had been at it for months, in the way that people are,
turning it and turning it and getting nowhere at all.
And he sat down by the fire, and he did not go to sleep,
and he did not stay awake, and that is where this happens.

[Chorus]
Kekulé's snake! Turning in the firelight!
Atoms in long rows, twisting like serpents in his eyes,
and one of them takes hold of its own tail and holds it —
and he wakes, and the answer is a RING, and the ring is right!
Kekulé's snake. The ouroboros. Benzene.
He said it himself, in a speech, in front of people.

[Verse 2]
Now historians argue, and they should, and it may be tidied —
he told it decades later, at a dinner, as a story,
and stories improve, and chemists are not immune to that.
But the phenomenon is real, whatever happened in that chair:
the threshold makes connections that the waking mind will not,
because the waking mind is disciplined, and discipline is a filter.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
And it's not only him. It's Loewi and the frog hearts,
it's Mendeleev, it's Coleridge, it's a hundred smaller ones —
people who could not solve it while they were trying to,
and solved it in the ten minutes when they stopped.
Which is not mystical. It's just that association goes loose
exactly when the supervisor steps out of the room.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(the fire settles)
Write it down NOW.
He wrote it down. That's why we know.