Reflections

A classic "saloon puzzle" is made from two or three or more separate metal pieces that interlock to create a sort of knot. The challenge: separate the pieces. The next challenge: put them back together. From one perspective, the puzzle seems hopeless, confounding, but amazing in the way the interlocked unity (which appears so simple) seems impossible to dissect. From another perspective, (when you "get" it), the puzzle pieces are already and always free from each other. In some higher dimension, they are not interlocked at all, they simply come apart, go together, effortlessly, like elemental locks and keys. There is no "knot".

With the long, complex, poly-motivic subject and an equally compelling countersubject, this fugue appears from one angle to be an impossibility. Image adding more metal pieces, contortions, transformations and interrelationships on top of the subject and countersubject: three voices that constantly exchange the piece over time, modulatory and cadential procedures to glide through a potential set of 24 keys, sectional design incorporating exposition and episode. How can it work? How difficult sometimes to attempt to analyze, to "decompose". But the unity and its multidimensionality are undeniable. Inscrutable, but all the more admirable for its inscrutability. Like nested ivory spheres, each exquisitely carved, complete in its private dimension; nested ivory spheres inextricably related in the experiential dimension, as though they could not be conceived of separately.