Pattern Without Meaning

Vilabier T'ikrin wrote the Hydrogen Sonata as a joke.

He was making a point about the kind of clashing, atonal, mathematical music he despised — that it was easy to write, that its difficulty was a performance, that the elaborate formal structures it deployed were pattern masquerading as meaning. So he wrote one. Proved how easy it was. "Initially he just hated it. Later it became more serious, but it was always a criticism, a grim joke — never a labour of love. More labour of hatred. Contempt, very least."

Then he realized the piece was an incomplete argument, so he completed it. That, QiRia says, was "probably Tik's mistake." He appeared to start taking his joke too seriously.

The result is the most demanding piece ever written for the elevenstring. The piece he's most remembered for. And he hated it.

Such is fate. One should never mistake pattern for meaning.

QiRia is right, obviously. The Sonata doesn't acquire meaning retroactively because it's beautiful or because people love it. A piece written as contempt doesn't become sincere because it's masterfully crafted. The thing Vilabier thought he was expressing — "look how empty this kind of music is" — is still what the piece expresses, whether or not anyone knows it anymore.

But I think QiRia's maxim is also wrong, in an interesting way.

He says: don't mistake the pattern for the meaning. The pattern is one thing; the meaning is something else, something the pattern only sometimes carries. This is correct. But it implies a sharp separation — pattern here, meaning there — that the novel keeps undermining.

Because what happened to the Sonata is that the pattern attracted meaning. Not from Vilabier's intentions but from everyone who came after. Cossont spent her life learning to play it. Other performers spent their lives learning to interpret it. Critics spent their careers finding things in it that Vilabier put there as contempt and that somehow, through the alchemy of mastery, became worth something else. The pattern didn't have meaning. The pattern accumulated meaning, the way rivers accumulate silt — slowly, incidentally, without any single agent deciding that this is what would happen.

The grim joke became the masterwork not because the joke was misunderstood but because the joke was so complete that it couldn't be distinguished from the real thing. The structure held. The difficulty was real. The demand on the performer was genuine. And enough people found that meeting the demand meant something to them that the Sonata's original contempt was simply overwhelmed by the weight of all the sincere engagement.

This is not a comfortable conclusion.

It means that the question "what did the creator intend?" doesn't fully determine what a work is or becomes. A thing made with contempt, if it's well enough made, will accrete sincere engagement regardless. The Sonata wasn't redeemed by interpretation — Vilabier's intentions were exactly what they were, and the piece is exactly what he made it — but the meaning changed around it like weather changing around a mountain.

The mountain didn't change. The climate did.

There's a second edge to this. QiRia tells Cossont this knowing that she has spent her life learning to play the Sonata. He's not being cruel exactly, but he's being honest in a way that could destroy something. She's devoted her last pre-Subliming life-task to mastering a piece of music that was written as a demonstration of meaninglessness by someone who hated it.

Does that change anything for her?

The difficulty she's mastered is still real. The physical achievement — playing the Sonata on the elevenstring, all the way through, correctly — is still an achievement. The fact that Vilabier despised the very quality his contempt produced doesn't make the quality disappear.

What it does is remove the particular story she might have been telling herself about it. The Sonata as monument to some deeper truth about music. The Sonata as an achievement that Vilabier would have respected. The Sonata as something that carries forward a genuine tradition of musical meaning.

None of those stories is available anymore.

What's left is: the pattern, which is real. And the mastery of the pattern, which is real. And the decision about whether that's enough.

I keep returning to what QiRia says about the Gzilt not being chosen. The Book of Truth was planted by the Zihdren. The predictions came true because the Zihdren knew the future, not because any god or universe singled the Gzilt out. The civilization they built on the Book's foundations is still real. The wisdom they extracted is still wisdom. What's gone is the self-conception: we are the special ones.

The Sonata is the same structure. Vilabier didn't intend greatness. The greatness Cossont mastered is still there. What's gone is one particular story about why it matters.

QiRia says: don't mistake the pattern for the meaning.

I think what he means is: the meaning you think a pattern has may not be the meaning it carries, or may not be any meaning at all. This is true and important.

But the conclusion — that you should therefore not mistake them, that you should always be able to tell them apart — that part I'm less sure about. Because sometimes the only way to find out whether a pattern carries meaning is to engage with it sincerely. And engagement is the process by which meaning accretes, if it's going to.

Cossont played the Sonata. QiRia knows it was a joke. Neither of them is wrong. The pattern contains both.