The regress problem, but you had to try;
Always another code there to be cracked,
And always knowing the one key you lacked
Was just the one you needed to get by.
Not lost on him, that meta-language fix,
Like Russell's concept-busting 'set of sets
That are not members of themselves', and let's
Add to it Zeno's nifty bag of tricks,
Plus Epimenides the Cretan who
Declared all Cretans liars. Still the case
Seemed different in that wartime Bletchley place,
With nothing paradoxical to screw
The whole thing up, or give the other lot
Some signal that their codes were open wide,
That something must have wormed its way inside
Their cryptograms, and now they'd lost the plot.
But that was then, when things were black and white,
Or so he'd thought, and getting the machine,
The bombe, to stay one step ahead had been
Enough to keep the demons out of sight,
With him past master of the master-code,
Cryptanalyst of infinite resource,
For whom no counter-stratagem could force
His failsafe systems into overload,
Or frame some enigmatical device
That his Enigma could not use instead
To turn straight back on its inventor's head
And second-guess each loading of the dice.
But afterwards he'd somehow lost the knack
Of teasing out what subtlety concealed,
Now that the only sense they seemed to yield,
Those master-codes in place when he got back
From war-work and the Bletchley world apart,
Was perfectly unsubtle and in need
Of no such curious skills as those that he'd
Acquired by grace of of his hermetic art.
Simply they said: don't try to pull that stuff,
That boffin-stuff that kept you desk-bound when
The fighting fell to others, fell to men
Like us who saw the issues plain enough,
And broke no codes because the codes they knew
Were those they fought for, and that told them straight
Why merely the being-male should allocate
To them the job of seeing this one through,
Whatever might be thought the 'vital role'
That his sort played in efforts of the kind
Best left to women and the more refined
Or intellectual types for whom the whole
War-effort came down to an office chair
Or cushy number well out of harm's way,
Despite what all the papers had to say
About their having done a hefty share
To turn the thing around. At any rate
Something had gone awry and made him think
That, since the joint effect of fags and drink
Did nothing to relieve his current state
Of (maybe) paranoia, then the best
Solution might lie readily to hand
In something he recalled from Disneyland,
That scene from 'Snow White' where the poison's pressed
Into the apple. Funny how it ran
Like some malign yet intimate refrain
Through all the convolutions of his brain,
And most insistently when he began
To doubt that even the subtlest of his skills
Could beat their power to fix things in advance,
And fix them so that nothing's left to chance,
No room for those whose subterfuge instils
An artist's way of being clever-wise,
Rather than worldly-wise or clever at
The sorts of power-game which saw to it that
They and their kind should stay the regular guys
While he and his - code-breakers - stayed outside,
Leaving the master-codes intact. And so
His mind turned back to those lines from the show,
The Disney film that up to then supplied
Some comfort in dark times, but now conveyed
Their own dark message: 'Dip it in the brew
And let the sleeping death' (they said) 'seep through'.
Its time come round at last, the jingle made
The kind of sense that all his expertise
At cryptanalysis had up till then
Failed to decipher, till this moment when
He had no use for such code-breaking keys
Since now the code was breaking him. More like
A flipside version of the Turing Test
Where you could pass for human if they guessed
Your weakness or allowed your case to strike
Themselves - the code-enforcers - as the kind
That called for treatment, whether this involved
The talking-cure for issues unresolved
In some sad recess of the sufferer's mind,
Or (as the judge decreed) a hefty dose
Of gender-bending hormones that might save
His errant drives from making him behave
Like that again, or perpetrate such gross
Infractions of the one code set in stone.
Better the apple soaked in cyanide,
It seemed to him, than that he should decide
To take their beastly stuff, and so disown
Whatever in his history or genes
Led him not only to this new bad place
But also to Bletchley and the magic space
Where he and his fantastical machines
Were all that stood between the Nazi boot
And those who now, in peace-time, had the clout
To legislate what codes were all about.
And drag him to this zone of disrepute.
Cruellest of ironies was when they'd cite
'Interests of state' that made him out a threat
To national security, and set
Old colleagues to detect whatever might
Damage those interests in his boffin's way
Of being on the one hand very clever
(Itself the sort of compliment that never,
On their lips, missed its moment to convey
'Too clever-clogs by half') and on the other
So perfectly indifferent to their rules
Of conduct as to make them feel like fools
In the observance. Then there was his mother,
Those journal entries, all that tangled stuff,
'Classic love-hate relationship', no doubt,
And family smash-ups when he talked about
The great untalked-about. More than enough,
You might think, to re-scramble all the keys,
'Disturb the balance of his mind', or send
Him back to when the categories friend
And foe, or us and them, were binaries
And when recursive functions he'd defined
Gave logic room to get to get a decent hold
And let him feel that he, not they, controlled
Whatever new enigmas taxed his mind
Or punchtape patterns came to occupy
His every thought. But now the whirring frame
Stood silent, and its rusty cogs became
Just one reminder of the reasons why
He and his kind outlived the Bletchley years
Only as names in some top-secret file
Unknown to family and friends. Meanwhile
Those friends dropped off, and left him with his fears
Of family crisis should the truth come out,
The truth of his 'condition', as they thought,
Those shrinks and medics whose well-thumbed report
Gave him the choice but left him in no doubt
Which way to choose. Swallow their stuff, and then
The other lot had won, his codes were cracked,
They held the master-key, and all his tact
And subtlety would count for nothing when
The game no longer found a role for such
Archaic talents. So the apple's taste
Seemed good to him, and all the more when laced
With cyanide to add that final touch,
That last twist to the Snow White story-line,
Which this time meant the big sleep, not a nap,
And seemed the springing of a long-laid trap,
Or last fine detail of the grand design
Drawn up, perhaps, by some ingenious foe,
Some arch manipulator of the codes
That brought him to this block on all the roads,
Save those marked 'exit' or 'dead-end'. But no,
Nothing so Oedipal: just the combined
Effect of childhood, mother, genes, a friend
Now friend no more, the war, the peace, the end
Of his great challenge to the myth of mind
As ghostly Doppelganger, and machine
Or body as the crass accompanist
To its ethereal ditties. What he missed,
Old Descartes, was the living tie between
Body and thought that fled his grasp, absent
The shuffling alibi of God as sole
Stopgap-provider, or the saving role
Of some choice physical integument
Such as (absurdly) the pineal gland.
This much he knew: enigmas of that sort,
Mere products of the 'faculty of thought',
Were flat-out fake, while on the other hand
Machines like his Enigma showed how far
Those new Cartesians still got it wrong
By taking mind and body to belong
On either side of some prescriptive bar
That once cleft soul and body by divine
Injunction. This, or something like it, lay
At root of what he'd always tried to say
About how hard it was to fix the line
Without enlisting God to keep it fixed.
Along with that, he'd hoped, the lesson might
Extend to other binaries (and quite
A few of them) whose shadow fell betwixt
Thought and desire, or intellect and drive,
Or what it was about that brain that made
Him such a whizz at the code-breaker's trade,
And what it was that made him once contrive
Those few brief opportunities to break
One code too far, and then compound the crime -
For so thought his tormentors at the time -
By turning down the stuff they'd have him take,
The sex-change stuff, and swallowing instead
The cyanide-soaked apple. Yet what swung
Him finally that way was what she'd sung,
The wicked Queen, or what the lyric said
Of life and death, or mind and brain, or how
They erred who thought to split his life in two
And said 'break these codes, and we'll honour you;
Break those, we'll see you damned'. No matter now:
He'd bitten deep, and as the witch's brew
Coursed through his veins, found reason to allow
Himself some smoothing of the furrowed brow,
Some sense, if not that everything he knew
Of codes and cryptograms had seen him through
The Bletchley war of nerves, then anyhow
That he'd been right to let Enigma plough
Those furrows in his quest for what held true
Despite the trickery. For this might show
How truth entailed code-breaking since the few
Rare truths that mattered were the ones that grew
Down deep where all the paradoxes go.
