It is in the sixteenth century that Niccolò Tartaglia, studying the pathways of flying shots, determines that such trajectories are curved.
It is August 6, 1945. Does he hear it over the radio? Is an announcement made at the plant that day? So much of his life will be part of the life of this event. There is no fence yet around the swimming hole. His daughter Iris is not yet born. Is he proud? He was part of what made it possible. And the war is over.
On the same day, in his statement accompanying the news of the bombing of Hiroshima, President Truman announces that the technical processes of the production of the bomb will not be revealed. We must count ourselves trustees of this new force, he declares, three days later. In just one week, as the Second World War is formally ended, the Department of War orders that all scientific and technical knowledge about nuclear energy be kept secret.
Within the cell, proteins create the building materials, and carbohydrates and fats supply energy.
The word secret has an erotic edge, as if in hiding anything, a story, a weapon, a piece of candy still wet from the mouth, clinging to the flannel lining of a pocket, one moves closer to a sequestered sexual body at the core of being. During my childhood the absence left by all the secrets my parents and the other adults kept from children was numinous and hot. There was the war that had just occurred and, beneath those images of heroism, unspeakable whispered horrors. There was my mother’s drinking, just like her father’s before her, the flashing sight of her wild laughter and then rage, before my father pulled her out of the hallway and into the privacy of their bedroom. The secret process of atomic fission, the secret mechanisms of missiles. All these secrets migrated into one space in my imagination, a geography of lost and missing pieces.
It is in the eighteenth century, during the War of the Spanish Succession, that a cannon invented for use on the battlefield is deployed. Its brass or sometimes iron gun barrel is elaborately decorated. It sits on wheels, which allow it to be transported by horse.
Does it appear to him like a moonscape, this flat expanse of desert, so stripped of anything familiar, dry, full of sand and dust? Nothing like Germany. In the moonlight he might easily imagine that the moon herself had been severed from this place before being flung out into the void. This is all of the moon he will see now. His vision is circumscribed by a more modest experimentation. The slow reassembling of parts. The careful explanation of old designs. On May 10, 1946, almost exactly a year after the end of the war in Germany, the first American V-2 rocket is launched from this strip of desert, located midway between El Paso, Texas, and the Trinity site in New Mexico, where the first atomic weapon was detonated. The rocket rises to an altitude of seventy-one miles. To commemorate the occasion, the lieutenant colonel in charge gives each of the participants a wooden model of the rocket.
It is not what he had hoped for. Just now the moon recedes farther and farther from him. So many obstacles impede his journey. Is it far-fetched to liken him to the lover whose ardor shines brighter as his beloved recedes from his grasp? The moon of course says nothing, being silent, mysterious, aloof as a maiden in a castle. But as I enter the field of his passion, it is not a desire for intimacy I sense so much as the will to possess whatever exists as part of an empire of knowledge. Meanwhile he must raise an army to assault her bastion. And to do this, it is other men he must woo.
Is his tone seductive? Certainly he is aware of the value of what he knows. Knowledge is the only currency of his power. Does he let it drop at a dinner party? Or is he standing at a bar, in a hallway, in the lobby of a theatre? A hint, almost casually mentioned, that another weapon was designed at Peenemünde. Someone else is building rockets. The moon may even have another suitor. Helmut Gottrum, who worked with him at Peenemünde, is there now in the land of rivals looming large and phantasmagorical at the borders of imagination. When a more formal meeting is arranged, he cautions his listeners that of course he cannot know for certain. This is just an educated guess, a scientist’s conjecture. It would perhaps be three years before the Soviets would be able to produce this rocket.
No words need pass precisely delineating the terms. A deal is struck but it is not written. They are called gentlemen’s agreements. The negotiators know and they do not know what they do.
There are those who wish to deport Dr. von Braun. Members of the Nazi Party are forbidden entrance to the United States. And there is a suggestion that he is a war criminal. According to the official procedures, which are followed to the letter, Dr. von Braun is interrogated. Yes, he was a member of the Nazi Party, and a major in the SS, but all this was simply a part of his winding path to the moon. Memos are written. Remarks passed in the same hallways, at clubs, in certain familiar gathering places. There is the Soviet threat. The interballistic missile just now being born from the old V-2 designs. Finally the President issues a new interpretation of the standing policy. Those who joined the Nazi Party for opportunistic reasons will be exempted from the rule. Though Dr. von Braun’s name is never mentioned, a certain understanding has been reached.
It is speculated that the first single-celled organisms were created from the union of less complicated structures.
It is June 26, 1948. Following Stalin’s orders, all traffic into the western sector of Berlin is being stopped at the eastern border. The city has been without access to food or coal for two days. Now, just as plans for a massive airlift of supplies are being set in motion, the President orders two squadrons of B-29s into Berlin. These airplanes will carry nothing to meet the needs of those who are garrisoned. They serve another purpose. As they fly over the eastern territory to their destination, the silhouettes of wings, engines, tails, carry another message mimed for those who watch. Even unspoken, all participants quickly grasp the meaning. These are the only airplanes capable of delivering atomic bombs.
This is the way diplomacy has always been conducted. The covert suggestion of possibilities not so much threatened as displayed. Does the President take pleasure in this gesture? He knows that he possesses the most powerful weapon in the world. Is it possible that he feels this new strength even in his body? Short in stature, now no one can argue with his power. It is a virility superhuman in its proportions. And the power is more than physical. It is also mental. He is the only one who knows if the weapon will be used. It is through this uncertainty that he makes an assault on his enemy. And can it also be said that, in the wake of his rival’s ignorance, he feels, at this moment, in command of all knowledge?
I was just three years old in the year of the Berlin airlift. I was the youngest in the family. And everyone knew more of the world than I. Just mastering language, I made my family laugh as certain words eluded my still undeveloped skill for speech. It was that innocent laughter reserved for the small and young, those not yet on sturdy legs, stumbling and vulnerable, staying near their mothers for protection. I had seen images of mushroom clouds but this was vastly diminished in my child’s mind by the height of the back steps to our house which I had just mastered.
It is September 1949. In the beginning the President will not believe the report. The response is a common one. We have all experienced this. By denying the truth of an event, one gains the illusion of control. But it is true. Air force intelligence has found radioactivity in air samples gathered near Siberia. Later reports will all confirm: a plutonium bomb has been detonated in the Soviet Union. The period of exclusive knowledge has ended.
It is June 25, 1950. Massive forces from the north have crossed the South Korean border. General MacArthur delays sending word to Washington. For several hours the battlefield will be his alone. Without seeking permission from the President, he orders the dispatch of munitions to South Korea. Is it perhaps a giddy feeling he has now? This is, he says, Mars’s last gift to an old warrior. As he goes just to the edge, and then just over the edge, of his legal powers, he is something like an acrobat, leaning over an abyss of space. Our sense of perspective would argue that he should fall; but nevertheless he seems to defy gravity.
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Imagining myself in the general’s place, I can just begin to perceive the outlines of his reasoning. His character after all has been carefully constructed for such challenges. Whatever fears accompanied him, the nausea before he took his examinations at West Point, the abiding nightmare of failure and public shame that still haunts him, are diminished again and again by his victories. And who should know better how to proceed in this war? He has spent over half his life in this region. He was a young man, traveling with his father, then a general, when he first encountered Asia. Through this first impression, this region gained what he called a mystic hold on him. He had discovered, he would say later, Western civilization’s last frontier. Where was it in his mind that this frontier existed? At the edge of a bamboo forest, elegantly quiet? On a warm beach surrounded with the scent of tropical flowers? In a city filled with exotic sounds, strange clothing, new tastes, unpredictable movements? In his mind now he is the commander of the Far East, and it falls to him to seize and restore order in his suzerainty.
History rarely moves in a single direction. While the notion of empire expands in one place, it diminishes in another. Nineteen hundred and fifty is also the year in which the state of India finally becomes a sovereign republic. The European colonies of Asia and Africa are breaking away. But at the same time another frontier is opening. This is also the year that Wernher von Braun and his rocket team move to Huntsville, Alabama, to begin work on a missile with a range of five hundred miles. In Dr. von Braun’s mind is this five hundred miles closer to the moon? The work proceeds more slowly, and by a more circuitous route, than he would wish, the moon remaining elusive, so near and yet so far.
Strange as it seems, when I think of General MacArthur stretching as far as possible the limits of legal authority over Asia, the image of an astronaut, making giant steps with an elated buoyancy, enters the territory of my imagination. It is as if, in my mind, all the events of history take place simultaneously. As I sit in a darkened theater watching film taken of the first lunar landing in 1968, one astronaut plants a flag, while another, almost floating across the strangely beautiful moonscape, tells us he has recently discovered something essential about human nature: man’s need to explore. Breaking natural law, sailing into unknown space, is it only here in this territory free of the familiar that the voyager tastes the true meaning of life? But free though he is, the journey is not limitless. The flag must be saluted; the airship turned home again. And there is always the possibility of a fatal error in calculation by which one will be planted forever in the void.
It is 1951. If the general has held a precarious balance it is only momentary. He sends a cable to Washington. Can he use atomic bombs to cut off the supply routes from Vladivostok and Manchuria? Can he surround the north with a band of radioactive waste? He disobeys orders and crosses the 38th parallel. And when the Chinese enter the war, he boasts to Japanese diplomats that China will be crushed with a nuclear attack.
It is in the early spring then that the President relieves him of his command. There is a procedure which must be followed. If the President has made his own innuendos about nuclear weapons, words were placed artfully. The balance of power is intricate, the rules infinitely complex. The balance tips first this way and then that. And at either end of an incline perhaps too steep are consequences whose proportions are still stunning the world.
For those who have never seen it, the sight is spectacular. A white chimney of fire, a light with an intensity many times brighter than the midday sun, golden, purple, violet, gray and blue, lighting every peak and crevasse of the mountain, the beauty great poets dream about, followed by an awesome roar which warns of doomsday. Tourists, busloads of schoolchildren, whole families travel to Mount Charleston in the hours before dawn to watch the explosions. The travel section of the New York Times promises the likelihood of an attenuated cloud passing right over the observer’s head.
It is still 1951. Moved from the Marshall Islands because of the proximity of the Korean War, the test site has been a feature of the Nevada landscape since the beginning of the year. Now, late in the same year, the army constructs a bivouac, temporary buildings, tents, offices, a canteen. Thousands of troops are arriving to witness the explosion and to conduct field exercises under the extending clouds. Pigs and rabbits dressed in military uniform will be placed closer to the blast. This is how it is explained to the Atomic Energy Commission. The soldiers will be taught protective measures. And the army will study the effects of the explosion on their emotions.
A three-inch mortar used by the Union in the Civil War during sieges was known to have a devastating effect on advancing troops.
Of course the military study of emotions does not go beyond what is necessary to an army. So much in the range of human emotions is forbidden to the well-trained soldier. Even if stoicism fails him momentarily, he is quick to regain his composure. Does the blast reverberate into heretofore unknown territories in his mind? Might it unlock secret traumas, a child’s terrified weeping, a small and delicate body prey to the overwhelming force of others more powerful than he is?
The military mind shies clear of a certain kind of knowledge. Just as in our imagination of public events, we banish what we call private life to the background of our telling, the soldier excludes particular feelings and memories from his idea of who he is. I am thinking now of my father. How well he learned neither to speak of nor to think about his mother. Yet the thought must have been perpetually at the back of his mind, in that place that escapes apprehension. He had a sorrow that he himself could not explain.
There are events in our lives that we cannot understand because we keep a part of what we know away from understanding. War is one of those events. And there are other, private events which mystify us, as if there were no explanation for them except nature itself. That we are mystified becomes a habit passed from one generation to the next. My father suffered from the silence of his father, and I suffered from his.
In the steady continuum of history we meet a divide between public and private events. Shifting from one to another, the discourse changes. Even the tone of voice, when entering the world we call private, slows down, drops a scale, and perhaps softens. This is partly why we seldom associate military repression with the unnatural silences of childhood.
The troubling nature of censorship is clearer when it falls on the very young. A certain kind of silence, that which comes from holding back the truth, is abusive in itself to a child. The soul has a natural movement toward knowledge, so that not to know can be to despair. In the paucity of explanation for a mood, a look, a gesture, the child takes on the blame, and carries thus a guilt for circumstances beyond childish influence.
I was told a story by a woman whose name I cannot tell, for she must protect her family and her livelihood. It is a story filled with silences. She grew up in a poor family in Appalachia, and what happened to her, both at work and in her home, is not uncommon in that region. So emblematic is her story of the lives of men and women in that part of the country (and I suppose of any poor part of this country) that, where I have changed details of her life to conceal her identity, I have simply substituted details true in another life from that place.
She did not tell her mother. But her mother knew. And she was certain of this because after that day she was never again allowed to be in the house alone with her father.
From those few details I begin to have a sense of her mother. The sociologists give us a picture of the mother of the girl who is sexually abused by her father. This woman was perhaps abused herself. And in a way becomes complicit in the rape of her daughter. If the girl tells her, the mother chastises the girl, and may even testify against the child in court. She is a passive, frightened woman, who will not believe the truth.
But the mother of the woman who told me this story was not like this. She was not passive. She had the characteristic strength of the people of this geography, who year after year survive against great odds. They are courageous and
they adapt, and this is due not to any exotic mixture of genes but to the lessons of poverty, taught to generation after generation.
To this day, no one in the family has ever spoken a word of it, but all the female children were abused by their father. And yet with each, this happened only once. And that one time was like a signal to the children’s mother, who thereafter kept them separate from the father. She did not leave her husband. She no doubt could not conceive of this as an alternative. The first time that it happened, she already had four children. With both parents working, the family was still in serious debt, barely eating, barely keeping one car running.
I can see her coming into the house, recognizing a look on her child’s face, setting her jaw one more time. From now on, she says, from now on, you go over to Grace’s house, and don’t come home before I do. You hear? And the child hears, and does as she is told because she knows why she must.
No doubt Grace knew too, why this child would wait at her house before she could return to her home after school. And she lent her support willingly, without mentioning the reason. Or even saying it to herself.
The child’s father was often home, and thus she was often at Grace’s house. Her father was not a well man. She was six years old and her father forty-seven when one of his lungs collapsed. It was the coal dust. The particles enter and settle and over the years do a damage that turns into emphysema, or pneumonia, or tuberculosis. It is called black lung disease. And it goes with the work. The men in the mines expect this illness. Just as they expect the explosions that occasionally occur, or the poison gases that can kill a laborer more quickly than a fire. Like the other men of the area, her father would often work without his mask. To do so was a sign of manhood, whereas to be concerned with safety meant being called “sissy,” too much like a woman.
It was because his lungs were damaged that he was not accepted for the army and had to keep working in the mines when America entered the Second World War. He knew little of the meaning of the conflicts in Europe, but he was a patriotic man and wanted to prove his worth on the battlefield. And so in the midst of the war, when he and the other miners went on strike and Roosevelt sent down the National Guard to break up that strike, something in him was proud. The President had declared that the Guard was sent in because the work in those coal mines was essential to the national war effort.
A Chorus of Stones Page 3