It is years ago when the pilot was just a boy. His father wants to send him to military school. His mother, Enola Gay, known to be as gentle as his father is severe, argues for the boy to stay at home. She loses this argument. All through his childhood she will take his side. Later, she will support her son’s choice to join the air force.
Cells create motion, transport other molecules, generate electricity, transmit knowledge, emit light.
On August 11, 1941, Life magazine publishes a photograph of Rita Hayworth. A beauty redolent with light emanates from the silvery surface of her skin. Through a gaze you feel yourself sink back with her into the deepest, most rounded region of pleasure. Over five million copies of this photograph are sent out during the Second World War. Her image travels in footlockers, in packs, in ships, airplanes, tanks to the far points of the earth. The same photograph is to be pasted on the first nuclear weapon detonated over Bikini atoll in 1946.
In 1884 a weapon invented by Hiram Maxim is advertised for sale. It will load and fire itself at the rate of over 600 rounds a minute. It is called an automatic machine gun.
There are more languages than diasporas on this earth. A vocabulary is embedded in every cell of every living being. And this is how cells are able to duplicate or how an embryo can grow from the meeting of an egg and sperm, a flower and then fruit from the seed.
I have often wondered what it would be like to be a refugee, to find oneself suddenly in a place where no one knew the same names for things. I would have to learn a new language but always there would be a longing for the old words. And perhaps at night, falling off to sleep, to comfort myself, I would whisper certain sounds: leaf, river, doorbell, cup.
It is an unexplained part of human nature that we delight in naming. In the eighteenth century a boy who had lived all his life in the woods emerged into civilization knowing no words. The scientist who worked with him began to teach him language. Quickly the boy learned to pronounce the word lait, which is French for milk. But he did not use this word to command the presence of the milk that was brought to him daily, as one might have guessed. Rather, he would say the word after the milk had appeared, with a kind of delight or praise, and then again, after he had consumed it, over and over, like a song.
Perhaps this is why I find myself saying over and over the name of my friend who has recently died. All those we lose, and all that we love works its way into our language. We live our lives in a fabric of shared meanings. The commonality of words gives even our most inner thoughts resonant tones. And there are other languages, words, gestures, the small rituals of daily life that connect us to others, both the living and the dead. This afternoon I drink my tea from a ceramic cup. It is useful and also beautiful. And part of its use, part of its beauty, lies in the long history of the cup, so that as I drink I participate for a moment in other lives.
The cell is constantly exchanging matter with the world around it.
There is a matrix of meaning in the material world. Is it this matrix that culture reflects? Just as our lives are defined by the intricate connections we are born to and have made, any given particle, a neutron for instance, derives its significance from its environment, the “atom.” This environment is not fixed but is instead a chemical process, a constantly changing field of matter and energy. Yet even these constant changes possess some order, some still ineffable reason. It is a reason derived from connection, and it is this reason which is destroyed by a chain reaction. Neutrons bombard atoms and these atoms release other neutrons which in turn bombard other atoms. The matrix in which the neutron lived is torn apart, and the world of connection becomes a diaspora.
The neutron does not travel very far when it is driven from the atom. The distance is not perceivable to our eyes, or even imaginable. When we try to understand the neutron we draw pictures of it which are enlarged many thousands of times. But these pictures fail us too. For the neutron exists someplace in its smallness, someplace as precise and exact as our own bedrooms, our kitchens, a place that is a world with its own laws, its own being. To the neutron the space through which it travels is vast. Like a void, a great immeasurable emptiness. Does the neutron have consciousness? Where does our own consciousness live? In the cells? In the animal alone? I can’t answer this. Only, I know that the neutron does belong to a world of meaning, a meaning that is in us too, in our bodies, and in all that surrounds us. As the neutron leaves the atom, does it feel senseless and without purpose? Does it feel the anguish of separation? Does it despair?
I know such a loneliness as I imagine the neutron possesses in its journey through the void. Sometimes it feels a part of my flesh. As a child, I saw everyone I loved leave me in one day. My parents separated; I was sent to my grandmother, and my sister to my great-aunt. My memory is of an endless chill descending, sweeping all my family away, even as if by violence, though no one had really died, and for a few months we were all still just a few miles apart. But time and distance cannot be measured except as we know them. Distance is relative to feeling.
In 1945 experiments are begun to improve the Gatling ten-barrel gun. It is fitted with an electric motor. After ten years, this weapon can fire 5,800 rounds each minute.
When my father was separated from his mother, he learned the lessons of loss and abandonment, and he passed this knowledge on to me. In a sense, when Enrico Fermi created the first chain reaction, he too taught the neutron a lesson, which it in turn passed on, unto many generations.
In spring, I decided to travel to the island where my father was born, and where he parted from my grandmother. I hoped to find some mention of her there, proof of her existence, in the town records, in old newspapers, buildings bought and sold, some sign. I wanted to know why my grandfather had left her, and even more, simply to affirm to myself she had lived. For me she had receded into a cloud of unknowing. All I had learned of her were fragments from my sister or my mother. I cannot remember my father ever speaking to me of her, except just before his death, when he showed me that photograph she had sent him in the mail. She had written to him over the years, but this was the first and only letter he answered. Still, for me she scarcely inhabited this world. She belonged instead to the world of speculation and dream.
Is it possible that for Fermi the world of matter had become unreal? He spent the greater part of his waking hours considering what we call the physical properties of things. What was it that kept the neutron bound to its inner path? What is the nature of this that we call real? In a certain sense, the answers that he provided for these questions were proved accurate. But I am arrested by the image of a man who is himself transfixed, not just for a moment, or for a few hours, but for a lifetime. He is staring at a view somewhat distant from himself. He will never journey into this territory. He will always keep his distance.
Do our thoughts belong to another realm eternally divided from matter? For many centuries it has been the opinion of science that matter is inanimate and therefore has no possibility at all of possessing that quality we call spirit. The soul was said to emanate from heaven and to give life to dead matter. The mixing of wine with water in the holy sacraments was meant to signify this union. But an earlier view says that wine and water are of their nature indivisible. What a strange pass we have come to now concerning this question. By the same discovery through which science has finally learned that the enspiriting force and matter are one, science has also discovered a way to separate energy from matter, rending apart thus the fabric that we now know holds existence together.
In the days before the first atomic bomb was tested at Alamogordo, Enrico Fermi was said to have taken side bets on the possibility that the whole state of New Mexico would be incinerated. Such a bet produces an obvious problem. But only for a mind that believes itself to be part of a body. Had the entire state of New Mexico been incinerated, Fermi, who was watching the test in New Mexico that day, would have perished. He would not have been able to collect his debt, or even understand that he had won. His gamble enter
s the region of Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty which has it that the experimenter affects the reality he observes. But in this case, it is the observed which would have affected the scientist. And in fact, as history has it, Fermi was not unaffected by what he saw that day.
In every scientific experiment there is some risk that events will not proceed as they have been predicted. Otherwise the experiment itself would have no purpose. Concerning whether or not the bomb would explode at all, Hans Bethe, the head of the theoretical division at Los Alamos, said, Human calculation indicates that the experiment must succeed. But will nature act in conformity to our calculations?
Until an error was discovered in their calculations, the scientists at Los Alamos feared the possibility of an infinitely expanding explosion. Repeated equations had led them to this conclusion. But finally the scientists made calculations that convinced them the explosion would be finite.
Still, the blast was far more powerful than the scientists had predicted. Nature exceeded their calculations by so far that the instruments designed to measure the explosion were destroyed by it. The scientist operating these instruments was reduced to tears. During the experiment Fermi concentrated on the pieces of paper he was using to measure the explosion. He was perhaps like another physicist there that day named Frisch who told himself he could memorize this phenomenon without being affected by emotion. Yet, though he did not hear the sound of the blast, Fermi was affected. At what moment did his feelings reach him? Was it when he lifted his eyes from the fallen paper, or was it after he explored the region of the blast?
Whenever it was, he was shaken. So much so that, though he never permitted anyone else to drive his car, now he had to be driven. He left the site of the experiment as a passenger. Months later, after the bomb had been dropped over Hiroshima, he told his wife Laura that during this journey it had seemed to him as if his car were jumping from curve to curve and skipping the straight stretches in between.
If Fermi was shocked at the disparity between how he thought he would feel and how he did feel, at least he was able to confess this shock to his wife, and thus, knowing himself in this way, regain composure, as in the telling he wedded together two parts of his being. For Fermi underwent two shocks that day. The first was on seeing the power of the blast, and the second was on meeting an undiscovered part of himself.
Perhaps such a moment is like a dream whose images wake you in the middle of the night. The dream itself has been terrifying and for a moment it is a relief to be awake, but then another terror follows upon this relief when you realize that the feelings and images in the dream were your own.
After certain nights one is glad to wake to a daylight which diminishes the gigantic proportions of dreams. This kind of night is filled with a sense of menace that we believe belongs to darkness. Yet we also entrust sexuality to the night. It is the time when lovers embrace and when even sleep leads to the realm of passion. Night is an intricate landscape where passion and joy cohabit with terror and menace. This is part of the territory of nightmare but it also belongs to waking thought and is woven by day in a more subtle fashion into myth, into story and legend.
I learned the Greek myths in school. The older I grow I read more and more into the shapes of these myths and they become radiant. In this way it is as if time takes me backward and gradually joins me in a circle with antiquity. But the figures from my childhood who glow most brightly are film stars. Childhood memory is the bedrock under all we see. There is the youth and beauty of Achilles. And then the tough and blazingly handsome face of Alan Ladd, framed by his leather jacket, as he moves gracefully into the cockpit of his airplane. Achilles wounded in his heel. Ronald Reagan, his legs severed, crying out, “Where is the rest of me?” Penelope waiting bravely, patiently weaving and unweaving her threads. Paulette Goddard forever making a home, forever saying goodbye. Helen, a thousand ships at sea because of her beauty, Rita Hayworth hotly burning herself into a region of desire.
There was much that Enrico Fermi could not tell his wife. She heard rumors. A sleepless patient at a hospital awake in the early morning hours sees a strange light. A blind girl sees a flash of brightness. A newspaper speculates that a hidden ammunition dump exploded. One day all the men at Los Alamos disappear together with no explanation. When they return they do not say where they have been. What does she think? It is wartime. There is much that is unexplained. And this creates a chasm of speechlessness between her and the man she has married.
There is a party at the Fermi home. This party is held after Fermi has created the first chain reaction. But none of those present speak of this event. And the hostess, Laura Fermi, does not know the reason for the celebration. Later, she is to write a history of these events which she saw but did not witness.
What do the guests at this party do? Because the husbands know something the wives do not, is the atmosphere strained? Or is the party like so many others, where the husbands congregate in another room and hold a separate conversation, speaking as usual about things the wives never know? Do they dance?
Later, when Fermi is alone with his wife, do they undress together, their bodies become suddenly so innocent, simple, unclothed, being naked, and undisguised as truth, do they lie down together, does he open his mouth to her, put his tongue in her mouth, her vagina, his penis in her, hearing her cries, does he also cry, even from someplace unwilled in him, his flesh, the cells washed, as if by light, or life, with pleasure, and more the pure sense of being, and at the same time, his skin like a cloud diffusing into her skin, through her flesh, the room, the bedroom curtains, the horizon? At this moment, where is his secret? Does he let it go, believe it never happened? Bury it deeper inside himself, in a wordless place, in a place described only by formula and the vocabulary of science, a vocabulary he keeps apart from all the words he uses at home: breast, leaf, river, doorbell, cup, child, love? Fermi. Does he ever tell his secret to himself in this plain language?
Though I never put my feelings into words, I had trouble preparing for my trip to my father’s birthplace. The island of Grand Manan, like my grandmother, had never been real to me. I made a desultory attempt to find it in an atlas. Grand Manan was not in the index. Nor on the map of the region surrounding Nova Scotia. When I reached Maine, I did find it on a map, and I dialed a telephone number to hear the recorded times of ferry crossings. But still the place and even the ferry seemed half mythic for me. It was only when my daughter and I crossed over the Canadian border, and I found pictures of Grand Manan in a tourist office, that I began to believe in the existence of this island. Then a shock of energy went through me, and I was astonished. It was as if I had just awakened, or rather, as if a dream had suddenly become real.
The physicist David Bohm speaks of an illusory perception that we have of nature shaped by our fragmentary thought. Because we think in a fragmentary way, we see fragments. And this way of seeing leads us to make actual fragments of the world.
While Enrico Fermi worked with a team of physicists to design and construct the weapon which would, by means of a chain reaction, create a vast explosion, Paul Tibbetts trained a crew of men to maintain and fly the necessary airplanes, navigate, operate the radar, aim and release this weapon. The atomic bomb dropped over Hiroshima was aimed with the human eye. Following the directions of Tibbetts, who was his commanding officer, Thomas Ferebee, the bombardier, practiced dropping bomb casings, designed to weigh what the atomic bomb would weigh, again and again and again over the deserts of Nevada. He and the pilot made many careful observations of this procedure and numerous minute changes—adjusting the height of the seat, the placement of a headrest over the site. After this, guided by what he had learned, the bombardier practiced until his eyes and hands were educated and could achieve a certain accuracy.
WHAT YOU HEAR HERE, WHAT YOU SEE HERE, WHEN YOU LEAVE HERE, LET IT STAY HERE. These words were displayed next to the gate at Wendover, the base where Paul Tibbetts assembled his battalion for their training. Just as in the
desert at Los Alamos, the base at Wendover was chosen because it was isolated. The men who were trained there were not told of the existence of an atomic weapon, nor of the purpose of their mission. Stop being curious, the pilot told them. Never mention this to anybody, he said. That means your wives, girls, sisters, family.
Paul Tibbetts was known to be a laconic man. Laconic. The word has a military history. It was derived from the Greek word meaning to imitate the Spartan manner of speech, which was terse, and Sparta was a military state. This nation was frugal with more than words. All its resources, human and material, were marshaled for war.
That the pilot was keeping military secrets from his wife fit almost imperceptibly into the pattern of their married life. He was habitually silent about his thoughts, his feelings, or what he did during the day.
In this way he was not unlike my stepfather, a man who, though once present in my life, fades easily from my memory. He was always vanishing. Either he did not come home until very late, or he returned only to eat and fall asleep on the living-room couch. Seated at the table, or behind the wheel of his car, he would say very little. Sometimes he would tell me jokes. I did not dislike him. He smiled, and at times his eyes shone with a rough tenderness.
The tips of my stepfather’s fingers were swollen, and this kept him from doing the fine mechanical work on cars for which he was trained. He had fixed machines in the war. But his fingers became forever swollen in the same war, from some unnamed and mysterious ailment he contracted while sleeping in wet fields. He was never in battle. He loved the time he spent in war because he loved the company of men. It was not so much that he spoke with them any more than he did with my mother or me that drew him but simply the way he was with them. When he came together with men in bars or on the occasions his friends would visit the house, I would watch him do a silent dance of comradeship, a swelling of his chest, a movement forward, a gesture with his hand to another man’s shoulder, the middle of a back, an unexplained but shared laughter. It was as if they shared a secret.
A Chorus of Stones Page 8