It is April 1919. Alpha particles colliding with nitrogen have produced strange scintillations. Ernest Rutherford succeeds in determining that these are hydrogen atoms. Atoms of nitrogen have been split. This disintegration will allow scientists to study the inner recesses of the atomic world. In the summer of the same year Enrico Fermi, just eighteen years old, and still a student, spends his vacation months in Rome reading books and papers on the latest discoveries in theoretical physics. He takes his bibliography from Ernest Rutherford’s paper on radioactive substances.
For each newly created radioactive chemical, it will take hundreds of thousands of years to return to a normal state. Until that time, the process of fragmentation, and release of toxicity, will continue.
Is there perhaps a long silence in the year following the war, a period in which particles still fall quietly to earth, leaving the shape of the outcome as yet unclear? It is early in the year 1919. Winston Churchill, recently made Secretary of State for War and Air, decides to keep the Royal Air Force as an independent branch of the service. He looks for a commander. A report crosses his desk detailing the mutiny at Portsmouth. Churchill is impressed with General Trenchard’s performance. He asks him to take command of the Royal Air Force once again.
Almost immediately an opportunity to prove the usefulness of the Royal Air Force presents itself. In Somaliland a mullah and his men have successfully resisted British attempts to control them throughout the war. Now Trenchard sends his pilots to bomb the mullah. The mullah is forced into retreat, and when he reaches Abyssinia, he is killed. Calculating the cost of this victory to be merely £77,000, Trenchard argues that bomber squadrons are the best means of pacification. The Royal Air Force is stationed in Egypt, to police Iraq and protect Britain’s sea route to India and the Far East.
At the synapse where the axon of one cell joins the dendrite or body of another the reversal of electrical charge leads to the release of a chemical substance, called a neurotransmitter.
It is in the same year, on October 15 in Vienna, that Sigmund Freud appears before a commission investigating the treatment of soldiers with electric shock. There is a scandal. Shell-shocked men returning more than once from the trenches for treatment received increasingly strong electrical currents. Some suffered permanent damage. Others died. Freud is sympathetic to Professor Wagner-Jauregg, who supervised this treatment. The professor, he reasons, cannot have intended to inflict damage. There was a war. The situation was demanding. Still, he argues that if war neurotics were malingerers, as the professor diagnosed, their malingering was unconscious. And unconscious feelings are beyond conscious control. Psychoanalysis, he suggests, would have been a better way to return them to the trenches.
It is 1921. General Trenchard’s bombers, attacking an Iraqi encampment, fire with machine guns on the families of tribesmen who in their fear flee into the lake. There is a national scandal. Churchill writes Trenchard that to fire willfully on women and children is a disgraceful act. He urges Trenchard to court-martial the pilots responsible. But Trenchard, who believes that the luxury of a conscience has no place in the army, defends the pilots. They were carrying out to the letter a course of action defined for them by civilian administrators. He disciplines them lightly.
Radioactive substances, depending on the type of particle released, can pass through skin, or be taken into the body with air, food, or water, or through an open wound, entering the blood stream, the lymph system, or they may be incorporated into bone and tissue, remaining there for a few hours, or a lifetime.
The attack on the Iraqi tribesmen reminds me, of course, of an incident which occurred during the Vietnam War, the attack at My Lai. I remember looking at the photographs. Small children, infants lying face down, flesh ribboned open and bloody. The terrified face of a young woman about to be raped and the unspeakable pain of her mother beside her. The sergeant who led this attack was prosecuted. But there were many other incidents that never came to trial. And perhaps a pattern that was never exposed drifts even now into the future we occupy.
It is still 1921. Mohandas Gandhi, now called the Mahatma, or Great Soul, has adopted still another style of clothing. It is as if progressively over time he has stripped away one layer after another. Now he wears only the loincloth of an Indian peasant. This is made of the homespun cloth called khadi, now part of the campaign for independence that includes a boycott of British cloth and the revival of spinning among peasants who cannot make a living off the land. Chest bare, thin arms and legs uncovered, one can see him spin his thread with a simple hand tool every day for half an hour. He calls it a sacrament.
Once this chemical touches the membrane of another cell that membrane becomes six hundred more times permeable to a substance that changes the charge of the interior cell from negative to positive.
It is 1924. If the psyche that was once impenetrable opens now, there is, at the same time, a hardening. A structure felt momentarily as fragile, even coming apart, is grasped suddenly with a new tenacity. Ernst Jünger publishes Storm of Steel, depicting himself as a wandering knight, who has broken many a lance, born by the desire to kill. If the story he once told in his wartime journals was saturated with second thoughts, complexities, traces short of pure strength, these have vanished now. At the same time, the knight’s illusions have melted away in sarcastic laughter. Violence transcends every earthly concern. And around and about these lines, emerging as if from the same telling of the story, another voice can be heard. A young corporal in the army begins to speak about a betrayal of Germany’s pride and strength. Hermann Göring is listening. What he hears begins to shape the direction of his future life.
Exposing cells to the microscopic explosions of ionizing radiation can cause cell death, or cell radiation. It can make the cell unable to replace itself, or stop reproducing itself.
I can imagine it. All the fortitude of your being, even your own desire to survive, moves with a certain rhythm. The march. You have nearly died. You have witnessed death. Your ears are still ringing with the sound of shells. You can scarcely describe this sound. No one who was not there understands it. The march has stopped. Your foot is in midair. Suddenly the world is swirling about you in a different direction. You strain at the boundaries of language to find the words, a story, a plausible order.
There are neural pathways which carry impulses inward to the central nervous system and pathways which carry impulses outward determining response. Impulses leading inward carry knowledge everywhere in the nervous system about everything that affects the body.
It is an irony of history that the symptoms of shell shock resemble in many ways the symptoms of radiation sickness. Lassitude. Confusion. Sometimes a tremor. Forgetfulness. Did I not have an illness which affects the immune system, as does radiation, and causes its own kind of shock, I would not have noticed the similarity. I visited a doctor near Freiburg, the small city in the Black Forest where Göring was sent when he was recovering from rheumatic fever, and where he learned to fly. One afternoon on the arm of a friend I took a walk in the village cemetery near our rented rooms. There were many young and recent deaths. The doctor told us it was cancer and leukemia, the result, she believed, of fallout from nuclear tests that had drifted in the direction of Freiburg. The stones told their own somber story, names, ages, sometimes a line of poetry.
Am I imagining this? So much of the land, the fields, have a strange flatness now. You notice it where it is not so. Out of time. Quaint. Picturesque. From a past I know was far from perfect. Still, there is something almost palpable in the fields outside Freiburg, children playing in the newly mown grass, pines at the edge, dark beginnings of a forest.
Cellular damage from radiation manifests as damage to a particular organ of the body. If radionuclides lodge in the bone they can cause damage to the bone marrow, resulting in bone cancer or leukemia.
There is something we long for that is not here. A life knitted together by a vast and intricate meaning, implicated in the movements of o
ur hands, tongues, eyes as they pass over the momentary landscape. It is 1925. It is the year that Gandhi will spend touring the Indian countryside. Passing on the practice of spinning cloth by hand, he will teach even the most remote villagers the virtues of a direct relationship with nature and an autonomous economy. He explains his Constructive Programme. The notions of frugality and prayer are old ideas. But there is also a newer concept, the principle of equality with untouchables and with women.
This knowledge, interpreted by the central nervous system, and evaluated according to memory, old habits, present postures, attitudes, is transformed and sent back to the periphery as decision, commanding how the body will respond.
Is he carried along in a stream, not entirely of his own making? Other lives mingled with his? Other stories he has heard? Some he imagines. He depicts an India before the British Empire, filled with spinning wheels. It is an illusionary past he creates. A vision of the future inscribed as if into memory. Except that there must be some memory, some intimation, drawing the image to him. He can envision then a whole cloth never before woven, a justice that has not been seen before, an equality which perhaps always existed, except that it was silent and still.
If these particles lodge in the lungs they can cause respiratory diseases. General exposure can be experienced as stress to a hereditary weakness. Individual breakdown from exposure occurs at the most vulnerable points. The young are especially affected.
It is 1926. The advent of speech takes many courses. At times an old story must peel away so that a new telling can begin. Hemingway’s war stories, having been embellished with added bullets and wounds, suddenly cease. I distrust all frank and simple people, he writes in his first novel, especially when their stories hold together. This is the voice of the generation after the war, trusting nothing, pared down, nearly flat, with an ironic cadence, a world weariness seeking excitement. But it is not a voice that affects Enrico Fermi, who has just been made professor of theoretical physics at the University of Rome. He needs no stimulation. He is about to explore a new world. He will try to disassemble the nucleus of the atom.
The flow of knowledge within the nervous system is not simple. It does not travel back and forth so much as in a circle, simultaneously, mutually. Sensation evokes movement which evokes new sensation which modifies movement, creating one conscious experience.
In Britain, other experiments of a different nature are occurring. It is 1927. Under General Trenchard’s command the Royal Air Force has succeeded in launching a pilotless missile. It has a range of two hundred miles and has landed within five miles of its target.
If radiation damage occurs in the sperm or ovum, this affects procreation, causing defects, stillbirths, or the inability to conceive.
It is 1928. General Trenchard is finally retiring from service. He leaves for the future command what he calls his last will and testament. He regrets that the plans for a guided missile are not being carried out. The future will lie, he says, in this direction. Air attacks, in crushing enemy morale, will be decisive. In the next war both sides will bomb without scruple those targets they find most effective. He urges the government to accept this fact and to prepare to meet and deliver these attacks, which will be inevitable.
The human nervous system, containing countless nerve cells, intricate pathways, possibilities for response, feeling, knowledge, has evolved gradually over a million years of subtle augmentations and changes.
The circle of time drawn in this telling returns. There will be a next war. Bombings. The Bomb. Small explosions invisible in the air. In tissue, blood, bone. Inevitable and yet can there be an unraveling in the telling and another story that begins to reweave the strands, new on the loom once more? Are there earlier voices, older than the stories we have heard—shock and cry of war dismembered—interior language of the cell, standing stone of history, oddly familiar in our hands, making us lean toward what we have not yet perceived?
VI
NOTES TOWARD A SKETCH FOR A WORK IN PROGRESS
If she had lived, what would she have done with the rest of her life? What would she have painted? And would she have gone on singing as she worked?
August 1990
My thought is to weave a journal into the pages of the sixth chapter. Here I will record notes about the process of writing this chapter and the book.
I ask this last question because Charlotte was singing all the time that she painted and wrote her great work, Life or Theatre? Marita Guenther told me this when I went to visit her in the South of France, two years ago. And how did Marita, who never knew Charlotte, know this intimate detail of her life? That is another story which perhaps I will tell later.
August
What I am seeking is the effect of a work in progress, a work that still continues off the page, and is only completed in the imagination.
My own fascination with Charlotte Salomon began over ten years ago. A thick book reproducing her major work, Life or Theatre? A Play with Music, was displayed in the window of a bookstore in my neighborhood. On the cover of this book was a painting of the face of a young woman. As she stared into the eyes of the viewer, her presence was extraordinary. This was a self-portrait in the tradition of Rembrandt, worthy of Käthe Kollwitz, penetrating, frank, evoking at one and the same time a feeling of intimacy and the desire for an equally clear knowledge of oneself.
August
So the chapter will include traces of my own process in telling these stories.
When I opened the book I discovered that this “play” consisted of a series of paintings, 769 in number, which depicted the story of the painter’s life. Words written on the paintings, together with an accompanying text, made the work like a play, with a plot, dialogue, drama. At certain points, Charlotte even indicates music to be played or hummed with it.
August
This last section of the book should be like a sketch for a painting. And not only the journal, but the text too should have, in places, this slightly unfinished quality.
I found the form innovative and exciting, but in the end what truly drew me was the simple fact that she had created this work to save her life.
August
I want the boundaries of the book to be opened, letting in the atmosphere of contemporary events.
Her story begins with a suicide. In 1913, a year before the First World War began, her aunt Charlotte, after whom she was named, jumped into a river in Berlin and drowned. This death was one in a long chain reaction of suicides in her mother’s family. In Life or Theatre? Charlotte traces the pattern back to her mother’s uncle who killed himself. After this there were cousins, then her aunt Charlotte, then her own mother, and finally, almost in her presence, her grandmother committed suicide. She tells the story so she will not repeat this cycle of destruction.
August
There is so much that is extraordinary happening around us at such an intense pace. The end of the Cold War. And the beginning perhaps of another war in the Middle East.
Why is it I find this so compelling, Charlotte’s effort to see herself and her family history honestly, and yet, at the same time, to render what she sees into art? What she has made is a beautiful mirror, but also a self-image that is not static, that lives in the imagination of the viewer, opening up new possibilities to the mind.
August
Events are happening more quickly now than we can absorb them. Borders are changing so rapidly, a map made today will no longer be accurate tomorrow.
At the end of this long book about many kinds of denial, I want to write about testimony. About bearing witness to events in such a way that they become lucid, their inner life revealed. When light is shed in this way, can it not change the course of events? I find Charlotte’s story especially pertinent now because she addresses the question of self-destruction. I have come to believe that our shared movement toward nuclear war is a movement toward mass suicide.
August
For months I have been saving clippings fr
om the newspapers. There is a story, for instance, of the collapse of discipline in the People’s Army of East Germany. The newspapers describe it as an identity crisis.
Perhaps there is something within us as a social body that wishes to die. Or perhaps there is a dimension of ourselves that must be sacrificed if we are to go on living. It is not so much that I expect an answer. It is instead simply the desire to turn and look in that direction.
August
The identity crisis they are talking about is probably one of national boundaries. But of course there are other identities placed in jeopardy now, such as the identity of the warrior.
And there is this also: Charlotte was a civilian who was trapped by the violence of public life, as we are all trapped and held hostage by nuclear weapons now. Her private troubles are depicted against a background of dramatic historical events. Her story is simultaneously a story about war and about a family.
August
Without the Cold War, warriors are not so necessary any more.
Charlotte was born in Berlin between the First and the Second World Wars.
August
One’s identity can be threatened by any change, even a change for the better. I notice it in my own process. The longer certain words remain on the page, the less I want to alter the text.
Charlotte’s family was Jewish, well assimilated into the German middle class. Is it only in her memory or was it true of the atmosphere of her grandparents’ home that all traces of Jewishness were effaced? In Charlotte’s depiction her grandparents’ home has a feeling which is almost international now among people of a class.
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