Insect Dreams Orphans

A NEW PLANET

Mon, 6 Mar 2006 09:41:12 -0500

As our observational techniques become more sophisticated, we seem to be discovering more and more new planets. But Pluto was a biggie. 1930. Because of Plutonium and the bomb, I had wanted to bring in a lot of material about the god of the underworld. This was the earlier, historical part of that story.

One amazing coincidence: Donna and I went to visit Alamogordo for research, and had a hot afternoon to kill in this one-strip town. We couldn’t get into the test site, and so were desperate for something to do out in the middle of this (significant) nowhere. Ah — let’s check out the tiny New Mexico State University at Alamogordo, just outside of town. Tiny campus, 2,000 students. The most interesting and impressive building was the “planetarium” — the Clyde W. Tombaugh planetarium! As far as I know, he had no connection to the Manhattan Project. Were they making the same sardonic connection as I was?

PLUTO: A SHORT EXCURSUS AWAY FROM THE LIGHT

“A bagel. I want a bagel. I need a bagel.”
Gregor put on his new camel’s hair coat on this frosty Ides of March, and scuttled down two flights of stairs into the morning sunshine. Eighth and C. The fabled Lower East Side, more than its image, less than its myth.
Once he was a salaried employee again, the Roach About Town had decided to settle in, gather his belongings under one roof -- his own, and concentrate on building a life. True, the Wall St. crash had clouded things somewhat, but the mood at Ives & Myrick was upbeat, reflecting, perhaps, the sunny personality of Mike Myrick, and the hibernation of the confused and depressed Charles Ives. Gregor’s $35 a week was more than ample for room and food -- provided he live frugally in a low rent neighborhood.
The Lower East Side was the obvious choice. For a being so dedicated to life, L’chayem, this was the core and center, the bubbling ur-soup of real-life life, tenement canyons and courtyards hung with laundry, bedclothes, people up and down fire escapes, bodies, always bodies leaning out windows, talking, calling, yelling. Inside, outside, the rhythm continued, the streets always alive with pushcarts and junk bells, cats yowling and beggars singing, dogs whining and babies crying, men, women, children talking, talking, always talking up a storm. Even the parrots could curse, constantly -- in yiddish. Talk, talk, talk, Jewish talk, up and down the airshafts, semitic surf and symphony, untiring, counterpoint to the rattling of dishes, the squeaking of clotheslines, the plop and splat of peelings and fish heads tossed from above. On the street corners, soapboxed, seers and rebels, prophets and cranks, shouting God’s fire and America’s woes unto the sky. In yiddish! Yiddish! A language he could understand without translation, words he could speak without accent. The Old World in the middle of the New -- at last he belonged, truly belonged.
He belonged among the children who owned the streets and every smallest corner of alley or lot, every found piece of twisted junk, every stick of lumber, wheels off rusty prams, old dead clothing, who rejoiced in even the find of a dead, half-rotting squirrel, somehow escaped from Tompkins Square. The children! How beautiful these children. Like little animals with yarmulkas and braids, scouring the world for the few pennies they needed for a hot dog, or a cup of chocolate, halavah, knishes, pickles, or fifty kinds of candy, playing tag and tops and kites and stickball, skelly and ringeleveo. Swarming.
The children and the aged. The nobility of these gaunt, gray-bearded men, shuffling in black coats and hats to schul and synagogue, the same as in Prague. The same clothing, the same bentness, the visible, invisible weight of learning and dedication. The peddlers, old timers -- and new ones forced from their stores by the crash, managing the streets, filling them with infinite variegations of the material world. The “I cash clothes” man, the old and dignified scissors grinder with his huge, wheeled, grindstone. Gregor loved to watch the sparks fly, fire from friction, swords into ploughshares. He loved hearing the names of angels and demons from every corner, seeing the babushkas and old fur hats, the riot of banana peels on grey pavement; he loved even the smell of urine. To a blattid, urine smells of life.
The sights and sounds, the tastes and smells of the Lower East Side were a continuous, multi-sensorial madeleine, bringing our six-legged Proust back to his bipedal youth in Prague in the decade before the “sanitization” of the Jewish quarter, Josefov. Though his upwardly mobile father had moved from ghetto to square several years before Gregor’s birth, still, the square backed right on to the ghetto, and young G spent much of his non-school day exploring the crooked alleyways, the dark tunnels with their “spittoons of light” as he called them, leading to interior courtyards of houses named “The Mouse Hole”, or “The Left Glove”, or “Death”. Like the Lower East Side of the thirties, Prague’s Jewish Quarter of the previous eighties had suffered an exodus of the well-to-do. The more prosperous families had moved out of Josefov, leaving only the poorest of poor Jews, soon joined by multicultural ranks of the underprivileged: gypsies, beggars, prostitutes and alcoholics. By the time Gregor’s father, he of the apple, moved out of the ghetto, only 20% of its inhabitants were Jewish in this, the most densely populated area of Prague. The malodorous Josefov was seen as a blight upon the city, in the words of Meyrink, “ a demonic underworld, a place of anguish, a beggarly and phantasmagorical quarter whose eeriness seemed to have spread and led to paralysis.” No wonder Herr Samsa wanted out. No wonder the city fathers wanted urban renewal. In 1893 they decided that Prague might become the jewel of the Empire, a beautiful, bourgeois world city like Paris. And so the old neighborhoods came down and were replaced with block upon block of opulent art-nouveau buildings, decorative murals, doorways and sculpture. With gypsies and prostitutes, the Jews, too, were cleared out: the end of a community which had existed in Prague for a thousand years. Given the Nazi occupation forty years later, we might expect there to be no trace at all of Josefov today. But truth is stranger than fiction: the remnants of the old Jewish quarter had their savior, one Adolf Hitler, who chose to preserve what little was left of the ghetto -- the Jewish Town Hall and the Altneu Synagogue wherein sleeps the golem, the Old Jewish Cemetery, eternal home of the great Rabbi Lowe who created him, and five other synagogues with their contents -- as the basic sites for an “Exotic Museum of an Extinct Race”. Jewish artifacts stolen from all over central Europe were stored in these buildings, and now constitute one of the great collections of Judaica in the world. With friends like these...
Sorry for the diversion. I was making the point that the situation in the ghetto of Gregor’s youth was much like that in New York fifty years later, and thus his new life had a deep and secret resonance which softened the edges of what someone more objective might see as desperation. For even the early days of the depression-to-come had led to many evictions, and forced ever greater numbers of families to crowd together in unheated quarters with aunts and uncles, cousins, grandparents, and friends.
Late October is no time for an economic crisis, for the winter comes hard upon, winter with its dripping walls and airborne diseases. Poverty in winter. Can you imagine the collective suffering of a hundred thousand tenements, grimy, windblown junkheaps of rotting lumber and cracked brick? And in them, thousands, tens of thousands of tuberculars and paralytics, hunger, fatigue, a world of rotting livers and breaking hearts, babies screaming until breath stopped, pneumonia, influenza, typhoid. Garbage trucks and hearses prowled the streets in ghastly competition. Multitudes were without work, and strikes, suicides, food riots pushed pious women to prostitution. The streets reeked with filthy slush, and the sun vanished in greyness behind the sky. Winter, 1930.
Yet Gregor, eternal optimist (at that time), was wont to see the beneficent Janus face of adversity. Its precious jewel was that spirit of community where everyone knew everyone, complained and kvetched (a word G taught me), but were there for one another when chips were down -- as they almost always were. If Schwartz summoned Goldberg to a call on the corner pay phone, he’d earn a penny or two. With any eviction notice came a collection from housewives up and down the block. Who could afford a physician? Yet people cared for one another, and the old witch doctor, Baba Schimmel, made her rounds, an old crone with huge varicosed calves, carrying philters in her knotted apron. That scene last week of children chasing the sightseeing bus, pelting it with rocks and garbage -- and a dead cat -- “Go home,” they yelled, “Go back uptown!”-- What else could G conclude but that there was some enormous vestige of neighborhood pride, a sense of strength among the surviving.
On this sunny, cold March morning, Gregor put on his camel’s hair coat to go buy a dozen bagels. He loved bagels -- he always did. His mother used to make them, soft and warm and chewy. He would watch them rise from the dead in the boiling pot and float, triumphant, carving out a tesselate honeycomb of circles on the bubbling surface. Now that he was older, he recognized in bagels the great symbol of Buddhist Nothingness, and the joyous O of O say can you see and O what a beautiful morning. And having recently studied Sir D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form, a copy of which he had inexplicably found in a trash can outside Tammany Hall, he was now aware of his brotherhood with the bagel, toroid to toroid, a solid mass surrounding a hole.
Perhaps even more than bagels, he loved going into Paddy’s Bagel Bakery on Sixth St., off Avenue B. The name was improbable enough, but the large brown bagel hanging out front, growing out its intensely green four-leaf clover broke the bounds of all rational construction. And the sign was just the beginning of the outlandish Paddy experience. Gregor descended a short flight of stairs to a basement level areaway piled with years of tossed-in trash, a genuine archeological dig site. There was a narrow, almost clear path toward a door which over the years had carved a radial swing space in the mass of miscellany, and as G headed for his goal he thought -- as we do today concerning four wheel drive -- how lucky he was to have six legs, in case he needed them. He pulled open the door and was hit, full body, with a caressing blast of steam which felt um-um-good on this freezing Sunday. He closed the door behind him.
Once inside, he could see, as usual, absolutely nothing. The steam was thick, almost impenetrable, and the two 15 watt bulbs hanging from the ceiling served only to make it opaque as well. Remember, bagels have to be boiled before baking, and here in this low-ceilinged basement storefront sans ventilation, it was the steam from two great vats that took front and center -- and above and below. And behind. Gregor knew that others were in the shop, but he assumed he was the only customer since all he heard was continuous nattering back and forth in a language of gibberish. It could have been a whole hoard of Niebelungen dwarves, or more likely a large cohort of leprechauns jabbering away in Gaelic. Shadows flitted and projected through the thick, atmospheric fog, but shadows of what -- no one could tell.
“A dozen plain bagels, please,” he shouted into the hubbub. He didn’t know if he had been heard. He repeated his order, and waited, antennae alert, mosaic eyes moist with cloud. A hand appeared out of the mist, holding a brown paper bag. Whose hand this was, he’d never know, but he took the bag from it and replaced it with twenty five cents. The hand withdrew into the mist without so much as a thank you. He turned to grope his way back into the street when the door swung open in front of him, and G made out the form of a newsboy, silhouetted against the light, waving a paper. Or was he simply fanning away the steam?
“Whuxstree, whuxstree, read all about it, new planet called Pluto! Pluto the new planet!...”
Perhaps it was the shock of sudden light or the dizzying high of steam in the spiracles. More likely it was the stroke of that word: Pluto. Gregor sank down to the ground, and crawled, invisible, until he hit a wall, and pressed up against it. The newsboy, eliciting no customers, backed out, slammed the door shut, and G was left in the misty darkness.
“Pluto. Pluto. I come from Pluto.” The voice echoed deep inside him, reverberating off the inner surfaces of his chitinous shell. “I come from Pluto.” Perhaps his earliest complex thought, trailing darkest clouds of glory. He would tell his parents, over and over, “I come from Pluto.” His mother would say, “Don’t be silly, mein Schatz,” while his father would refuse to understand. And indeed, how could his parents understand, for the planet, with its chthonian name lay still in the darkness, outside the known reaches of the solar system. But not for child Gregor with his clear memories of long periods of overwhelmingly beautiful night, the sky half filled with a huge moon, looming through swirls of greenish gas. The strange, pale glow of a vastly distant sunrise. His movement lithe, half-floating in near-weightlessness. Cold. The cold. He remembered the cold, an intimate dwelling place among barely shivering atoms.
The whole scene came crashing back on him now, again swaddled in darkness and faint mist, but this of the warmest, wettest kind. He lay on the floor under a dark shelf above, antennae quivering with a faint, paresthetic scent of sulfur. Where was it last he sensed that smell? Sulfur, oxygen’s downstairs neighbor in Mendeleyev’s great table, aggressively sniffing out the world with its two electrons, and being sniffed, in turn. That smell...
If a doddering old History of Science professor may be allowed yet another intrusion, even into Gregor’s interplanetary swoon...
The discovery of Pluto was one of the more remarkable stories in a science replete with same. When Herbert Hoover was sworn in as our thirty-first president on the 4th of March, 1929, he would have told you, if asked, that there were eight planets in our solar system, and being an ex-mining engineer, could have listed them, in order: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Yet at that very moment, there were two earthlings who could have assured him otherwise: Vesto Melvin Slipher, the world-renowned director of the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, and Clyde W. Tombaugh, a 23 year old farmboy from Kansas.
The story begins even before there was a Kansas, back in 1781 -- March 13th to be exact -- when the British astronomer, William Herschel, became the first person in modern times to discover a planet unknown to the ancients. He called it Uranus after the personification of heaven, and like that personification of heaven, it proved to be a bit erratic, straying tens of thousands of miles off its mathematically predicted course. Some unknown force must have been distorting its path, and in 1845 (sixteen years before the state of Kansas) the French astronomer, Urbain Leverrier, worked out the likely mass and orbit of a hypothetical planet beyond Uranus. Given that roadmap, it was located in the following year -- but again seemed to pull away from a purely mathematical dance. And worse, its mass was too small to account for Uranus’s meanderings. There was still something out there, invisible, sucking on those two huge spheres. But given the reach of contemporary telescopes, nothing else could be found. And as the resolutions gradually increased, so did the number of points of light. How many 17th magnitude dots can one analyze?
In the early part of our century, two Americans once again took up the search, an occasion for two of those extraordinary coincidences which seemed to decorate G’s life like mysterious jewels. Percival Lowell, the literary, world-travelling scion of the distinguished Lowell family of Massachusetts, had been inspired by the discovery of “canals” on Mars to devote his life and personal fortune to studying the red planet. Because of the stillness of the air above, and the rarity of cloud cover, he had built a private observatory outside Flagstaff, Arizona and equipped it, at great expense, with the most advanced equipment available. At this site, he developed a theory, published in 1906 (Mars and Its Canals -- still interesting reading), of intelligent life forms on Mars cultivating long rows of vegetation, using irrigation from annually melting ice caps. You may laugh at a theory which seems more appropriate to the The National Enquirer than to the Annals of Astronomy, but it was not until Mariner 4’s 1965 fly-by that it was conclusively disproved.
Lowell moved on from Mars to an elaborate mathematical study of the orbit of Uranus. He attributed its irregularities to the gravitational pull of some unseen planet beyond Neptune, calculated its probable position, and organized a systematic search by his observatory staff, directed, after 1916, by Vesto Melvin Slipher. Fourteen years after his death, “Lowell’s Planet” was discovered.
Coincidence number one: Percival Lowell was the brother of A. Lawrence Lowell, the president of Harvard, whose hidebound review put Sacco and Vanzetti to death.
Coincidence number two: How is one supposed to compare field photographs of half a million stars? Lowell, whose plates over the years surely contained a faint image of his planet couldn’t make out its slight traverse through the zodiac.
Do you remember Hans Lindauer, Zeiss designer of the planetarium projector and donor of lenses for Gregor’s reading glasses? Hans Lindauer. Here he is again in our story -- the inventor of the Zeiss Blink Comparator. Vesto Melvin Slipher was wise enough to purchase the new device shortly after it appeared, and using it, Clyde Tombaugh “blinked” Planet X (as it was then called) into visible existence.
The Zeiss Blink Comparator was an ingeniously simple device. Photographic plates of identical sky fields from two different nights were put into the machine, which focused them into the same eyepiece. They were then “blinked”, quickly alternated, into the eyepiece, and any celestial object which had changed place over several days would appear to jump back and forth, thus calling attention to itself. Hans Lindauer -- a clever mind. Needless to say, there were technical difficulties to be overcome -- precisely matching up star fields, allowing for slight atmospheric differences in visibility night to night, identifying defects in photographic plates, and so forth. But a determined perfectionist like Clyde went through three quarters of the zodiac using the highest standards of patient, technical precision, and on February 18th, 1930, less than a year after he was hired to do this scut-work, the 23 year old tow-head with thick glasses and callused hands loaded the Blink Comparator with plates taken January 23rd and 29th, and out jumped Planet X from the star-dense constellation of Gemini, smack in the middle of the Milky Way, a 15th magnitude dim “star” that changed its position against a fixed background.
Clyde Tombaugh. Did he jump around like the star, and rush to announce his decision? Not Clyde. He put in two more weeks of patient work, searching for the image in intermediate and outlying positions, and only after he had proved its existence to himself, seen it’s slow, continuous inching through a 248 year course around the sun, did he go up to the director’s office to nonchalantly announce, “Dr. Slipher, I’ve found your Planet X.”
For the next few nights, Slipher, Clyde, and other lab staff checked and rechecked, and the director was ready to put his reputation on the line by announcing the discovery to the world. But when? With an astronomer’s love of the calendar, Slipher chose March 13th, 149 years to the day from Herschel’s discovery of Uranus, and, coincidentally, Percy Lowell’s birthday, a date which the wily director knew would much please Lowell’s widow -- the observatory’s continuing benefactress.
Announced on a Friday, along with a request for name suggestions , the news provoked a flood of telegrams to Flagstaff, one from the grandfather of eleven year old Venetia Burney, of Oxford, England. Venetia was studying mythology in school and over breakfast suggested that Pluto, king of the underworld, might share his name with the new planet because it was “so distant, dark and gloomy”.
After much sifting through suggestions, this was the one that stood out, partly because of its aptness, but largely because the astrological sign for Pluto is (print special character) P/L, the initials of Mrs. Lowell’s beloved husband, and therefore provocative of more continued funding. The largest objection to be overcome was the name’s possible association with “Pluto Water”, a widely advertised laxative.
So “Pluto” it was, announced in the Sunday papers, the headline screamed out by the newsboy into the darkness of Paddy’s Bagel Bakery.
One more word about Clyde W. Tombaugh. Through a mutual friend, I came to know him quite well in his later years. He became a quiet, sweet old man, twisted by kyphosis, one of the astronomical world’s great punsters. I remember him talking about finding Pluto in his hay day: “It was like a coaxing a wheedle out of a naystack.” He never learned to use a word processor, or even a typewriter. I received one of his detailed, long-hand letters early this year, just before his death. He spoke about the irony of his life spent working in cold and darkness in a world of blazing sun. It reminded me of Gregor.
Gregor, whom we last left pressed against the wall under the shelf, under the ground, in Paddy’s wet darkness. Why had the mention of Pluto affected him so strongly?
I had never understood his original, terse story until one day he and I were getting ready for a soak at the Jemez Hot Springs, a favorite haunt of the Los Alamos community, where many new ideas have erupted during late night discussions ringed with the stink of sulfur. I had already sunk down in the blissfully warm water: G was putting on his dry suit when suddenly he sank to the ground. I thought he had lost his balance trying to put his hind legs through the tiny holes in the garment. But no: he had actually become faint. I helped him into the pool thinking the healing waters would bring him around. He kept muttering “Smell, smell...”, by which he could only have meant the sulphurous vapor. As he wasn’t doing well, I bundled him into the truck and took him home. After a cup of camomile tea, he related a very strange story, harking back fourteen years to the experience at Paddy’s.
A cockroach’s antennae -- his organs of smell -- are very long -- a third again his total body length. Smell is an intense stimulant of the blattid sensorium. Were one to draw a distorted facial map on the sensory part of a cockroach brain, it would have a very big nose. The ghostly newsboy’s cries had brought back an overwhelming olfactory incident from several winters ago, the memory of which had thrown him into a swoon similar to the last.
It was on day four of the five day blizzard of ‘27, and G had gone out in the blinding snow to forage for dinner. The wind-chill was intense, I imagine, though they didn’t measure wind-chill in those days. What I do know is that after wandering around for half an hour in conditions of poor visibility, G had stumbled into a large dumpster in the alley behind Blinder’s Cutrate Bakery. His legs were starting to slow, and his thoughts were taking on an expansive quality that comes with intimations of crystallinity. Lowering himself into the offal -- more to partake of its bacterial warmth than to forage -- he was overwhelmed with the smell of hydrogen sulfide from a case of rotting eggs deep in the dumpster’s south-east corner, now disturbed and venting.
Hydrogen sulfide is quite poisonous to humans, rapidly corroding and destroying lung tissue. But lungless, cockroaches react entirely in the depths of their ganglionic webs, and being so close to the edge of this life, the combination of smell and toxin sent Gregor -- he concluded -- into a swirl of past life memories and chaotic impressions, astrological, astronomical, mythological, tragi-comical, intra-specific.
Even as he told me about them later, in the warmth of his chicken coop, a comforter over his abdomen, a cup of steaming tea in his lap, he went off into a kind of tangled rambling which I will try to reproduce from the deep impression it made upon me. If I don’t get it exactly right, little matter: the connections seemed so loose as to be fluid and interchangeable.
“Sulfur,” he intoned, “sulfur is breath of the underworld, Plutorealm, Plutospirit. I come from Pluto. I am born on Pluto -- under the light of the great moon.”
(Let me remind the reader that all this happened more than a year before the discovery or naming of Pluto. And Pluto’s huge moon, Charon, 40% Pluto’s size, was not found until 1976, thirty one years after G’s death!)
“Horror-rich wealth of the invisible,” he continued, “storehouse of things dragged from, never seen, void of day, descent. Down unto death. Entrance to Pluto smells like this. I’m coming, I promise. I change. If no death, I do not transformation. Sulfur-turtle down, hidden under shell me. Caught in dark and cold Persephone, violate from below. I can’t see. I can’t see the materials. I see other. Sulfur sounds in emptyspace. Ohhhh, is beautiful, full, full. Spilling-over fruit. Nature now no more -- is psyche, deformation, I understand, now I understand metamorphosinvisible. This mold and I have much in common. Oben, geräuschlos, die Fahrenden: Geier und Stern. I could be born in winter and never live till spring. On Pluto. Don’t resist, mein Herr, change is good-for friend. Hot springs. Yes. Enter again. Hot smell? Breath of monsters in dark regions of the setting sun. Abendland. West. Oooo-west. [I don’t know if he was referring here to his original vision or to the recent experience at Jemez.] A Universe of Death where Nature breeds, perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things, abominable, inutterable and worse. [This I recognized from Milton. I hadn’t realized G was involved with Paradise Lost.] Transformed, regenerate, reincarn-carn-carnival. Secrets bursts into being. Ruler, Pluto, of mysteries. Es sind noch Lieder zu singen jenseits der Menschen.”
And here he began to half-sing , half-speak the last of Schubert’s Winterreise, the song about the inscrutable hurdy-gurdy man, impervious to life’s woes. He fell asleep, muttering, singing. I took the cup out of his hand, wrapped him more securely in his patchwork comforter, and left. To this day, I puzzle out that thought-web in the dark light of Gregor’s destiny.

MESSIAH

Sat, 4 Mar 2006 00:00:00 -0500

Every year since 1958 I’ve played, sung or conducted Handel’s Messiah. One of my pet peeves is that Messiah, originally an Easter work, featuring a lot of “pain and spitting”, death and subsequent resurrection, has been reduced in America to its introductory section telling the pretty little Christmas story. Tack on the Hallelujah chorus and the Amen, and you’ve got a dumbed-down normal presentation, the Hallelujah halleluja-ing not the resurrection of Christ, but the birth of Jesus.
There actually was a community Messiah performance at Los Alamos one Christmas. Folks wrote about it in diaries — so that much of my tale is “true”. I did want to try writing a variation on Father Mapple’s sermon (why not?), and so introduced a character to do the harangue (it would have been appropriate, no?), who has now disappeared from the book along with his chapter and Messiah. Here’s what got traded off for Stravinsky.

AND WITH HIS STRIPES WE ARE HEALED

Outside, across the great waters, there was the great war. But inside, behind the barbed wire, there were the little wars.
Like the war between Teller and Bethe over who should really be head of the Theoretical Division. Or the war between Neddermeyer and Parsons over how implosion work should proceed. Kistiakowsky once told me that when he reads books on Los Alamos “everything looks so simple, so easy, and everybody was friends with everybody,” but that certainly didn’t jibe with his recollections. Nor mine. When you put a lot of original, outstanding, competitive people together you can count on friction increasing proportionately.
Internecine strife among the elite was not the worst of it. As any sociologist could easily have predicted there was frank alienation, and subtle class war, between the “men” of the military, and civilian “eggheads” -- the scientists and their families.
Enlisted and drafted GIs, men who had hoped to “fight Nazis” or “kill Japs”, found themselves cutting wood, collecting garbage, fixing plumbing, selling soda, cigs and stamps, checking groceries and cashing checks for civilians who seemed to be “slumming it,” enjoying life at a rustic camp at taxpayer expense, people who whenever they wanted could return to their ivory-covered universities. Who knew who they were or what they were up to? “Slackers”, they were called in private, “phonies”, “tech-area jerks”, “longhairs”. Men, women and children! Many of these GIs had had to leave families and loved ones behind, and now suffered without visits, without phone calls, with censored mail. Worst of all, the incendiary rumor prevailed that the Army was not about to “waste good men on this project”, men who “could be out there winning the war.” Consequently, the MPs guarding the gates and checking passes were often less than friendly; the scientists didn’t know if they were being protected or imprisoned. As a recent government publication laconically put it, “Considerable hostility developed between the Tech Area civilian workers and the military workers in the Post Administration...and a considerable portion of the business was done at arm’s length.”
Things grew even worse with the arrival of the SEDs. In addition to the regular Corps of Engineers who ran the Post, a Special Engineering Detachment was sent up to work in the Tech Area, a unit of drafted physics and engineering students -- some of them with PhDs. Although the Army had failed to get the senior scientists into uniform, it did try to militarize the SEDs. But these boys were quite different from regular Post soldiers. In spite of their uniforms, they looked -- and acted -- more like baby professors than combat troops.
I remember a hilarious incident -- at least some of us thought it was hilarious -- shortly after the SEDs came up the Hill: a formal military review had been scheduled in the field between the Lodge and the Big House, the single men’s dormitory. For us, it was just a festive Sunday afternoon parade, but for Groves it was important enough to invite high brass from Washington to come inspect. The whole scientific community came with dogs and children to see the show. The MPs, the Post soldiers, the WACs, and even the military doctors looked smart as they marched across the field, but the SED boys were awful. Their lines were crooked, they couldn’t keep in step, they grinned, waved and shouted at friends on the sidelines. And the situation was not helped by the fact that they received the loudest applause from the bleachers. Our soldierly visitors were not very pleased; one general even called it a disgrace to the army. Nevertheless, these young scientist/scoffers had all been classified as non-commissioned officers. Many were completely without basic training. And yet they outranked the hard-working GIs, ordering them around, and playfully expecting salutes. Worse yet, civilian scientists trying “to counteract the military regime”, became invested and pushy about SED promotions, an infringement on military prerogative which was not too gracefully accepted. Civilians vs. military was one level of struggle. Civilians, military and SEDs upped the ante to a three-body problem which was too complex to be solved without divine intervention.
Enter Jesus Christ, potential Redeemer! The military and civilian directors, aware of growing tension, came up with a scheme to harness the Christmas energy of Peace-on-Earth-Goodwill-towards-Men to solve, or at least ameliorate, the problem. Little did Groves or Oppie know what forces would be released.
The Mesa Chorus, led by Donald (Moll) Flanders, would present it’s first annual performance of Handel’s Messiah at 7PM, Saturday, December 18th, at Fuller Lodge. Because the GIs, by and large, preferred to spend their Saturday nights in the more alcoholic setting of the PX, attendance would be required, but the odium of enforcement would be diluted by a free, fancy meal at the Lodge beforehand, and free drinks and dancing afterward. Only the middle portion of the choral work would be given, a section semi-flirting with interesting soldierly gore, and hopefully short enough to hold the attention of any whose musical stamina was shaped by the three minute surges of the top ten. Moreover, one of their own, Rudi Schildknapp, lead trumpet of the Schildknapp Six, would be employed at a critical moment to blast out a crackling downscale of heavenly trumpets. As Rudi improvised exclusively, half the audience was hoping he would get it right and not embarrass them, while the other half was rooting for him to take off and show the longhairs what one of them could really do.
The plan, of course, was to get the soldiers there, even if coerced, to have them mix with the scientist civilians over a good meal, to have them all enjoy, or at least tolerate a piece of music which had proven ever-popular, at least among the choral music set, and then to top off the new bonds of friendship and experience with easy-going, hopefully incident-less physical contact of social dancing -- with Groves playing the familiar role of cultural despot and censor in the less familiar guise of DJ. Could anything but greater harmony result?
How long was the concert? Groves wanted to know. Oh, about forty minutes, Moll assured him. Fine, said the General. Then there’ll be time for a little Christmas-y talk afterwards, just so they’ll get the picture, and not go out drunk after civilian’ wives. And the Nobel Prizewinners might also be moved to a little charity for their inferior fellow humans. I’ll ask the chaplain to say a few words, will that be all right? Sure, said Moll.
**************************
Gregor was excited. He loved Messiah. It was nothing a Jewish boy in Prague had been expected to love, but it was nothing any boy in Prague could miss. As a child, it had seemed to him that each April, every church in Staré Mesto had entered some frenzied Messiah competition. Until he was fifteen, he had steered clear of this goyish mania. But one day, a lovely young girl with long, dark hair handed him a leaflet for a performance at four PM, in five minutes, right there, right at St. Mikulás, right around the corner from his house. She looked very Jewish, this one. Maybe she sang in the chorus. It must be all right for a Jew to go into a church, if it’s for a concert. His parents would not be home until six. They’d never know.
Gregor was ravished by the experience. He used the word in every possible meaning: he was seized and violently done to; he was overcome by horror, joy and delight; he was pre-sexually bewitched, for the long-haired one was in fact singing soprano in the front row, and never had such an angelic voice issued from such sensuous purity. This concert, too, was of the Easter portion of the work, and from “Behold the Lamb of God” to the last “Hallelujah”, he was transfixed with wonder. Jews didn’t make this kind of sound in their churches. Synagogues were filled with the discordant rumble of davvenning, each worshipper finding his individual prayer voice and rhythm, chanting, whispering, singing, crying, repeating phrases over and over, lost in the brumming of the crowd. Sometimes a cantor sang. But this -- this! Could it be his Jewish faith was shaken? Unspeakable. It is music, music that hath ravished me! He got home before the rest of his family, and never mentioned his experience, even to his sister Grete, a budding violinist.
He had tried to hear Messiah every year since then, but with all the changes that had occurred along the way, he had managed to bat only about .300. So what a boon -- right here, in his own community, an annual Messiah! The sad part was that he could no longer sing it, as he had in his late teens and early twenties, in the face of his father’s rage. Not that his father was an observant Jew -- it was strictly High Holidays with him, and whatever social practice was necessary to maximize profits. But for some reason, the idea of his very own son singing -- singing! -- about Christ, advertising a false messiah -- the faintest whiff of this image sent him into catastrophic fury. In fact, one of these seizures, the most terrifying one in Gregor’s memory, had been on the very night before Gregor’s change. He hadn’t made the connection. But still, not to be able to sing this, to be kept from pouring his heart into the clean and glorious lines...Metamorphosis had many boons, but being unable to sing Messiah was not one of them. His voice was too scratchy.
Gregor came early, picked up a program, and sat down in the front row. The tables had been pushed back, and the room was filled with dinner and folding chairs, even on the balcony. As he read through the program, people slowly filtered into the room, some in suits and dresses, many more in uniform. The growing rumble reminded him of davvening.
“Behold the Lamb of God”, ok. Hey, where is “He was despised” and “He gave his back?”...must not have an alto soloist. (For the first time in ages, Gregor grew aware of his own back, and the smiting by his father. ) Surely...”And with his stripes”...”All we like sheep”, good, good. What? Genia Peierls is the tenor soloist? She sings “All they that see him?” Easy, G, take it easy. “He trusted in God”, ok, and at least we get “Thy rebuke”, even if it is with Genia... “Lift up your heads?” What? Where’s the death? Where’s “He was cut off out of the land of the living?” How can they skip that? If she can sing the other tenor solos, why not that?
Gregor thought he had better give up reading the program, so he could listen with a receptive heart. They would do what they would do.
Choosing to do the Easter portion of Messiah for Christmas had been a trans-Atlantic compromise. Though written as an Easter piece, and traditionally performed in Europe during Easter time, in coming to America Messiah had shifted seasons, and along with them, content. Though the Puritans had banned the celebration of Christmas, post-Puritan America has embraced it with a vengeance, currently exhorting all to worship at the mall of one’s choice. Perhaps in the land of the Easter Bunny and the electric chair, crucifixion is seen as barbaric, but Christmas, not Easter, is where most American celebration is concentrated, and with it, most concertizing. Messiah has become a Christmas piece, and most American performances restrict themselves to its first section concerning Advent and the birth of Christ. For some reason completely incomprehensible to Europeans, the meat of the oratorio is left out, and the introductory portion is capped with the Hallelujah chorus -- a masterwork written to praise Christ’s ascent to his heavenly throne. “A premature ejaculation at best,” commented Hans Staub, concerning this practice.
But if this was their country, and the Americans were determined to put on part of Messiah at Christmas, the new influx of Europeans were going to be damn sure it was the Easter portion that was performed.
The piano in Fuller Lodge was, appropriately, a living example of both the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and Neils Bohr’s -- excuse me, Nicholas Baker’s -- Principle of Complementarity. You were never quite certain what the pitches were because you could not have accurate tuning of two or three of the multiple strings at the same time. If one was in, the others were surely out. Then too, the instrument existed in some duple state averaged between Hammerklavier and Harpsdischord, as Joyce was pleased to call it, a soft touch bringing out the clinging, plucking quality of frayed felt, while a strong attack manifested the sound of bare wood core on metal. You could never elicit the two at the same time, and a complete description of the instrument would have to include aspects of both. Otto Frisch, an excellent Mozart pianist, was quite the sport to agree to play on it. But no one was about to move Teller’s Steinway grand over through snow and frozen mud for a forty minute performance at the Lodge. Besides, such accompaningt sounds took the burden off the chorus to sing in tune. No one would think of blaming Frisch, and no one could really indict the singers.
At 7:20 the chorus entered a restless hall to great applause, and the full-bearded Moll Flanders, computation leader in the Theoretical division and thus Dick Feynman’s boss, dressed in unwonted, too large tailcoat and white tie made his way to the front. Even the GIs whistled and stomped. Moll had permanently endeared himself to the whole community with a show he had put on in the early fall: “The Moll Flanders Ballet Workshop [the poster said] presents the premier of an original ballet -- ‘Sacre du Mesa’ -- to the futuristic music of George Gershwin.” Everyone in his company had had ballet training except him. But he pointed out with impeccable logic, that in order to dance General Groves, [Groves was in Washington], he didn’t need ballet training, since the General himself had had none. QED. Tonight he would surpass that feat.
The “house lights” went down, and in the first of only two wrong decisions that evening, he broke the suspense with two mere announcements: The concert was beginning at 7:20 because, as the contemporary world has amply demonstrated, the Messiah always comes late. The audience simply took this in, confounded. Also the chorus All we like sheep had to be scrapped at the last minute because too many had gone astray and the shepherd was still out looking for them. Chuckles from the cognoscenti. He signaled to Otto, and the Overture began, grave, perhaps more striking than usual for being in an indeterminate key. Then, a truly extraordinary event occurred. When the moment came for the Allegro moderato to begin, Moll walked over to stand at the side of the upright piano, placed his elbow on top, and performed that three-part fugue all by himself. He whistled the soprano voice out of the right side of his mouth, the alto out of the left, and vocalized the bass part with accurate, wordless humming. You don’t believe me. I was there. I am not a gullible man. I heard it with my own ears. He must have been practicing this in the shower for the last twenty years in preparation for that night.
Now Messiah is one of the grandest works of western culture. It is simply not appropriate for a serious conductor to whistle the overture in public performance. But the effect, rather than being ridiculous, was to create a lodgefull of gaping at the wonder that is man. No problem was too great for one who set his mind to it, no achievement too difficult. The Fuller Lodge was riddled with people who had dedicated themselves to excellence: none could gainsay Moll Flanders’ accomplishment.
The music jumped from E minor to G minor, an artifactual glitch of abridgement, noticeable to few in the audience since “Behold the lamb of God” had caught them up, every last one of them it seemed, in its net of falling lines. Were there some there who had never heard the Messiah before? What were they expecting? Something churchy? That is not what they got. Rather they were bathed in an ominous summoning to pain and passion, set in a post-whistling context which included even them, the sinful of the world. Those who knew recognized the voice of John, the same voice that cried in the wilderness, “Comfort ye, my people.” The Lamb was about to be chosen, the Passover Lamb, the sacrifice upon whom all sins would be heaped and slaughtered into renewal, the Lamb whose blood would be smeared on door jambs to frighten Death away, the Lamb that would conquer the wolves, the conquering Lamb.
What about this Lamb? Handel took great pains to describe its scorn-filled whipping. “He gave his back to the smiters, and his cheeks to them that pluckèd off the hair.” Blood and hair clotting together on the prison floor. Here is perhaps the only major artwork which celebrates saliva as such: “He hid not his face from shame and spitting,” spit in the face, a cadence, ach-ptoo! But without an alto soloist, the audience was cheated of secretions. Instead they were assured, in no uncertain terms, that the Lamb was burdened with their very own doings: Surely he hath born our griefs, and carried our sorrows. The fierce F-minor cries, the painful, discordant suspensions: He was wounded for our transgressions; he was bruised for our iniquities, a catharsis of pity and terror.
Even the Jewish and Italian mothers of many in the audience would not have been able to evoke such a sense of guilt. The thoughtful were carried emotionally along, while at the same time wondering about the phenomenon of the Messiah. Is this suffering quadruped the Saviour of the world? How odd. The Messiah’s function is to be victorious. Christians thought of Christ. Jews thought through their own lens of the “true” reference, the continued oppression and persecution of Israel throughout the Christian and pre-Christian centuries. The currrent Nazi attacks, the pogroms of the nineteenth century which had brought their parents to the New World, the persecutions of the eighteenth century, the seventeenth, and on back to the Exile, where the image of the Lamb converges with that of scattered Israel.
“And with His stripes we are healed.” What is that about? Why should one’s agony be inversely proportional to another’s? Conservation of Wound? Conservation of Tears? Conservation of Pain? Beckett has told us: “The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.”
Handel lingers over the word “healed” as if to lay soothing balm upon Christ’s -- and our -- wounds. Yet at this very moment, G’s wound began to weep. As he searched his soul for cause, he heard someone in the soprano section, he couldn’t tell who, articulating the melismatic syllables of “healed” as “hee-hee-hee-hee-heeled”, in effect a subtle but demonic, underlying cackling, as if to say that no matter what the unction, the wound is too great to be cured -- you’ll see. Hee-hee-hee.
And now, skipping over the strayed “All we like sheep”, Genia Peierls stepped out in front of her row to sing “All they that see him, laugh him to scorn. They shoot out their lips and shake their heads, saying”: Enter the scornful.
Genia, the Russian wife of the emigré German theoretician, Rudolf Peierls, and mother of the brilliant, beautiful, precocious Gabrielle, age 12 going on 40, had recently arrived with the British mission, and was already the most talked-about character on the mesa. No matter what the issue or activity, Genia was there, in the front row, taking things energetically in hand, running everything with ringing voice and Russian disregard of the definite article. The less generous, or more easily intimidated, spoke of her as a terror -- always telling other people what to do. In this instance, she had insisted in singing the tenor recitative preceding He trusted in God, because, as she forcefully observed, “How will audience know who speaks?!” And although she was right -- it was important to identify the excerpted voice of the chorus -- the transition did little to soften the brutal choral metamorphosis from a confessing people of God to an unruly crowd in obscene play at a public execution. So does Jekyll turn unexpectedly to Hyde.
He trusted in God that He would deliver him: let Him deliver him, if he delight in him. Such assertive contemptuousness! The trivializing, de-legitimizing of God, putting his capitalized pronoun on a syncopated weak beat, now ironically, self-flatteringly strong. What pristine nastiness, abundantly clear. Genia stepped forward again to sing Handel’s comment, justified only by her own: “Is very important!” Thy rebuke hath broken His heart. He is full of heaviness. He looked for some to have pity on him. But there was no man, neither found he any, to comfort him.
And surely she was right to do so. Not only was this Gregor’s favorite moment of Messiah, with the single most touching note in music slipping into place in the piano’s middle voice, a pensive entwinement of suffering and beauty. In the pause after pity on him, a luminous E rises half step to a questioning, consoling F, as if at least one human heart might go out to Jesus from the frigid emptiness answering his gaze. But it was also the theological key to the work: Here was the heart of it. As every culture has known and proclaimed, something is wrong with the human race. Things are not as they should be. There have been many intellectual explanations -- mythological, religious, philosophical. But here is the psalmist’s prophetic assessment: the primal fault is that we disdain God. We have turnèd everyone in his own way. The biblical word for this is “sin.”
Gregor felt connected to Genia Peierls for the first time. Perhaps he sensed for a moment why she was the way she was. At the same time, he, in that moment of E to F, felt terribly, agonizingly lonely. And his wound, not so much stripe as crater, bled its brown tears.
The listeners had to interpolate the moment of death. But G found this not as egregious as he had expected. The whole textual strategy of the Messiah is one of brilliant, evocative avoidance. Charles Jennens, an otherwise unremarkable British gentleman, had provided his friend George Fredrick with a libretto of theological genius, portraying every shade of devotion from piety, resignation and repentance to hope, faith and exultation. And all this without resorting to narrative, as in the Passions of Bach: Christ did this, and then he did that, the misery composed directly into the music. Messiah commands attention because of what it does not show, for the most part indicating, rather than depicting events. And therefore the death of Jesus, that epoch-making moment, really could exist as a lacuna between his unrewarded search for comfort and the triumphant Lift up your heads which followed. Praise be to Moll and Genia for demonstrating this.
Lift up your heads; The Lord gave the word; Their sound is gone out. And so, for the Jews, the Ark takes its place in the Temple, for the Christians, the Son takes his place in Heaven, and the preachers tell the world -- but some do not hear. Why do the nations so furiously rage together? Jim Tuck, the gawky six foot comedian of the newly-arrived Brits, he of explosive lens research, stepped out to sing, less than accurately but with conviction, to sing of the kings of the earth, of the rulers that counsel together against the Lord. Again, the demonic chorus: Let us break any bonds with the Anointed, and cast away their yokes from us. And what will happen? This time Willy Higinbotham, a “real” tenor, stepped forward to describe the smashing and breaking that will ensue, an image which always reminded Gregor of the piled up debris confronting Benjamin’s Angel of History.
And then, the great moment, the moment incoherently misplaced in American versions, the great Hallelujah Chorus. The piling up of debris? Hallelujah! For the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth -- which at first blush is not a very encouraging vision of the future. But what if it were to become the case -- that the kingdom of this world is become the kingdom of our Lord, and that over such a peaceable kingdom He shall reign forever and ever ? It did give one pause, in the midst of the battle of Stalingrad, the submarine warfare, and the maiden flight of the V2.
Two hundred two and a half years earlier, King George had stood in his excitement, dragging the court to its surprised feet around him, and now the European aficionados led the audience in Fuller Lodge in this traditional ninth inning stretch, though many of the GIs, worshippers in someone else’s church, didn’t quite know what was going on, and rose with quizzical expressions under their crew cuts. Fiercely cued by Moll, Rudi Schildknapp’s five trumpet notes came in right at measure 57, and though several of his cohorts applauded defiantly right then and there, they were shortly cut off by the impregnable momentum of the music.
For all the radiance of that performance, at that time, in that place, there was one moment that stood out above all others. Willie Higinbotham, with his strong tenor voice, came in too soon after the breathtaking pause just before the final cadence, shattering the dramatic silence in the Lodge. After the concert, Otto Frisch consoled him with congratulations. “I’ve heard Messiah perhaps thirty times in my life,” he said, “and I’ve always waited for someone to come in too soon. It was very satisfying to me.” The story even followed him to Washington where he went to lobby for civilian control of atomic energy late in ‘45. I heard it there several times in scientific and diplomatic circles.
In spite of George Bernard Shaw’s opinion alleging “the impossibility of obtaining justice for that work in a Christian country,” the night’s Messiah excerpt had been an exhausting forty-three minutes for Gregor. He leaned back against brown wetness -- to decompress. But before the audience could conclude the event was over, Chaplain Capt. Jonathan Maple walked onstage, making his way through the departing chorus members, who were taking places at the back of the hall. Chaplain Maple was a gaunt thirty-five, with a high forehead under short black hair accentuating his skull-like visage, his somber eyes magnified by thick, round glasses. He had recently arrived on the mesa, a permanent replacement for the guest ministers, rabbis and priests whose coming-and-going Groves felt might compromise security. He had an office in the Big House, and was available by appointment for consultation. This, however, was his first general public appearance, and even those who might otherwise have fled stayed around to assess this new member of the community. I had mentioned Moll Flanders’ two mistakes of the evening. This was the second.
Chaplain Maple began innocuously enough:
“I want to thank Dr. Flanders, Dr. Frisch, and the thirty-four members of the Mesa Chorus for their gift to us tonight.”
Audience applause for those at the back.
“But I also want to acknowledge the appearance of someone invisible -- more than someone -- three, four, perhaps a dozen invisibles whose voices have been haunting the evening. Can you think who they are?”
No answer from the room of thinkers and doers.
“I am referring, of course, to the psalmists and prophets who supplied Mr. Handel with his texts, and us with our spiritual itinerary.”
Some mumbling among the crowd. The one comment I clearly caught was, “Now we have to sit through a sermon?” Others seemed intrigued.
“Have ye not known? have ye not heard?
Hath it not been told you from the beginning?
Have ye not understood from the foundations of the earth?
It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth
And the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers...”
The quotation came out of the blue, entirely unprepared by the previous remarks. Furthermore, the Chaplain’s voice had taken on a new quality -- or was it the Chaplain’s voice at all? The closest approximation was the disembodied voice heard at all hours of the day and night over the Project PA system, but here shorn of its electronic quality. Perhaps it was a practiced ventriloquy used in his denomination. In any case, it seemed to come from the three sides of the balcony rather than from the speaker in front. Gregor, at first joining the audience in the search for the source, was drawn to attention by the characterization of “grasshoppers”. After a pause for the exotic voice to dissipate, Chaplain Maple continued.
“Those were the words of First Isaiah, the author of much of Handel’s text Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth: I have nourished and brought up children and they have rebelled against me. Thus begins the first and greatest of the books of prophets: a testimony with visionary authority, proud genealogy, cosmic scope -- and an indictment of the rebellious children of the Lord.”
A few soldiers stood up to leave, but were signalled back down by imperative sergeants.
“I say ‘First Isaiah’. Do all of you know that the ‘Isaiah’ of the Old Testament is not one, but at least three different people, writing scores of years apart? [Silence.] I hope I am not shocking anyone. These are the words of the First Isaiah, who began to preach in the reign of King Uzziah, in the eighth century BC. First Isaiah was a visionary moralist, calling upon a country in the summit of its power. Uzziah had built the economic resources of Judah as well as its military strength. In Jerusalem there were engines, invented by skillful men, on each of the towers, capable of shooting arrows long distances, and heaving great stones.
But Uzziah’s strength had become his weakness. He grew proud, and angry at meddling priests, and as his anger mounted, leprosy broke out on his forehead. And King Uzziah was a leper to the day of his death, and being a leper, he dwelt in a separate house, for he was excluded from the house of the Lord.
In the year that King Uzziah died, First Isaiah had a vision: he saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up. Above the throne stood the seraphim, and each one had six wings; and with twain they covered God’s face, with twain they covered His feet, and with twain they did fly. Insect-like angels, shielding men from the radiation of God.”
Scientists and military brass took wary note. Radiation? The radiation of God? Did the Chaplain know something he shouldn’t? Gregor, tachycardic, again noted the insects.
“Those were years of power struggles and shifting strategic alliance. The huge kingdoms of Egypt and Mesopotamia, Babylon and Assyria, alternately triumphed, while tiny Judah played its cards as cleverly as it could, seeking protection without humiliation. First Isaiah lived through the reign of four Judaic kings, and he counseled each to rely not on military protection, but on God’s. History, he proclaimed, was a stage for God’s will and God’s work; the rising and falling of willful nations was mere detail.
The louder he spoke, the farther he was pushed from centers of power. So he let it be known that politics itself, with its arrogance and disregard of justice, was the problem -- not the solution. And why, Ladies and Gentlemen, and Children of all ages, why is that?
Because politics is based on the power of the sword. You know First Isaiah’s words: some of you have laughed at them. He announced the day when nations ‘shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.’ Are you still listening? First Isaiah proclaimed the day when ‘nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.’
It had become clear that this was to be no short, simple thank-you speech from the religion Division. Some in the audience became restless, some transfixed. The GIs knew they could not leave, and the civilians felt they could not abandon them.
“What were First Isaiah’s flight instructions from the Lord?” continued Maple. “Now hear this, friends:
‘Go and say to this people (this people is you):
Go and say to this people
Hear and hear, but do not understand;
see and see, but do not perceive.
Make the heart of this people fat,
and their ears heavy,
and shut their eyes;
lest they see with their eyes
and hear with their ears,
and turn and be healed.’
What? What could these instructions mean? Isaiah checked them twice. Prophets are normally charged with making people see and understand; they aim to mobilize their hearts, not put them to sleep. ‘How long?’ Isaiah asked, appalled. ‘How long this tactic?’ God’s plan was uncomfortably clear:
‘Until the cities be wasted without inhabitant and the houses without man, and the land be utterly desolate.’
Maple paused to let the thought sink in.
“It is hard to be a prophet,” he added. And again that voice from nowhere and from everywhere:
“‘Why is my pain unceasing,
My wound incurable,
Refusing to be healed?’
Gregor could not believe his ears.
“‘I cry by day, but you do not answer:
and by night, but find no rest.
I am a worm, and not human;
scorned by others and despised by the people.’
Why, Isaiah, why? Could it be, my poor Isaiah, that only an outsider, only an exile, can claim the humanity society denies?
Gregor was breathing quickly.
“God’s plan was decimation; First Isaiah was assigned to cover the news. Reduce Israel to a remnant, and let things begin again. And the Jews were scattered, and their Temple destroyed.
But in the Exile, a prophet arose who lifted the meaning of the events from mere political history to a cosmic drama of world redemption. This was Second Isaiah, the poet responsible for chapters 40 through 55, for much of the Messiah text, a lyrical visionary of the heart. For Christians, Second Isaiah spoke the words that most clearly presage the coming of Christ. The historical, human order is to be overcome by the suffering servant, to Christian thought, the crucified Saviour.
It is not just a few thousand Jewish exiles to whom this prophet speaks, as they sit weeping by the waters of Babylon. Second Isaiah addresses every exile all over the world, every human at a loss to find God, every blind man trying passionately to penetrate the darkness of the future. That, Ladies and Gentlemen, is you.
The root of the problem, indeed the root of all evil, is your false sense of sovereignty, and stemming from it, your pride, your arrogance, your presumption.
‘They worship the work of their own hands,’ the Prophet says, ‘that which their own fingers have made. They have chosen their own ways, and their soul delighteth in their abominations.’
But the Lord is weary of such offerings. Where is contrition? Where is regret?
‘Bring no more vain oblations; your incense is an abomination unto Me.
When you spread forth your hands,
I will hide My eyes from you;
Even though you make many prayers,
I will not listen.
Your hands are full of blood.’”
Things were becoming truly uncomfortable. This might have gone over in some small southern Baptist church, but this was the Fuller Lodge at Site Y. Chaplain Maple seemed to sense this, and pulled back.
“Let me say a few words about history. This is what the prophets discovered: History is a nightmare. We generally assume that politics, economics and warfare are the substance of history. To the prophets, it is God’s judgement of man which is the main issue. They look at history from the point of view of Justice, judging its course not in terms of wealth and success, victory and defeat, but in terms of corruption and righteousness, violence and compassion.
We should not expect the darkness of our history to be dispersed soon by any clever technical or political strategy. We will not receive answers concerning the future, because we ask questions of those who cannot know, the vain gods of the nations.
The only solution of the historical problem today lies in the prophetic concept. Isaiah speaks to the exiled remnant of our time, to those in prisons and concentration camps, to those separated from husbands or wives, from children or parents, to those toiling in despair in foreign lands, to those in the hell of modern war. He speaks to every one of us in this room.
How should we respond to his words? Ironically? Dismissively? Angry at their seeming pretentiousness, at the immense gap between the proffered solution and the catastrophic reality in which we live?
Two and a half centuries ago, we opted for means to control nature and society. It was a right decision, and we have brought about something new and great in history. But we excluded ends. And now the means claim to be the ends; our tools have become our masters, and the most powerful of them have become a threat to our very existence.
A century and a half ago, we opted for freedom. It was a right decision; it created something new and great in history. But in that decision we excluded the security without which man cannot live and grow. And now the quest for securit splits the whole world with demonic power.
What is the world you are making? Wars, victories, more wars. So many tears. So little regret. And who can sit in judgement when victims’ horror turns to hate? What saved Second Isaiah from despair was his messianic vision of man’s capacity for repentance.
Only one thing stands in the way. Do you know what that is? What stands in the way of repentance is the worship of power. Why are human beings so obsequious, so ready to kill and ready to die at the call of kings and chieftains, presidents and generals? It is because we worship might, we venerate those who command might, we are convinced that it is by might that man prevails.
The most striking feature of all prophetic polemic is the distrust and denunciation of power in all its forms. You who work here know what I am talking about. The hunger for power knows no end; the appetite grows on what it feeds.”
Maple’s between-the-lines was growing ominous.
“Now as then, the sword is the pride of man; arsenals, forts, chariots and bombs lend supremacy to nations. War is the climax of human ingenuity, the object of supreme efforts; men slaughtering each other, cities blown to ruins. What is left behind? Agony and desolation. And you think very highly of yourselves, don’t you? You are wise in your own hearts and shrewd in your own sight. But into your world, drunk with power, bloated with arrogance, comes Isaiah’s word that the swords will be undone, that nations will search, not for gold, power or harlotries, but for God’s word.
It seems inconceivable, doesn’t it? But to Isaiah it was a certainty: War will be abolished. You shall not learn war any more because you shall seek other knowledge. Your hearts of stone will melt, and hearts of flesh will grow instead. Are you ready for the metamorphosis?”
Richard Feynman got up to leave.
“But wait!” the Chaplain called after him to no avail. “We have forgotten an Isaiah, the Third and last Isaiah, the strangest and most mysterious of the three. In transit from the second, he begins with gentle, female imagery:
‘Rejoice ye with Jerusalem, and be glad with her, all ye that love her: rejoice for joy with her, all ye that mourn for her.
That ye may suck, and be satisfied with the breasts of her consolations;
[A titter from the young girls in the audience. Feynman paused at the door.]
As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you, and ye shall be comforted in Jerusalem.’
Happy ending. Nice and tidy. The American Way. But the Bible is not born of shallowness. [Feynman completes his exit.] I skip to the end of the book and read you the comments of Third Isaiah, after all Flesh has come to worship the Lord. God schedules a little field trip:
‘They shall go forth, and look upon the carcasses of the men that have transgressed against Me: for their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched; and they shall be an abhorring unto all flesh.’
The unending destruction of flesh. The eerie excursion of the chosen to look upon the World’s Fair, the abhorrent, endless process of corruption.
‘Through the wrath of the Lord is the land darkened, and the people shall be as the fuel of the fire: no man shall spare his brother.
And they shall snatch on the right hand, and be hungry, and they shall eat on the left hand, and they shall not be satisfied: they shall eat every man the flesh of his own arm.
Therefore hath the curse devoured the earth, and they that dwell therein are desolate: therefore the inhabitants of the earth are burned, and few men left.’ So that the Lord ‘may do his work, his strange work, and bring to pass his act, his strange act.’”
Little Paul Teller started to cry. Mici carried him out.
“Well may you cry, my young friend. It’s a grisly scandal of a text. The reality of Third Isaiah judgement is indeed grim, but it is dishonest to pretend that reality is otherwise. Where do you in this room fit in this reality?” With a wave of his arm, he indicated the entire room. “What’s wrong with this picture?”
The tension exceeded the punctured silence before the final Hallelujah. But there was no Hallelujah -- only the disembodied voice again:

‘“Woe to those who call evil good and good evil,
Who put darkness for light and light for darkness!’
‘The stone will cry out from the wall,
Woe to him who builds a town with blood,
And founds a city on iniquity.’
Chaplin Maple strode quickly from the silenced room. He was not seen again on site. The dance that followed had a forced and frantic quality. Gregor left early to go home to bed.

HEIDEGGER AND DEATH

Fri, 3 Mar 2006 00:00:00 -0500

Heidegger was perhaps the deepest, darkest and richest theme that was cut. I’ve been “working on” Being and Time for years, trying to understand and digest its enormity. Its publication date, and the stir it created was just right to impact Gregor‘s life. The subsequent revelations of Heidegger’s Nazi associations would have made his inclusion that much richer and more ironic for the contemporary reader; ditto his relationship with Hannah Arendt. The great chapter on Death fit precisely into Gregor’s suicidal mood at Los Alamos. But, sure, it was too much to burden the novel with as it was gathering itself to its climax. Maybe Thomas Mann could have pulled it off. Here’s the chapter “In the Blackest of Forests” containing my treatise on Heidegger, not in the published version.

IN THE BLACKEST OF FORESTS

In the air, on the less-than-comfortable B-29, he composed a long letter to Leo Szilard detailing his recent adventures, findings and thoughts, and mailed it (c/o Trude Weiss) from La Guardia -- while still outside the censors’ reach. Then another long plane ride to Chicago, and on to Alamogordo Army Air Field, for the bus ride 160 miles north to Santa Fe and Los Alamos. It was the first time he had been in Alamogordo, but it would not be his last. His last would be his last.
It may be worth briefly reviewing the Project Gregor returned to, an enterprise much modified by reorganization around plutonium and implosion design. In July, Segre had established that a gun design for plutonium would not work, and the lab went into crisis. The only alternative would be to solve the immensely complex implosion problem suggested by Gregor and Neddermeyer’s early experiments in the canyon. Enrico Fermi and his family had arrived in August, and “The Pope” was appointed associate Lab director, and head of F-division, a catch-all gang of trouble shooters for interdisciplinary problems. The changes had lifted Lab spirits, though there was still only dim light at the end of tunnel. If there was an end of the tunnel. Bob Bacher took on a newly-created “Gadget-Division” focussing on bomb design, Kistiakowski continued to lead the X (explosives)-division, investigating explosive lenses, Luis Alvarez was developing micro-second detonation systems, and Robert Brode led the development of arming devices which could not trigger while the bomb was still in the airplane. Edward Teller and his stupendous ego continued to be a thorn in almost everyone’s side, but Oppie valued him too highly to let him go. He was appointed leader of a small “Super and General Theory Group” to work on problems not directly related to immediate production.
“Super” was the name for his hydrogen bomb idea -- a fusion weapon with many times the explosive power of anything possible with uranium or plutonium fission. Teller’s beloved brainchild, it was a bomb within a bomb, requiring an atomic blast to achieve the temperatures needed to crush hydrogen together. Gregor found it appalling. The weapon currently being developed on-site was projected to explode with the force of 10 kilotons (10,000 tons) of TNT over an area of 10 square miles, a figure horrible enough. Teller’s calculations for the Super predicted a similar effect over 1.000 square miles: it would require only one superbomb to entirely destroy New York City. Teller and his group did some targeting calculations: serious earthquake-level damage would occur if the bomb were detonated underground or underwater near a continental shelf. Even more exciting was the calculation that if a superbomb burned a 10 meter cube of liquid deuterium 300 miles above the atmosphere, the blast could lay waste a million square miles. Boys will be boys.
Teller, however, was not the only physicist whose thoughts were tending toward the inhuman. In April of ‘43, Fermi, in Chicago, had proposed the possibility of using fiercely radioactive isotopes bred in an atomic pile to poison the German food supply, a preemptive strike against a similar possible German attack. Such might be an alternative in case a fission bomb proved impossible. Oppie swore Fermi to secrecy -- a secrecy within the overall secrecy of the Manhattan Project -- and the Italian went quietly to work. Oppie discussed Fermi’s idea with Teller, and the two agreed that Strontium 90 might be the best agent, not hard to separate from other radioactive products, and depositing itself quickly and permanently in bone. Oppenheimer, the man dedicated to ahimsa -- doing no harm -- wrote to Fermi, “I think that we should not attempt a plan unless we can poison food sufficient to kill a half a million men, since there is no doubt that the actual number affected will, because of non-uniform distribution, be much smaller than this.”
Gregor had returned to an enterprise where both the best and worst of men had been caught up in the whirlwind of technical challenge, and had been unpredictably brutalized by their struggle. The new pace was frenetic, the energy high, the collegiality blinding and inspiring. The Germans were losing the war, and though there was still some fear of a desperate Wunderwaffen, it was the Japanese who seemed destined to be the Gadget’s target.
**************************
On his second day back, Gregor checked his mailbox. In it, he found a surprise. He had almost forgotten he had written.
365 W. 95th St.
New York 25, N.Y.
20 December 1944

Dear Mr. Samson,

Thank you for your provocative letter. I hope you will have patience with the extended answer I believe such a letter demands.
I must admit I found your auto-da-fe amusing, though not for its slapstick quality. Rather it demonstrates an unfortunately typical misdirection of goodwill: destroying the messenger does not invalidate bad tidings.
We agree, I think, on the message Kafka brings to a misconstructed world: the ancient admonition to “Know Thyself.” The truth of our time must be disclosed or uncovered from within its all-pervasive and seductive trappings. It requires a scalpel as sharp as Kafka’s to do such deep surgery. Modern man stands amidst the confusion of the time and seeks guidance, and Kafka provides not only guidance, but the intellectual momentum for constructive escape.
Let us look together at two of Kafka’s little parables, in some ways contrasting, even contradictory, and in some ways additive. Here is the first:

“He is a free and secure citizen of the world, for he is fettered to a chain which is long enough to give him the freedom of all earthly space, and yet only so long that nothing can drag him past the frontiers of the world. But simultaneously he is a free and secure citizen of Heaven as well, for he is also fettered by a similarly designed heavenly chain. So that if he heads, say, for the earth, his heavenly collar throttles him, and if he heads for Heaven, his earthly one does the same. And yet all the possibilities are his, and he feels it; more, he actually refuses to account for the deadlock by an error in the original fettering.”

Even so is the world, a place where freedom and security is protected by chains which, while not seriously limiting earthly activity, keep one from falling off. But Kafka tells us that earthly freedom -- that granted by “the world” -- is not enough. For there is a dimension of other-than-earthly activity which also belongs to any citizen of the world: he is bound also to this transcendent realm, and gives up his citizenship at his peril. That is Kafka’s first great message: not one of limitation, but one of transcendent connection, a connection which also protects from too great immersion in the ordinary. True, there is conflict, tension, even paralysis in this situation, and you, Mr. Samson, may see the protagonist as defeated by his sadistic author. But the protagonist is not defeated. He is actually aware of the possibility that there is no error in the structure, that if deeply perceived and adroitly handled he may be able to bountifully operate within these strictures, as a poet does within the limitations of sonnet form. It is not stubbornness or stupidity behind his analysis. It is the smell of real freedom.

The second story is this:

“He has two antagonists: the first presses him from behind, from the origin. The second blocks the road ahead. He gives battle to both. To be sure, the first supports him in his fight with the second, for he wants to push him forward, and in the same way the second supports him in his fight with the first, since he drives him back. But it is only theoretically so. For it is not only the two antagonists who are there, but he himself as well, and who really knows his intentions? His dream, though, is that some time in an unguarded moment -- and this would require a night darker than any night has ever yet been -- he will jump out of the fighting line and be promoted, on account of his experience in fighting, to the position of umpire over his antagonists in their fight with each other.”

The most obvious level of this tale concerns man embattled between the forces of the past and the imperatives of the given future. It pictures a crushing, suffocating thought-world miraculously evaded. However you choose to interpret the story, Mr. Samson, it again urges corrective action. True, the night will have to be at its darkest -- to provoke, to inspire and to hide -- but such a condition is already a regular occurrence in our dark times. And the man who can dream such a jump, such a discontinuity, such a transformation, that man is more than halfway toward its realization. Let Kafka whisper in your ear, and things may evolve which have never appeared before.
Forgive my presumption in suggesting that you concentrate not on the fetters, or the darkness of the night, but rather on the taut potential for situational metamorphosis. Kafka discloses what our blinded eyes have ceased to see, and such revelation has the power to trigger the springs of action.
As it has not yet appeared in English, and would be difficult for a non-native speaker to penetrate, I imagine you have not read BEING AND TIME, the important work of my friend and teacher, Martin Heidegger. It is impossible to summarize this complex work, but let me alert you to its existence, and hope you will spend some time with it when and if it is translated. To whet your appetite, let me simply mention that a key node in the work concerns the experience of “Angst”, a word with no English equivalent, approximately rendered by “uneasiness” or “malaise,” a feeling of non-normality occasionally experienced by reflective and serious people, perhaps you yourself. Common things may seem uncanny, odd or unfamiliar, as if from some other planet. Heidegger argues that Angst is a crucial experience in pushing beyond the “they-world”, a blinding, deafening, stultifying continuum of idle talk and stereotyped expectations. One who is transformed by Angst is given the space to escape such a world -- by seeing how strangulating it really is. Kafka’s heros are characterized by nothing so much as Angst,and are therefore given an opportunity to transcend denied to most people. Inasmuch as the reader identifies with these characters, they too, are asked to see the world as unheimlich -- uncanny, but also etymologically “not-at-home”, and themselves as no longer unquestioning members of the “they”. Kafka’s animals are the supreme metaphors of potentially redemptive self-alienation. The animal metamorphoses you mention -- into “apes, dogs, moles, mice -- even insects” are not simply “regressions” -- these characters are adventurers out of the “they-world” into the the possibility of other experience and deeper understanding. There may be many “unresolved interpretive furies” and “unproductive hypotheses”, but Kafka’s writing would not be “true” were it otherwise.
You may be interested in Heidegger’s understanding of the fruits of Angst, painful as they may be. Angst draws out, e-ducates, the authentic self, which then interacts with an authenticated world via Sorge,or care, both caring-about and caring-for.
Again, again at the risk of being presumptuous, let me say that you seem to be a caring person, perhaps just by nature, or perhaps after having experienced some kind of transformative Angst. My counter-suggestion to you is that you be the one to re-evaluate this extraordinary prophet and teacher, and to engage him not as an enemy, but as a friend. “An enemy,” as the Russian proverb says, “will give in, but a friend will argue.” Kafka never does give in, does he?

I remain yours sincerely,

Hannah Arendt
What a nice, thoughtful letter! Gregor was not half so interested in re-evaluating Kafka as he was in seeing what this Heidegger was about. He realized Professor Arendt had been unaware of his native tongue, and had assumed he could not read the text. But surely he could -- if only he could find one. Like Kafka, Gregor had trouble giving in.
Book emergency! Realizing he had little chance of finding the German original in Santa Fe, or, for that matter, anywhere in German-hating America, G brought an announcement over to the Daily Bulletin Office that very afternoon:
WANTED: A BOOK OF A PHILOSOPHER MARTIN HEIDEGGER CALLED APPROXIMATELY “BEING AND TIME” (“SEIN UND ZEIT”?) IF ANYONE OWNS SUCH BOOK, I WOULD APPRECIATE TO BORROW IT FOR A SMALL WHILE. THANK YOU. GEORGE SAMSON.
Next evening, returning from work, he found a note in his mailbox:
I HAVE A COPY OF SEIN UND ZEIT. IT WILL BE MY AMBIVALENT PLEASURE TO PRESENT IT TO YOU AS A GIFT -- IN THE GERMAN SENSE. VICTOR WEISSKOPF.
A curious note, but there it was. Whatever one may say about the Los Alamos community, it did not lack high European culture.
Vicky Weisskopf was an Austrian theoretician, a longtime resident of Germany, who, fleeing the Nazis and the war, had emigrated through Copenhagen (with Bohr), Zurich (with Pauli), and had finally taken up citizenship in the United States, teaching at Rochester and Stanford. In 1943 he was recruited for Site Y by his old friend from Göttingen days, J. Robert Oppenheimer. When Gregor came knocking, he and Ellen invited him in for the book -- and a glass of wine.
“So, my friend, you’ve got the urge for mystical Teutonic death-deviltry?”
“No -- I just got an interesting letter from a woman who recommended the book.”
“Who is that?” asked Ellen.
“Professor Hannah Arendt. Do you know her?”
“Of course we know her,” Weisskopf said. May I see the letter?”
“I have it at home. It was an exchange about Franz Kafka. But she mentioned Sein und Zeit, and I though I would look at it.”
“Well don’t look too hard. What did Nietzsche say? -- “When you look too long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”
“Yes. ‘Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.’ And then that line about the abyss. But what has this to do with Heidegger? Professor Arendt thinks he holds the key to Kafka and to life.”
“To her life, perhaps. Hannah Arendt was his lover.”
“How do you know that?”
“It, as they say, is well-known in German university circles.
“She didn’t mention that.”
“I’m sure.”
Ellen, a Dane without her husband’s immersion in academic politics, took off for the kitchen to prepare a snack. Weisskopf got up to fetch the book.
“Well, there you go. It’s yours. Keep it. Take it away.” He handed the black book over.
“Thank you. What did you mean in your note about it being a gift in the German sense?”
“Gift. Das Gift. Giftig.”
“You mean poison? Poisonous? I thought Kafka was poison.”
“Like unto like.”
“How so?”
“It is not for me to tell you how to understand it. But I can give you some facts. Do you know anything about Herr Martin Heidegger?”
“No. I’ve been away from Europe since 1920.”
“And it’s true these things don’t seem to concern the American press. I understand. That came out in ‘27, I believe. George Placzek brought it to my attention, gave it to me.”
Gregor examined the volume in his hand: Jahrbuch für Philosopie und phänomenologische Forschung, Band VIII.
“I tried to read it several times at the end of the twenties,” Weisskopf continued, “but it was hard, and there wasn’t enough time to really study it. I knew only a little about Heidegger then, but I soon found out more than enough: The man is an absolute Nazi.”
“Why, what...?”
“I was living in Berlin in ‘32 and early ‘33. The bands of brown-shirted students were roaming the streets, beating up Jewish students -- or anybody that looked Jewish. My office looked out on the university courtyard -- a front row seat. The police didn’t interfere, of course, and more than once I had to pull a Jewish student into my office so he could escape through the back door. Heidegger was put up for University Rector, but the faculty resisted. The students took them on -- these same violent Nazi students, clamoring for their man, Heidegger. I’m not sure how many of them knew exactly his politics, but he was a young, radical professor, extremely popular with all those students fed up with academic conservatism. They wanted to ask the big questions, to overthrow traditional thought. Heidegger’s lecture notes were being circulated in mimeograph -- they seemed truly revolutionary. The more the faculty was threatened, the more the students were for him. And he was for them, demanding active participation at all times -- active participation from all militant philosophy students! Discipline. Service. He was actually appointed by the Minister of Education, but he turned it down because of faculty resistance, and took up the rectorship at Freiburg. In May of ‘33 he gave his Inauguration Address -- so important it was printed in the Berliner Tageblatt -- and we knew where things stood.”
“What did he say?”
“I can’t quote you chapter and verse, but it became the bible of Nazi university reform. It was about self-determination of German universities, and need to develop leaders to bring Germany to its spiritual destiny -- the German radical students who were already marching. So-called academic freedom had to be expelled because it was, he thought --- I remember this phrase -- ‘no more than taking it easy, being arbitrary in one’s inclinations, and taking license in everything.’ This is academic freedom! The most extremist students must lead the faculty to discover its real destiny in service to the state. He ended by quoting Plato: ‘All greatness stands firm in the storm...’ The language was Nazi language -- stupid and obsequious, heroic nationalism, the general, empty raving of a party hack in power. This, from the genius author of Sein und Zeit! ”
“What did he do as rector?”
“What did he do? He expelled all the Jews on the teaching staff, he made every faculty member fill out a questionnaire on his racial origins and take an oath about his racial purity, he made the Nazi salute obligatory before and after class, he organized a University Department of Racial Matters directed by the SS, he took all financial subsidy away from Jewish students and gave it to SA and SS militants, he set up mandatory classes on racial theory, on military science, on German culture... Let’s see...What else?”
“Thank you. That’s enough.”
Ellen brought in a plate of crackers and cream cheese, but G was too upset to eat them, and took his leave as soon as was polite, his “gift” trembling in his claw. The mid-January sky showered him with cosmic rays as he made his short way home from Weisskopf’s, placed the questionable book down on the table, and lay down in the straw to think.
For all of Weisskopf’s vehemence, Gregor was still curious. More than curious: he could swear he felt a definite force, pulling him toward the black object on his table. How could he reconcile the two opinions of Weisskopf and Arendt? Vicky was one of the most widely educated Europeans on site, a gentle man of culture, an excellent pianist. She was a major thinker -- he had heard of her. Maybe she was his lover back in her student days, when, in the twenties? Why would she be still so enthusiastic now, after his Rectorship, in the light of his Nazism? He had to at least look between the covers. He opened the book at random: “67. The Basic Content of Dasein’s Existential Constitution, and a Preliminary Sketch of the Temporal Interpretation of it.” Better start at the beginning.
Like Vicky, he found the reading hard, even as a native speaker. It was not just that he had been away from the language for many years, and was superficially rusty. Heidegger’s strategy seemed to involve destroying or digging under, around and through an everyday language which formed a concealing crust over the problem he was pursuing. Gregor decided that on first reading he would skip the parts that were too complex to easily follow. Still, and in spite of the noisy party going on at Fuller Lodge, he was able to make a first beachhead in the difficult terrain. Surprisingly, it was for him the most intense of page-turners.
He read of Heidegger’s fascination with Dasein as an object of investigation which might reveal the nature of Being itself -- not the collection of qualities different beings manifest, not the grammatical convention, the empty copula of “The ball is blue”, but “is-ness” itself -- what “is” is -- behind all manifestation. “Reveal' -- in the way that Arendt had used it -- creating a clearing in the world’s “hiddenness” so that pure Being might be experienced. Dasein seemed for Heidegger a specifically human characteristic, humans -- the being that inquires into Dasein -- but he knew it was broader than that, for it seemed to relate even to him. Dasein, there-being. But where is “there”? In some abstract, German philosophical space? No! There is here, in the world. Dasein was all the possibilities he was in all his relationships with people, objects, events in my everyday world. This seemed potentially rich, perhaps even rewarding. Thank you, Doktor Arendt.
The language was strange, twisted, violently hyphenated as only German can be. There were new, made-up words existing in neither German or English -- like nichten, “to nothing”. He learned that not only he, but everyone, had been “thrown” into the world, so that Dasein was a Geworfenheit, a “thrownness”, into the infinite facets of “thingness” and “factness”, and that because of our deep association with things, and others-as-things, we come not-to-be-ourselves. Gregor’s flesh tingled under his carapace. He read Heidegger’s intense portrayal of Dasein’s self-estrangement in “publicness” in which every kind of spiritual priority is suppressed in a leveling down of sentiment and expression, in which “every secret loses its force” as “something that has long been well-known.” The passivity and even barbarism of the “they”, were just extensions of their everydayness, bearing no moral responsibility and no ethical guilt.
Gregor needed to take a breather from such searing intensity. He took a five minute stroll under the cool sky. The party at the Lodge seemed to be winding down. He thought of the Daseins inside, enveloped in their small-talk, in the prefabricated flux of conventional sentiment and mindless curiosity, indulging in what Heidegger was now characterizing as “inauthentic life”, an inevitable and distinctive component of “being-in-the-world”. He felt distant from them, and in this distance was aware of his Angst -- a repudiation of his Dasein’s “theyness”. Did he need further alienation from his fellow creatures? Nevertheless, the book called to him, and he returned to its perusal, refreshed.
“Inauthenticity” -- bad? No, necessary, Heidegger explained, as if preternaturally commenting on Gregor’s recent thoughts about the Fuller partyers. Alienation was positive because Dasein, when made aware of its loss of self, was motivated to strive to return to authentic being. “Fallenness” into “facticity” was a absolutely necessary precondition for the struggle toward true Dasein, toward repossession of self. It reminded him of the felix culpa of the Christians, Adam’s “happy fall” which set up the ongoing drama of human redemption by God. But here, there was no “God”, only a calling to authenticity.
And then -- there it was -- the term he had been looking for, the condition he had been wanting to know about since reading the letter: Sorge, care. Care seemed to be the relationship between the inauthenticity of being-in-the-world and the striving for Dasein. How tantalizing this was. It seemed it might answer questions that had flitted, ghostly, through his heartmind, never standing long enough to be posed. We feel unheimlich, Heidegger says, “homeless”, “unhoused” in Angst, and Dasein reacts by anchoring into a Dasein-for, Sorge, “care-for”, “concern-for and -with”, a concern for others something like solicitude -- all in moving towards a larger Sorge, a caring-for, an answerability-to Being itself, a Being that transfigures beings. Desire and hope are the reaching out of Care, a reaching out toward freedom. Gregor felt inundated in a newly-discovered reality of his own essence: I care, therefore I am. Care, says Heidegger, is the primordial state of Dasein’s being as it strives towards authenticity.
Years of unadmitted pain seemed to melt away as Gregor reconceived his own story in the bright light of this black-covered volume. This was respite larger than another walk under Orion’s sword, and he plowed on, ecstatic, to Part II, the section on Time, with its central image, the punch-line as it were -- the section on “Being-towards-Death.” His joy-ride came to a screeching halt.
Sein-zum-Tode. Being-towards-Death. According to Heidegger, Dasein can achieve wholeness only when it faces its “no-longer-being-there”, its nicht-mehr-da-sein. There is nothing with more potential for authenticity than one’s own death. No power of “theyness” can take away this fundamental truth -- that all authentic being is a being-toward-its-own-end. Heidegger quotes a medieval homily which Gregor had often heard in Prague: “As soon as man is born, he is old enough to die.” Death is perhaps the identifying phenomenon of life: Dasein cannot “be” without its end.
The they-world is not unaware of this phenomenon, and has created many evasions of authentic death: euphemisms, social taboos, medical optimism and death-talk. Gregor thought of his friends working in the “Gadget Division”, creating a death machine without equal in the history of the world, yet never -- never! --mentioning the word. No Dead Christ realism here! A true being-toward-the-end, says Heidegger, is one which continually tries to keep in focus its own finitude “in an impassioned FREEDOM TOWARD DEATH -- a freedom which has been released from the illusions of the ‘they’” Freedom. Freedom. Gregor had never felt so strongly the chitinous fetters which bound him. Being-towards-death was the absolute condition of freedom.
And here Victor Weisskopf’s voice came to him, in an I-told-you-so aria on Teutonic death-obsession, images of Dr. Lindhorst, the operating room table, Hans Holbein, the Leiermann, the Liebestod. But even within this morbid miasma he still felt the inalienability of his personal death as a profoundly bracing, even liberating, awareness, and in the uncertain glimmer of the end of night, he read about Dasein’s authenticity manifesting in conscience, summons and resoluteness. In resolutely projecting itself forward toward its own free death, Dasein attains its personal and social destiny. The 7:25 siren reoriented him to everyday space and time in all its fallenness. “Oppie has whistled,” as Fermi was wont to say.
**************************
At the 5:30 go-home-for-supper siren, Gregor trudged out of D-Building, the center of plutonium work, bleary-eyed from lack of sleep. Since West Mess was serving steak that night, he thought he’d eat at North Mess, as it would be a lot less crowded -- and head home to hit the sack. He was just raising potatoed fork to mouthparts when the fire siren shrieked and the loudspeaker cried, “FIRE IN THE TECH AREA! FIRE IN THE TECH AREA!”
The North Mess crowd went ashen. It was everyone’s greatest nightmare, an event so potentially catastrophic that all except Gregor -- whose job it was -- had relegated it, like Dasein, to the remotest parts of their minds. There was a rush to the coat racks; people bundled up and ran towards C-Shop where the flames were raging, just inside the Tech Area fence. Frantic MPs were struggling to keep the area clear, while children ran under their linked arms. The Administration Building with all its records was right next to the fire. Would it catch? The fire-fighters seemed to be making little headway. Had there been a wind, the whole town might have gone up in flames. The roof of C-Shop collapsed.
Gregor found himself huddling next to Genia and Gaby Peierls.
“Thank God there’s no wind tonight,” he said.
“All that water doesn’t do bit of good. Perhaps sabotage, you think? Bozhe moy, thank God is not D-Building.”
Though his relationship to the Deity was unclear, Gregor found himself in silent, but fervent Amen.
“Where are the SEDs when we need them?” Gregor wondered aloud.
“Stuck in barracks for goddam infraction of some goddam rule,” Genia answered. “SEDs would be good! Look at the wasting of all that water.”
After more than two hours, the flames flickered and died, and the freezing populace, reeking of smoke, went back to their homes, some chastened by the thought of what might have happened had the nearby plutonium burned, melted and scattered itself on ashes to be breathed.
When Gregor got home, he found a Western Union envelope tacked to his door.
It was good the censors had already gotten to it, as he might have been too tired to open the envelope. The telegram read WARNER CHOCOLATE CAKE RECOMMENDED STOP LEO. He fell asleep with his overcoat on, pondering its meaning.

BACK TO THE OLD WORLD

Thu, 2 Mar 2006 00:00:00 -0500

One of the truly fascinating pieces of history that got cut because it didn’t fit into the dynamic of the book is the story of the baseball player-spy, Moe Berg, and his assignment to assassinate Heisenberg. Another is the actual story of the Alsos project, Sam Goudsmit’s intelligence-gathering operation which definitively determined that there had been no German bomb effort, and which led Szilard to petition for the shutting down of the Manhattan Project. The German bomb was its raison d’être, so if no German bomb...

To narrate them I wanted to put Gregor in the midst of both these activities, but the historical timing was such that I would have had to send him back to Europe and bring him back, when he was so crucially involved at Los Alamos. Bad. Fred’s correct advice was to cut. But here are the fascinating contents. Again, all is true except for the roach.

THE OLD WORLD DIS-COVERED
On hearing the news of the first concentration camp found and freed, Gregor went to sleep. But then he had been up all night. The world also went to sleep -- with less excuse.
Although the Soviets gave it lots of play, the few stories and pictures published in the States had little impact on public opinion. People remained skeptical -- except for those who already knew. The one British report on the camp was widely seen as “a Russian propaganda stunt.” Hitler dismissed the news as an Allied attempt to defame Germany.
In that same summer of ‘44 the Russians overran three other eastern camps: Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. In doing so they actually freed few prisoners since the retreating Germans, fearful of being discovered, were evacuating and destroying the camps as best they could. Perhaps low numbers explain low interest. Also, almost none of the prisoners left behind were Jewish: most Jews had long since been disposed of. These early Russian liberations were mostly of common criminals, communists, gypsies, homosexuals, Seventh-Day Adventists, and political prisoners -- not groups to evoke widespread cries of protest from a war-weary West. Perhaps another reason for small response.
But in my view, the primary reason behind the lethargy was Western reluctance to give the Soviets credit for an accomplishment the Allies had evaded. The camps’ existence had been known in upper circles for almost two years -- there had been no lack of reports. Liberating them, bombing the rail lines which fed them, was not considered militarily important. It was not until the end of the war, while running down an already-defeated Germany, that the Americans and British began to liberate camps. And then the media began to crank. A large current publication of our National Holocaust Museum is called 1945, The Year of Liberation. That the Soviets had already been at it for half a year is almost unmentioned. Maidanek, the first of the camps to be photographed, is not in the table of contents. The cold war was well underway in the middle of the hot one.
Although Americans were reluctant to believe in Nazi death camps, they were quite unskeptical about a Nazi bomb. Hitler and Goebbels kept hinting about a “secret weapon” soon to be completed which would quickly decide the war.
It seemed a brashness of despair. The Germans were on the run. The allies had re-taken Paris at the end of August; Verdun, Dieppe, Artois, Rouen, Abbeville, Antwerp and Brussels in the first week of September . These last were especially important to Project scientists because, unlike the general population, they knew Belgium was a major repository for uranium ores mined from the Belgian Congo -- those very ores about which Einstein wrote the Queen. The Alsos Project was busy tracking down the ores known to have been captured by the Germans.
There was a comical scare (in hindsight) concerning large amounts of thorium, a possible alternative to uranium, which had been moved to Germany. Did this mean the Nazis were developing a thorium bomb, or using thorium to potentiate uranium? After much tense investigation, it was discovered that the shipment was part of a plot -- to corner the post-war market on a toothpaste additive. Brush your teeth with Thoriia -- the scientific toothpaste!
Real evidence concerning the reputed Nazi bomb project was maddeningly elusive. It looked as if “no large military programme is underway for the employment of T.A. products in the near future”, but Groves wanted every last lead nailed down before drawing conclusions -- every ounce of uranium ore recovered, every German lab searched for hints about nuclear piles and possible plutonium production. Epistemological snafu: negative findings were no findings: it was always possible something was missed.
Early in September, the OSS gave Sam Goudsmit, the scientific director of Alsos, a copy of the 1944 course catalogue of the University of Strasbourg, a demonstration school the Nazis had set-up in the occupied city just over the French border. Three nuclear scientists were listed on the faculty, including Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, the one potentially dangerous scientist mentioned by Einstein in his letter to Roosevelt. Groves was alerted. When the French captured Strasbourg on November 24th, Alsos was not far behind, now with one more member on the team: George Samson.
Gregor had been flown to Paris on the 23rd, when the capture of Strasbourg looked imminent, in preparation for the investigation. Groves, too, had an assignment for him, though unlike Oppie’s it wasn’t expected to be fun, nor was it out of concern for G’s health: rather it was to get him out of his greying hair, at least for a while, another Siberia tour, as was Los Alamos itself. G was a native speaker, he reasoned, and thus could pass more easily among suspicious Germans. He was also not a physicist, so that if he were captured, he could provide no technical information to German scientific intelligence. Gregor knew it was a self-serving ploy, but he was ready for a break, and the thought of re-visiting Europe at Army expense was an attractive one.
At a dinner in Paris on the 25th Goudsmit told Gregor and Vannevar Bush of the disappointing cable from Lt. Col. Boris Pash, the FBI-trained security officer in charge of the mission. It seems all the targeted scientists had evacuated in advance of the French. But the next day, following a faint lead, Pash led his men to the Strasbourg hospital where seven nuclear physicists, disguised as medical personnel, were unmasked and captured. A second cable asked the Paris team to come investigate.
It took Gregor and Goudsmit almost a week to make the normally five hour drive from Paris to Strasbourg, given the many icy detours to avoid pockets of fire and sporadic German resistance: the Dutchman swore he’d never ride in a jeep again. The Czech didn’t much like it either. They arrived, exhausted, on December 3rd, to comb through the boxes of documents Pash had seized over several days. That very evening, in the apartment of an absconded physicist, Gregor and Goudsmit, munching K-rations by candlelight (not romantic -- there was no electricity), read through files captured from houses and laboratories. These were not secret scientific documents but simply informal communications between scientists, mixing news about work with family tidings. Gregor found a copy of a letter to “Lieber Werner” -- must be Heisenberg -- about the problem of finding the “special metal” -- must be uranium -- in slabs rather than powdered form, slabs which could be used in “the large furnace” -- must be something like a reactor. But these recent considerations were so basic, so far behind all problems long ago encountered and solved by the Manhattan District. An urgent request to the government for money for “two slide rules” had the physicist and risk manager in stitches.
The details gleaned from these papers led to a clear but astounding conclusion: the Germans had no bomb project! Their elementary work had been entirely focused on the possibility of a reactor, perhaps at some point to power ships, a project to simply achieve “the production of energy from uranium.”
Sufficient unto the day was the joy thereof. At 6 AM, Gregor and Goudsmit collapsed, fully clothed, into twin beds in the dark bedroom recently occupied by the children of the house.
“Sam, said Gregor, as sleep descended, “isn’t it wonderful they have no bomb? Now we can stop with ours.”
Sam was already out, but Gregor imagined how happy he must be. He scanned the murky room and was surprised by a wave of sudden sadness as he focused on the toys. Somewhere there were two children, forced from their home, fleeing an avenging army. He and Sam had stolen their beds, these comfortable beds they must be missing at this very moment. In the faint light, he could make out an electric train, a movie projector, a toy microscope, an aquarium. Had the fish been fed? He got up and looked for a box of food, but could find none. His foot struck the leg of a card table, jostling it, sending a clattering to the floor. Sam stirred and snorted. G felt around in the dark to find a scattering of what felt like medals, cloth and metal constructions with small figures, perhaps playing sports. Little athletes with their rewards. Then one with -- was it? -- it was. A swastika. He held it up against the the dim light of the window, a disheartening silhouette. His sympathy for the children began to wane. And then, how mean, he thought. How many children at Los Alamos have American flags and pictures of Roosevelt in their rooms. What do they know? Gregor was too tired to clean up. “I’ll do it in the morning,” he said out loud to no one, and, under a framed picture of Hitler too dark to make out, he drifted off to insensible sleep.
**************************
Not everyone was as convinced as Gregor, Goudsmit and Pash that the Strasbourg papers guaranteed no German bomb. What if they’d been planted? Now that the general whereabouts of Heisenberg and several other physicists were known, shouldn’t they be tracked down and captured or killed? To keep them from falling into the hands of the Soviet Union, our “ally”? That was the thinking.
Werner Heisenberg was the chief prize, “target number one”. Plans were afoot for a joint Alsos-OSS venture into Switzerland for the rumored occasion of a Zurich lecture by Heisenberg; the object: “to deny the enemy his brain.” Allen Dulles, chief of the OSS office in Bern, was reluctant to upset the diplomatic apple cart, but Groves had been pressing to get Heisenberg since the beginning of the year, and Oppenheimer had asserted he was the one physicist sure to be at the center of any German bomb project. Philip Morrison and several other scientists discussed the kidnapping plan, and while they thought it “operationally interesting”, they considered it ill-advised. That is, if the German bomb was in an advanced stage of development, the theoretician Heisenberg should no longer be crucially important. On the other hand, if he was still crucially important at this stage, the bomb was not a serious threat. But Washington was not interested in such clever reasoning.
Groves was enthusiastic about a man he called “a very reliable and able OSS agent, Moe Berg, the former catcher of the Washington Senators and the Boston Red Sox, and a master of seven foreign languages.” You may recall Charles Ives’ comment about Berg on that June day of 1923 when Gregor took Alice Paul to the Princeton-Yale game at Yankee Stadium: “That Moe Berg is too slow for a shortstop. He should learn to catch.”
Moe Berg did learn to catch -- and one of the challenges thrown at him was an offer to use his Princeton education, and his seven languages, by becoming a spy. In 1943 he was recruited by the OSS (Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor of the CIA). His assignment now was to catch the heavy-hitter of German nuclear physics and take him out, if necessary. He was to attend the Zurich lecture. If Heisenberg said anything indicating the Germans were close to a bomb, he was to shoot him there, on the spot. But he needed help, for while his German was passable, he was far from the “master” Groves believed, with the fluency necessary to make such a portentous and irrevocable decision. Goudsmit and Pash, in consultation with Allen Dulles in Bern, decided Gregor would be the perfect partner to listen between the lines. On December 17, G was taken by jeep from Strasbourg to Basel, and then by civilian car from Basel to Bern for a final briefing with Dulles. He was outfitted in appropriate Swiss clothing, and given his “L” pill -- the lethal tablet he was to chew if necessary. Since cyanide works by inhibiting cellular oxidation, OSS doctors were convinced it would work, even in Gregor’s case. It was heartening -- in a way -- to know they had given him such thought.
Thematic, too. His rendezvous point in Basel had been the main arcade of the Kunstmuseum. Since he had been dropped an hour early, he had decided to briefly inspect its collection. The painting grabbed his eye immediately with its strange shape, the painting Dostoevsky had obsessed about in The Idiot -- Holbein the Younger’s Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb.
There could be no question what it was, even before he was close enough to focus. What other free-standing painting is five feet wide and ten inches high? Gregor turned into the room, and stood before it, appalled. I suggest that any of you who don’t know this work inspect a copy: no mere description can do it justice. It shows the Saviour, dead in a box, freshly dead: the blood not yet pooled, and the thin skin of the face barely suggesting that hypoxic blueness that will shortly engulf the corpse. Rigor mortis and gangrene have not yet set in. One can almost feel the warmth departing. There is no hint of beauty, of transcendence, no spirituality, no supernatural aura, as was commonly represented by painters of the time. This was simply the remnant of a man who had undergone unbearable torment, had been wounded, beaten, tortured, carried his cross and suffered the agony of crucifixion. It had been modeled, according to tradition, after a Jewish corpse fished out of the Rhine. The blank, fishy eyes are rolled up into the head, the mouth hangs limply open as one fingernail catching in the soiled and rumpled sheet, bunched up at its ends, too large for the already cracking coffin.
With the extremity of this work, Holbein was surely illustrating the depth of his faith: that from this unspeakable condition, Christ could rise in glory. But for Dostoevsky, the painting was the ultimate challenge to belief: how could any one seeing such a corpse possibly believe in the central mystery of Christianity -- the Resurrection? There are no onlookers, plunged in sorrow. The holy meat is inconsolably alone. Death is horrible, implacable, and corruption in nature regnant. How could the laws of the world be overcome if even Christ could not conquer them? Here is Dostoevsky’s summary:
Looking at that picture, you get the impression of nature as some immense, merciless, and dumb beast, or to put it more correctly, much more correctly, though it may seem strange, as some huge machine of the most modern construction which, dull and insensible, has clutched, crushed and swallowed up a great, priceless Being worth all nature and its laws, worth the whole earth, which was perhaps created solely for the coming of that Being! The picture sees to give expression to the idea of a dark, insolent, and senselessly eternal power, to which everything is subordinated, and this idea is suggested to you unconsciously. The people surrounding the dead man...must have been overwhelmed by a feeling of terrible anguish and dismay on that evening which had shattered all their hopes and almost all their beliefs at one fell blow. They must have parted in a state of the most dreadful terror, though each of them carried away within him a mighty thought which could never be wrested from him. And if, on the eve of the crucifixion, the Master could have seen what He would look like when taken from the cross, would he have mounted the cross and died as he did? This question too, you can’t help asking yourself as you look at the picture.
Gregor had surely been struck by something similar, for in his copy of The Idiot this passage is double-lined in the margin with his comment “Not just Nature.”
As he walked from Dulles’ office, the L-pill clicking against its container in his trench coat pocket, the Dead Christ floated in front of him. “Cyanotic means blue,” he thought. “Better to leave no body behind.”
**************************
Moe Berg met the train at the Zurich Hauptbahnhof. The signal (each carrying a green book -- Gregor: Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung; Berg: Ernie Pyle’s Here Is Your War. ) was transmitted and received, and the men walked off together into the station for beer and wurst. Their cautious checking-out period was short, since the food reminded Gregor of the first time he had seen Moe Berg at Yale-Princeton time, and Berg was impressed and touched by G’s elephantine memory of the game -- one of his best. Gregor modestly explained his vivid recall: it was his first and only ball game, and his senses were heightened by being on a first date. Berg was sorry the relationship didn’t work out, and thought Gregor’s suggestions about batters running to either first or third would make interesting hyper-baseball worth thinking about. In short, they hit it off quite well. They stayed together that night in Berg’s room at the Engelhof, and didn’t get to sleep till three, though the next day might very well have been their last. But there was much to talk about.
On the morning of the 18th, the two settled on their personae. Berg, with his dark, surly looks, prided himself on being able to fit in anywhere -- Berlin or Tokyo or Morocco.
“I was once walking down the street in Rome,” he told his partner, “when two American soldiers pulled up in a jeep. One guy says, ‘Let’s ask this guinea where the hotel is,’ and I tell him, ‘It’s three blocks up with a green awning. You can’t miss it.’ ‘Where’d that guinea learn to speak such good English?’ he says to the other guy. I said ‘Princeton, class of ‘23,’ and walked away.”
Today Berg decided he would be Ahmad al-Jabiri, an Arab businessman. Gregor settled on Gunther Stoßmann, a Swiss post-doctoral student in biology. For some reason he was set on keeping his initials, perhaps as a memory aid.
Ahmad and Gunther arrived at the Eidgenössische Techniche Hochschule (ETH) small lecture hall on Rämistrasse at ten minutes to four, hung their hats and coats in the anteroom (Gunther traded fedora for beret), and took seats in the second row. Ahmad checked the gun in his right jacket pocket. Gunther checked his L-pill. The room was close to full with twenty or so faculty and graduate students who had come to hear the world’s greatest physicist discuss his recent work on S-matrix theory. Ahmad would have had trouble following such a talk in English, much less German, so he concentrated on identifying the people in the audience, of whom he knew only one from a photograph: Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, recently missing from the University of Strasbourg.
Heisenberg, with two other faculty members, entered the room at 4:10. There was no security of any kind. After struggling to crank up the board, he began to speak from typewritten sheets of paper. Ahmad, always the good student, took copious notes. He was thrilled by actually seeing his target, the man he had been studying for six weeks. “Frail, 5’6”, 110 pounds, reddish-brown hair with a bald spot” he jotted down. “Dark, three-piece suit; wedding ring.” Then, perhaps unnecessary, “artistic hands, heavy eyebrows emphasize bony structure over eyes.” He made a quick sketch with an arrow pointing at the eyes. “Sinister,” he labeled them. Heisenberg seemed to notice his interest. “H. LIKES MY INTEREST IN HIS LECTURE,” he wrote on his pad, and showed it to Gunther, who nodded. “If he only knew what we were doing here,” Ahmad thought. Gunther thought the same thing.
Warming to his work, Heisenberg began pacing back and forth while he spoke, his left hand in his pocket. “Continuous seeming quizzical smile,” Ahmad wrote. Fifteen more minutes. He was approaching the fateful decision point in his assignment. If anyone could build an atomic bomb to drop on his mother, brothers and sister, it was this man here. But there had been no hint, he thought, no mention of a Wunderwaffe, nothing about explosions or a bomb. Another note to Gunther: “AS I LISTEN, I AM UNCERTAIN WHAT TO DO.” Gunther: “HE’S DISCUSSING MATH.” Ahmad: “I KNOW HE’S DISCUSSING MATH. BUT WHAT IS THE MATH ABOUT??” “APPARENTLY ABOUT ELEMENTARY PARTICLE COLLISIONS -- WHAT GOES IN AND WHAT COMES OUT.” “ I HAVEN’T HEARD ANYTHING ABOUT T OR PRODUCT.” “I DON’T THINK IT HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH T OR PRODUCT.” “WHAT IS HE -- DISCUSSING MATH WHILE ROME BURNS?” Gunther nodded.
I won’t bother you with the equations Heisenberg was scribbling on the board. But there are a few things about S-matrix theory which will help you hear the ironic echo of recursive metaphor. Heisenberg’s major creative work during the war was not on a bomb, but on a new, basic theory of such elementary particles as might be produced when a high-energy cosmic ray strikes the earth’s atmosphere or some more solid piece of matter. He was working on the radical notion that these events could be understood only by assuming a universal minimum length, a new fundamental constant in the universe, to limit the possible changes in momentum and energy of colliding particles. Events on this side of the fundamental length could be observed and measured; events on the other side could not. Not ever. Collision, and the transformations themselves, are unobservable events. What goes in and what comes out of the unobservable region he represented by a Scattering Matrix, a table of transformation possibilities, obeying relativity, conservation and symmetry constraints which restricted its array. From his equations, he was able to calculate simple examples of scattering cross-sections and cosmic-ray showers without recourse to the forbidden area of knowledge. He was hoping to replace a possibly futile search for a complete quantum field theory with a likely more productive quest for thorough matrix representation.
Without really being able to follow the formal manipulations, Gregor (not Gunther) felt immediately that he himself was a macro-metaphor of the micro-world under discussion. For surely there was an unknown and unknowable event of transformation, now playing out in sets of possibilities. He tried to construct his own matrix: wound and not-wound, quest and not-quest, bomb and not-bomb, death and not-death. What were the symmetries? What, besides tears and laughter, was conserved? Of one thing he was certain: Heisenberg should not be killed.
“SCRATCH THE PLAN?” he wrote his partner. “WHAT DO YOU THINK?” came back. “I THINK SCRATCH THE PLAN. DEFINITELY.” “YOU’RE PROBABLY RIGHT.” It’s not clear what Moe Berg would have concluded were he alone. Perhaps the same thing, perhaps not. But it is surely true that Gregor was largely responsible for Heisenberg’s survival -- and their own. It was not fear or survival instinct that shaped his conclusion. His considered opinion, reinforced by further research, was that Heisenberg was a loyal German, but an anti-Nazi who, by remaining passive during the war, kept Hitler from thinking a bomb could be built. What now six thousand scientists and staff on the mesa were working for, this one man had accomplished -- at considerably less cost. As they gathered their hats and coats, Ahmad whispered to Gunther. “Can you get Bohr to invite him to Los Alamos?” Gunther said he’d ask when he got back.
They followed the post-lecture group to a dinner at the Kronenhalle, and took a table as close as they could to that of Heisenberg and his friends. The room was noisy, and they couldn’t hear much without attracting attention. They did catch two crucial turns of conversation, marked by the silences which followed: Heisenberg was extremely upset by the news that Erwin Planck, Max Plank’s son, had been arrested and condemned to death for some connection to the July attempt on Hitler’s life . There seemed to be few details. The second was a sentence of Heisenberg’s which was subsequently given much play in Paris, in Los Alamos, in Washington. The din in the room had momentarily quieted, and both Ahmad and Gunther wrote down what they heard: one of the professors at Heisenberg’s table had challenged the master: “Well, now you have to admit that the war is lost.” “Yes,” he conceded, “but it would have been so good if we had won.” More room noise excluded the rest.
“It would have been so good if we had won.” What could he have been thinking of? Who was the “we”? Surely not Hitler, or Heisenberg would have taken a different wartime tack, or been more enthusiastic about punishment for the plotters. Perhaps it was fear of the Russians. But that remark, reported back by Berg and Gregor, was for decades profoundly damaging to Heisenberg’s relationships in the post-war international physics community.
Yet its implication was clear: there surely was no German bomb. For would a man with such a weapon make such a remark? That was the message Berg and Gregor took back to their de-briefings: no bomb, a message which had Groves lavish with praise for the mission. “Without B and G’s report,” he told me later,”I would have probably worked our scientists to death racing to be first.” As if he had ever stopped working them to death.
Death. Death was much on Gregor’s mind as he waited at the Zurich airport for a flight to Paris and back to the States. Several hours earlier, he had debated whether or not to return the L-pill. The decision was made when Dulles took it from him at the de-briefing. What would he have used it for, he wondered. The gaunt bearded man sitting across the way reminded him of the Holbein Christ. Yet how dignified he was. Death and dignity. Perhaps there was some sphere of interaction there, with dignity emerging from the unobservable region as a byproduct of annihilation. But how is it possible for God to die? For Jews, never. God is the microstructure of the world. But Christ? Christly sacrifice? “Take, eat, this is my body.” Providing food so that others might live. That death is neither murder nor disappearance but some life-giving discontinuity, a break in the curve closer to nutrition than destruction. The only rite Christ left to his disciples was the Eucharist, an acceptable and accepted gift. And if we had killed Heisenberg and then ourselves? Who would have been the victim? Or would it have been a saving, mediating “offering”?
A fundamentally necessary, beneficent discontinuity in the curve -- a mangod appears on earth for the first time, or an insectman -- there must be discontinuity, or we arrive where we are headed. A discontinuity, the old making way for the new, a life-giving severance, a slight flaw, like that crack in the coffin, opening out into escape. Yet the coffin was a place to hide after all the work and suffering which had preceded, after all the work and suffering that was to follow. We all need a vacation -- away from prying eyes. I don’t want to escape.
And what would Kafka say? Probably something like “From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.”
As he waited for the plane, he felt like he was in an old, old country in an old, old world.

ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT

Wed, 22 Feb 2006 20:15:41 -0500

Did you know that FDR was almost assassinated? Here’s the story (it’s all true, except for the six-foot talking cockroach), dug out of our American memory hole. It’s one of the many things I learned, researching Insect Dreams.
SURREALPOLITIK

The roach was tireless. He slaved away with an ardor and diligence available only to those with giant neurons and double ganglia. By Election Day, 1932, working full time and more, he had assembled a seven volume dossier on Mr. Hoover: every damning phrase and paragraph from every article in every newspaper and magazine across the land -- including his own words, so easily used against him. It was not yet our sleazy age of negative campaigning, focusing voter attention on sensational, irrelevant distractions. No, G’s research was solid history, economics, politics and sociology. It spoke truth about power to a population presumed intelligent. Tugwell and Moley and Berle spun this material out to the public -- again not in the current debased sense of “spin”, but carefully, logically, teachers that they were -- until the President was definitively snared in his own undoing.
Roosevelt 42 states, Hoover 6. Electoral College: 472 to 59. It is true that almost any Democrat could have beaten Hoover, he of the “Hoovervilles”, so frustrated and irate were the American masses. But the landslide was enough to give one pause. So much faith sits uneasily on any mere human being.
Yet FDR was at ease, apparently confident, during this most uneasy winter. Farmers brandished rifles when the tax men came to foreclose; apple sellers crowded the streets, but how many apples could “the common man” eat? People were hungry, marriage was rare, bank accounts were overdrawn. And on Roosevelt’s 51st birthday, January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany.
FDR, tanned and relaxed from a twelve day cruise, disembarked at Miami, the day after Valentine’s, the day after all Michigan banks closed down by order of the governor. On the Ides of February, he rode in an open car to greet a crowd of 20,000 supporters at Bay Front Park. He rode in a light blue Buick convertible, along with Raymond Moley, who had come down to Miami to report on the Cabinet search, and with Gregor Samsa, who had been rewarded for his Herculean labors with a Caribbean cruise on the Nourmahal.
Gregor Samsa on Vincent Astor’s yacht. Now there’s an image to ponder! This child of the Jewish quarter of Prague, this circus freak, this erstwhile elevator boy and dumpster diver, this toiler in the innards of insurance. What a rise was there, my countrymen.
Seated in an open car, driving along a dark street on the way to the park, Moley remarked to his companions how easy an assassination would be. But FDR was fearless. “I remember T.R. telling me me that the only real danger is from a man who does not fear losing his own life. Most of the crazy ones can be spotted first.”
In the crowded, well-lit park, shortly after nine, Moley and Gregor hoisted the President-elect up on top of the back seat, where he could be seen. Roosevelt spoke entertainingly for two minutes to much laughter and applause, then lowered himself into the seat of the car to greet Mayor Anton Cermak of Chicago, who was visiting his father in Miami.
Then, a popping in the air. Roosevelt thought it a firecracker, Moley a backfire. Gregor was the first to spot a short, swarthy man, standing on a rickety folding chair twenty feet away emptying a revolver in the direction of the President-to-be. After the first shot, a nearby woman grabbed his arm, and subsequent bullets made their wild ways through the crowd. The gunman was tackled and subdued by bystanders and Park Police while Secret Service men bulled their way toward the center of the violence. “I’m all right! I’m all right,” Roosevelt yelled. But Mayor Cermak was not all right, nor were four others. The mayor’s shirt was covered in red, and blood streamed from from lung to mouth. Secret Service shouted frantically for the car to evacuate, but FDR ordered the driver to stop so the mayor’s body could be lifted into this, the first vehicle which would be free of the crowd. He tried to find a pulse as Cermak slumped forward. “I’m afraid he’s not going to last,” he whispered to G, as the car made for Jackson Memorial Hospital. The man from Hyde Park coached his friend from Chicago: “Tony, keep quiet -- don’t move. It won’t hurt if you don’t move.” “I’m glad it was me and not you,” the mayor gasped. It’s true. Gregor was there. There is honor even among politicians.
In the ER waiting room, Moley approached Gregor. “I think it would be good for you to visit our would-be assassin. Find out if he acted alone or if there are others. Get back to the railroad car by 11:30.”
Armed with a hand-written note from Roosevelt, G took a cab back to the park and made his way to the 21st floor of the Dade County Courthouse, overlooking the scene of the crime. There, surrounded by Secret Service, was an unemployed bricklayer, one Giuseppe Zangara, 33, come to the United States ten years earlier aboard the steamer Martha Washington. So much was Gregor told. He went into the cell, and asked to be left alone with the prisoner. Secret Service reluctantly retreated. G could repeat the conversation almost verbatim.
“Hello, Mr. Zangara. I am Gregor Samsa, a friend of Mr. Roosevelt.”
“I am friend of nobody.”
“Mr. Roosevelt wants you to know he is all right.”
“Too bad. I am better kill him. Too crowded. Too much crowds.”
“Why do you want to kill him?”
“Because rich people make me suffer and do this to me.”
He lifted his shirt to show G a large, keloid scar on his flank and abdomen.
“Rich people make me to go out from school,” he continued. “Two months I am in school and my father come and take me out and say ‘You don’t need no school. You need to work.’ Six years old, he take me out of school. Lawyers ought to punish him -- that’s the trouble -- he send me to school and I don’t have this trouble. Government!”
“Do you hate the government?”
“Yes,” he answered, through clenched teeth. “Because rich people make me suffer and do this stomach pain to me.”
“The rich men make you suffer?”
“Yes, since they sent me to work in a big job.” He clutched his abdomen and groaned.
“Your belly hurts?”
“Because when I did tile work it hurt me there. It all spoil my machinery, all my insides. Everything inside no good.”
Zangara was barely five feet tall. At sixteen, he left home to carry a gun in the army. He had come to the conclusion that the real causes of exploitation -- and of his constant stomach pain -- were political leaders. He was going to kill King Victor Emmanuel, but he never got the chance. So he came with his uncle to America. He joined a union, and saved his money. In the prosperous twenties, he sometimes made $14 a day. Then his uncle decided to marry, and Giuseppe had to move out of the apartment they shared. From that time on, he lived in complete isolation, an angry hermit who took no part in the Italian community around him. A stranger to wine, women or song, his whole life revolved around his stomach pain.
When the depression struck, he took his savings and travelled from city to city with no clear goal. He wound up in Hackensack, N.J. where he lived in one $10 a month room and rented the room next door to prevent anyone from living near him. For the winter he moved to Miami.
By February, 1933, he had less than a hundred dollars to his name, and his stomach was pure agony. He decided he was going to get even, and kill Herbert Hoover.
“I kill that no good capitalist,” he told Gregor. “He make the depression. He make unemployment and the soup lines. He make burning in my stomach.”
“But Mr. Roosevelt works against Herbert Hoover. He is your friend.”
“Hoover and Roosevelt -- everybody the same. Hoover too far. Washington too far. I have only $43 dollars.”
“So Mr. Roosevelt came right to you, to Miami.”
“I read in the paper he is coming, and I don’t must go to Washington. I make Roosevelt suffer. I want to make it fifty-fifty since my stomach hurt I get even with capitalists by kill the President. My stomach hurt long time.”
Gregor was dealing with a nut case. This man could only act alone. Who would act with him? G probed a possible insanity defense.
“Did you know what you were doing when you shot at Mr. Roosevelt?”
“Sure I know. You think I am crazy? I gonna kill president. I no care. I sick all time. I think maybe cops kill me if I kill President. I take picture of President in my pocket. I no want to shoot Cermak, just Roosevelt. I aim at him, I shoot him. But somebody move my arm. Every American people mistreats me. You give me electric chair. I’m no afraid that chair. You’re one of capitalists. You is crook man too. Put me in electric chair, I no care.”
At the time of the interview, Zangara was charged only with four counts of assault with a deadly weapon. But three weeks later, when Mayor Cermak died, the charge was changed to first degree murder. Only thirty three days after the event, the wiry Italian got his wish. Strapped down in “Ol’ Sparky” at the Florida State Penitentiary, he railed at the observers, “Lousy capitalists -- go ahead, push the button.” They did.
On the train, Gregor reported his interview to a much-relieved Brains Trust. The President-elect was quite moved to hear, “I no hate Mr. Roosevelt personally. I like him, but I hate all presidents, no matter from which country, and I hate all officials and everyone who is rich.”
“Do you think this was a political act?” Moley asked the roach.
“He said he thought anarchism, socialism, communism and fascism were stupid. Also religion, God, Jesus, heaven, hell and any thought of soul. When I asked him if he believed anything he read, he said, “I don’t believe in nothing. I don’t believe in reading books because I don’t think and I don’t like it. I got everything in my mind.
“Did you get any sense about what he did believe?” Roosevelt asked.
“I asked him that. You know what he said?”
“What?”
“The land, the sky, the moon.”
The men and the roach sat in silence. Beyond the ticking telegraph poles, the moon shown full on the track back to Washington.