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WOMAN AND NATURE -- THE ROARING INSIDE HER |
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BOOK TWO: SEPARATION -- The Separations in His Vision and Under His Rule
I felt a Cleaving in my Mind --
The thought behind, I strove to
join -- EMILY DICKINSON, 1896 Separation I begin to sing of rich-haired Demeter, awful goddess -- of her and her trim-ankled daughter whom Aidoneus rapt away, given to him by all-seeing Zeus, the loud-thunderer. -- Homeric Hymn to Demeter Her womb from her body. Separation. Her clitoris from her vulva. Cleaving. Desire from her body. We were told that bodies rising to heaven lose their vulvas, their ovaries, wombs, that her body in resurrection becomes a male body. The Divine Image from woman, severing, immortality from the garden, exile, the golden calf split, birth, sorrow, suffering. We were told that the blood of a woman after childbirth conveys uncleanness. That if a woman's uterus is detached and falls to the ground, that she is unclean. Her body from the sacred. Spirit from flesh. We were told that if a woman has an issue and that issue in her flesh be blood, she shall be impure for seven days. The impure from the pure. The defiled from the holy. And whoever touches her, we heard, was also impure. Spirit from matter. And we were told that if our garments are stained we are unclean back to the time we can remember seeing our garments unstained, that we must rub seven substances over these stains, and immerse our soiled garments. Separation. The clean from the unclean. The decaying, the putrid, the polluted, the fetid, the eroded, waste, defecation, from the unchanging. The changing from the sacred. We heard it spoken that if a grave is plowed up in a field so that the bones of the dead are lost in the soil of the field, this soil conveys uncleanness. That if a member is severed from a corpse, this too conveys uncleanness, even an olive pit's bulk of flesh. That if marrow is left in a bone there is uncleanness. And of the place where we gathered to weep near the graveyard, we heard that planting and sowing were forbidden since our grieving may have tempted unclean flesh to the soil. And we learned that the dead body must be separated from the city. Death from the city. Wilderness from the city. Wildness from the city. The Cemetery. The Garden. The Zoological Garden. We were told that a wolf circled the walls of the city. That he ate little children. That he ate women. That he lured us away from the city with his tricks. That he was a seducer and he feasted on the flesh of the foolish, and the blood of the errant and sinful stained the snow under his jaws. The errant from the city. The ghetto. The ghetto of Jews. The ghetto of Moors. The quarter of prostitutes. The ghetto of blacks. The neighborhood of lesbians. The prison. The witch house. The underworld. The underground. The sewer. Space Divided. The inch. The foot. The mile. The boundary. The border. The nation. The promised land. The chosen ones. The prophets, the elect, the vanguard, the sanctified, the canonized, and the canonizers. We were told that when he tried to rape her, she said, "No, it is against God's wishes." That although she was stabbed fourteen times, she did not raise her hands to stop him, but only to prevent her defilement. That she forgave him afterward. That her mother forgave him. We were told that because of these acts she was blessed, that we were to look on her as a saint. Anger from her body. Intellect from her body. Separation. Interrogation. Purification. The test by fire. Space Divided: Heaven from hell. Time Divided: Mortality from immortality. Cataclysm. The last judgment. Judgment from emotion, from sensation. Sensation from idea. The sensation of color from the ray of light. Optics. Music from the sound wave. Acoustics. The laws of nature from nature. The lasting from the transient. The story came down to us that he feared she might conceive a son and that this son might depose him. The immutable from the mutable. Res extensa. Res cogitans. Splitting. Reduction. Sensual fact peeled away from number. Number. Measurement. The measured from the immeasurable. Quantity from the cave of illusions. The mind from the body. Thus we heard that he coaxed her to him and then he opened his mouth and swallowed her whole, that he was then seized with a raging headache, that his skull seemed to burst, that from his skull was born a daughter in his image, wielding a sword and shouting. Her will from her body. The knower from the known. The speaker from the mute. Self from self. From the nocturnal. From the nightmare. Discovery from dream. Her will from her body. We were told in a story that he pursued her. That she fled from him. She fled into the water. She became a fish. He became a beaver. She leaped ashore. She became an otter, a pig, a fox, a mare, a lion. He became a lynx, a bear, a wolf, an elk, a tiger. She became a goose. He became a swan. That he forced her to his will and she bore his daughter. Her name from her daughter. The named from the unnamed. The spoken from the spoken. The daughter from the mother. Somewhere we heard the story that she who made the earth yield, the seed grow, had her daughter taken from her. We heard that one day when her daughter was playing in the fields the earth separated and that from this gaping crevice sprang her abductor. That she dreaded him. That not knowing he had blessed this event, she cried out for help from her father. That not knowing one nearby could hear from her cave, she cried out rape. That wishing for her mother she cried out again and again and her voice rang against mountains and across seas until it reached her mother's ears. Cleaving. The part from the whole. The reduction of the element from the compound. Nitrogen from liquid air by boiling. Oxygen from air by boiling. Hydrogen from water by electric current, by steam passed over hot carbon. We knew from this story that her mother was seized with pain when she heard her daughter's cry. It occurs to us that she must have felt herself rent apart. That she flew like a wild bird, we were told, over land and sea, asking what had happened to her daughter. That no one would tell her the truth. Carbon dioxide separated from limestone by heat. Iodine oxidized from sea water, bromide oxidized from sea water, chlorine from the electrolysis of salt, fluorine from the electrolysis of salt. We remembered that finally she met one who had heard her daughter's cry. That together they searched for her, that together they carried torches, that they learned the story together of her daughter's rape, that the sunlight told them she was lost to her mother. That her mother became bitter, we knew, that she was unforgiving, that she left herself, that she lived in the body of an old woman, in the body of a housekeeper, and played the part of a nurse. (That she cared for the son of a king, while she shaped the body of this boy over her fires into immortality.) That finally she revealed herself in rage. But that though she demanded to be recognized for who she was, no recognition would appease her. That she remembered her daughter, the soft hair down her spine. Her daughter's voice. Her terror. And that she could do nothing to save her. She ate nothing. She drank nothing. She refused existence. She was mute. She withheld herself. She was numb. And the earth would not yield, and the seed would not sprout. The land was devastated and the sea shrank into itself in an agony of loss and the sky was black with dread. Silver from lead. Copper. Gold. Silicon from sand, quartz, rock, crystal, potassium from sylvite, carnalite, langbeinite from ancient sea beds, platinum from iridium, osmium, palladium from alluvial deposits, manganese from oxide, silicates and carbonates from the floor of the oceans, plutonium from uranium, uranium from pitchblende, uraninite, carnotite, phosphate rock. Loss. Grief. Parting. The gentle from the terrible. Suffering from knowledge. Separation. Tearing away. Breaking. The skin of the sea otter we were told from the sea otter that the world would be tested by fire, the tusk of the elephant that souls would be weighed from the elephant and judged according to a balance sheet the pelt of each life of the fox from the fox that there is a book the feather of the egret in which everything has been inscribed from the egret, the weed that the risen will wear this book around their necks as a passport from the flower, the metal from the mountain, uranium from the metal, plutonium from uranium, the electron from the atom, the atom splitting, energy from matter, the womb, spirit, from her body, from matter, cataclysm, splitting, the chromosome split, spirit burned from flesh, desire devastated from the earth. The Image SPANISH DANCER (oil, cardboard) We testify WOMAN AND CHILD (ink, chalk, paper) that we were called woman. WOMAN IN WHITE MANTILLA (oil, canvas) We were called woman STANDING NUDE WITH RAISED ARMS (gouache) and we were called nature HEAD OF A WOMAN (sepia wash) and we were the objects HEAD (oil, canvas) THE DRESSING TABLE (oil, canvas) BOTTLE OF RUM (oil, canvas) of his art. LANDSCAPE (oil, canvas) STILL LIFE (oil, canvas) THE MODEL (oil, canvas) WOMAN IN AN ARMCHAIR (gouache, watercolor) TABLE IN FRONT OF AN OPEN WINDOW (gouache, watercolor) WOMAN WITH FAN (oil, canvas) TWO NUDES (gouache, pencil) STILL LIFE (oil) We were the objects SEATED DANCER WOMAN AT THE BEACH MOTHER AND CHILD HEAD OF A WOMAN MATERNITY SEATED NUDE THREE NUDES of his art Mata Hari (her navel is like a round goblet) Salome (always filled) Delilah (her belly like a heap of wheat) Eve (surrounded by lilies) Lolita (her breasts like two young roes) and these were the names Helen of Troy (her eyes) Guinevere (like fish pools) we were given Clytemnestra (the joints of her thighs) the Sirens (like jewels). The Sirens We say (She was a Phantom) these were the names (of delight) we were given, Annabel Lee (a lovely apparition sent) We say these were the stories La Belle Dame Sans Merci of our lives. (To be a moment's ornament) We were called Miss Prue and Pamela and Dora, old bag, old bawd, Potiphar's wife and Hera, the nagging wife of Zeus (my wife with the hourglass waist) we were called Lilith and the Daughters of Zion, Jezebel and Madame Flaubert and the nagging wife of Socrates (with the wait of an otter in tiger's jaws) and bitch and crone and cunt and the Lady of the Lake (with eyelashes like strokes of childish writing) and the nagging wife of Abraham Lincoln and we were called Justine, we were called Lady Brett Ashley, we were called The False Duessa, harlot, heifer, mare and the nagging wife (my wife with the matchstick wrists) of Rip Van Winkle (whose neck is pearl barley) we were called quail, slattern and Lady Macbeth (whose throat is a golden dale) we were called shrew, we were called sow, we were called vixen (with the springtime buttocks, and sex of seaweed and stale sweets, with mirror sex, with eyes of wood always under the ax). *** We say we were
called woman WOMAN SLEEPING we were called good *** WOMAN Marriage Dearly beloved, you have come here to be united into this holy estate We are the empty vessel it behooveth you, then, to declare, in the presence of God and these witnesses we are the body the flesh the sincere intent you both have. We are one with him Who giveth this woman to be married to this man? and he is the one. Wilt thou have this man to be thy wedded husband We bear his name to live with him after God's ordinance in the holy state of matrimony? His knowledge is our knowledge, what he asks of us we give. Matter impressed. We are the background, the body, we receive. Matter impressed with heat. The enlarging of the molecule. The polymerization of material. The desirable flexibility. The formation of plastic. We have heard the story of the foolish virgins who were not always waiting for the bridegrooms. We wait. The making of plasticity. The material molded to desire. The synthesis of polyamide. The coupling of hexamethylene diamine with adipic acid. Nylon. We have heard the story of Zeus's mother, of how she forbade marriage to Zeus, of how she feared the violence of his lust. The material shaped. Of how Zeus raped his mother. Phenol mixed with formaldehyde. We comply. Bakelite. The material shaped at will. Ethylene reacting with chlorine. Polyvinyl chloride. Polystyrene. Plexiglass. Polythene. Polythylene. We know that after Zeus married Hera he angered her with infidelity. And we heard that after she rebelled against him he hung her from the sky, putting golden bracelets around her wrists and anvils about her ankles. The material easily shaped. We obey. Artificial rubber. Artificial wood. Artificial leather. Easily used. Teflon. Silicone. Corfam. Malleable. Cellophane. Polyurethane foam. Mutable. Glass fiber resins. Bent to use. DDT 24-D. Ammonic detergent. We have heard the story of Daphne. That she did not want to marry. That when Apollo pursued her, she fled. That when he seized her, she would not yield and she called out for help to her father, and that her father changed her to a laurel tree. And we heard that after this Apollo told her, "Your leaf shall know no decay. You shall always be as you are now, and I shall wear you for my crown." Benzene. Hexachloride. We yield. Dichlorobenzene solvents. Polypropylene plastics. Design. The formation of the earth in strata. The convenient stratification of the elements. The utility of the complexities of the earth. The convenience of resources. The availability of treasure. We were told that we exist for his needs, that we are a necessity. Mineral salt. Coal. Metallic ores. That it is in our nature to be needed. The production of soil for agriculture. The general dispersal of metals useful to man. The disposition of certain animals for domestication. The provision of food and raiment by plants and animals. The size of animals in relation to man. The convenience of the size of goats for milking. The convenience of the size of ripened corn. The value of labor. The labor theory of value. Her labor married to his value. We were told that Zeus swallowed Metis whole Her labor that from his belly disappearing she gave him advice. Her labor not counted in his production. We are the empty vessel, the background, the body. His name given to her labor. The wife of the laborer called working class. The wife of the shopkeeper called petit bourgeois. The wife of the factory owner called bourgeois. We were told that since it is in our nature to be needed wilt thou love him, comfort him, honor him, obey him that his need is our need and keep him in sickness and in health and that his happiness is our happiness and forsaking all others, keep thee only to him in all things, so long as you both shall live? And if we should suffer at his hands In the presence of God and these witnesses. I take thee we must have wished for this suffering to be my wedded husband that his sins are our sins and plight thee my troth that without him, we are not till death do us part. The Hunt Is it by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation when beholding the milky way? -- HERMAN MELVILLE, Moby Dick And at last she could bear the burden of herself no more. She was to be had for the taking, To be had for the taking. -- D. H. LAWRENCE, Lady Chatterley's Lover She has captured his heart. She has overcome him. He cannot tear his eyes away. He is burning with passion. He cannot live without her. He pursues her. She makes him pursue her. The faster she runs, the stronger his desire. He will overtake her. He will make her his own. He will have her. (The boy chases the doe and her yearling for nearly two hours. She keeps running despite her wounds. He pursues her through pastures, over fences, groves of trees, crossing the road, up hills, volleys of rifle shots sounding, until perhaps twenty bullets are embedded in her body.) She has no mercy. She has dressed to excite his desire. She has no scruples. She has painted herself for him. She makes supple movements to entice him. She is without a soul. Beneath her painted face is flesh, are bones. She reveals only part of herself to him. She is wild. She flees whenever he approaches. She is teasing him. (Finally, she is defeated and falls and he sees that half of her head has been blown off, that one leg is gone, her abdomen split from her tail to her head, and her organs hang outside her body. Then four men encircle the fawn and harvest her too.) He is an easy target, he says. He says he is pierced. Love has shot him through, he says. He is a familiar mark. Riddled. Stripped to the bone. He is conquered, he says. (The boys, fond of hunting hare, search in particular for pregnant females.) He is fighting for his life. He faces annihilation in her, he says. He is losing himself to her, he says. Now, he must conquer her wildness, he says, he must tame her before she drives him wild, he says. (Once catching their prey, they step on her back, breaking it, and they call this "dancing on the hare.") Thus he goes on his knees to her. Thus he wins her over, he tells her he wants her. He makes her his own. He encloses her. He encircles her. He puts her under lock and key. He protects her. (Approaching the great mammals, the hunters make little sounds which they know will make the elephants form a defensive circle.) And once she is his, he prizes his delight. He feasts his eyes on her. He adorns her luxuriantly. He gives her ivory. He gives her perfume. (The older matriarchs stand to the outside of the circle to protect the calves and younger mothers.) He covers her with the skins of mink, beaver, muskrat, seal, raccoon, otter, ermine, fox, the feathers of ostriches, osprey, egret, ibis. (The hunters then encircle that circle and fire first into the bodies of the matriarchs. When these older elephants fall, the younger panic, yet unwilling to leave the bodies of their dead mothers, they make easy targets.) And thus he makes her soft. He makes her calm. He makes her grateful to him. He has tamed her, he says. She is content to be his, he says. (In the winter, if a single wolf has leaped over the walls of the city and terrorized the streets, the hunters go out in a band to rid the forest of the whole pack.) Her voice is now soothing to him. Her eyes no longer blaze, but look on him serenely. When he calls to her, she gives herself to him. Her ferocity lies under him. (The body of the great whale is strapped with explosives.) Now nothing of the old beast remains in her. (Eastern Bison, extinct 1825; Spectacled Cormorant, extinct 1852; Cape Lion, extinct 1865; Bonin Night Heron, extinct 1889; Barbary Lion, extinct 1922; Great Auk, extinct 1944.) And he can trust her wholly with himself. So he is blazing when he enters her, and she is consumed. (Florida Key Deer, vanishing; Wild Indian Buffalo, vanishing; Great Sable Antelope, vanishing.) Because she is his, she offers no resistance. She is a place of rest for him. A place of his making. And when his flesh begins to yield and his skin melts into her, he becomes soft, and he is without fear; he does not lose himself; though something in him gives way, he is not lost in her, because she is his now: he has captured her. The Zoological Garden
Wild, wild things will turn on you -- CRIS WILLIAMSON, "Wild Things" In the cage is the lion. She paces with her memories. Her body is a record of her past. As she moves back and forth, one may see it all: the lean frame, the muscular legs, the paw enclosing long sharp claws, the astonishing speed of her response. She was born in this garden. She has never in her life stretched those legs. Never darted farther than twenty yards at a time. Only once did she use her claws. Only once did she feel them sink into flesh. And it was her keeper's flesh. Her keeper whom she loves, who feeds her, who would never dream of harming her, who protects her. Who in his mercy forgave her mad attack, saying this was in her nature, to be cruel at a whim, to try to kill what she loves. He had come into her cage as he usually did early in the morning to change her water, always at the same time of day, in the same manner, speaking softly to her, careful to make no sudden movement, keeping his distance, when suddenly she sank down, deep down into herself, the way wild animals do before they spring, and then she had risen on all her strong legs, and swiped him in one long, powerful, graceful movement across the arm. How lucky for her he survived the blow. The keeper and his friends shot her with a gun to make her sleep. Through her half-open lids she knew they made movements around her. They fed her with tubes. They observed her. They wrote comments in notebooks. And finally they rendered a judgment. She was normal. She was a normal wild beast, whose power is dangerous, whose anger can kill, they had said. Be more careful of her, they advised. Allow her less excitement. Perhaps let her exercise more. She understood none of this. She understood only the look of fear in her keeper's eyes. And now she paces. Paces as if she were angry, as if she were on the edge of frenzy. The spectators imagine she is going through the movements of the hunt, or that she is readying her body for survival. But she knows no life outside the garden. She has no notion of anger over what she could have been, or might be. No idea of rebellion. It is only her body that knows of these things, moving her, daily, hourly, back and forth, back and forth, before the bars of her cage. The Garden And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.... Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken. So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life. -- GENESIS 3:12, 23, 24 She was in the garden, sequestered behind bushes, as night came, just as the other children were called in, and so she stayed quiet, she said, as a mouse, so that she could be out there alone. And when the cries of the others had gone indoors, in this new silence she began to hear the movements of birds. So she stayed still and watched them. Then she felt, she said, the earth beneath her feet coming closer to her. And she began to play with the berries and the plants and finally to whisper to the birds. And the birds, she said afterward, whispered to her. And thus when, hearing her mother's frightened voice, she appeared finally from the dark tangle of trees and shrubs, her face was so radiant that her mother, amazed to see this new joy in her daughter, did not tell her then what she knew she would soon have to say. That those bushes her daughter hid behind can also hide strangers, that for her shadows speak danger, that in such places little girls must be afraid. HIS VIGILANCE (HOW HE MUST KEEP WATCH) Space Divided Bring out number, weight and measure in a year of dearth. -- WILLIAM BLAKE, The proverbs of Hell Miletus initiated the practice of the mathematical "plat," based not on a topographical reality but on numerical configurations. -- SIBYL MOHOLY-NAGY, Matrix of Man The mile. The acre. The inch and the foot. The gallon and the ton. The upper and lower, left and right, side, front, back, under, ante, post. The large and the small. Number and name. Perimeter. Classification. Separation. Shape. *** Space Divided. *** The Mile. As in thirty miles north of Oklahoma City (is a plant for the manufacture of plutonium) or six miles west of St. Louis (is the St. Louis Public Zoo) or one mile and a half north of Soledad (lies the Central Facility for Soledad State Prison) or two hundred miles southwest of Berlin (in the district of Bamberg, there once existed a house for the trying of witches) or six miles west of the city of Corona (is the California Institution for Women) or two miles south of Napa (is Napa State Hospital for the mentally ill). *** Space. The Acre. For example, 500,000 acres (of the Ozarks have been sprayed with herbicide) or 936 acres (comprise the central facility at Soledad) or 199 acres (are in the California Institute for Women) or 81 acres (are part of the St. Louis Zoo). *** Space. The Inch and the Foot. Divided. As in eight foot long (pencil-thin metal rods are used to store the plutonium) or thirteen feet by seven feet by nine feet (is judged the proper size for a cell used for continual separation and solitary confinement) or fourteen to eighteen inches (should be the thickness of the walls dividing cells) or eighteen inches (of stone should separate the cell from the corridor) or five thousand square feet (is the size of a pool accommodating several seals and one sea elephant) or fourteen thousand square feet (are allotted for the primate house) or thirty feet (are needed to widen the public ramp for the lion show). *** Divided. The Gallon. The Ton. As in a million and one half gallons (of 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid and 2,4,5-tetrachlorophenoxyacetic acid are stored on Johnston Island) or forty thousand tons (of 2,4,5-tetrachlorophenoxyacetic acid were dropped over the Vietnamese countryside) or tons (of toolproof steel were used in the construction of Sing Sing Prison). *** Divided. Upper and Lower. At the Side. Under. Left and Right. Ante. Space. As in upper and lower (chapels were in the two-story building) or at the side (was an outbuilding which was the torture chamber) or under (the building ran a stream used for test by immersion) or to the right (of the entrance hall was the warder's room) or to the left and right (of the corridor leading to the chapel opened eight separate cells) or to the right (are cell blocks and shops for hardened criminals who will not leave their quarters) or on the left (is the hospital for the abnormal) or antechambers (for the judges adjoined the chapel) or on the upper story (are cages for lions) or on the lower (are rest rooms for the public) or to the left (of the hospital was the death house). *** Space Divided, as in Large and Small. The largest of three (arenas is the chimpanzee show) or the small (mammal house) or a small (room on the upper story called the confession chamber). *** Divided. Name. Number. As in the name Hexenhaus (House of the Witches) or the number eighteen (cells and a room for a warder) or twenty-six (witches could be held in the house at any one time). Divided by Perimeters and Classifications, such as a twelve-foot-high chain-link fence (secured at the bottom to a concrete curb and topped by three strands of barbed wire, with ten armed guard towers, lined in two parallel rows of five) or such as four classes of inmates (900 average, 150 a disciplinary group, 150 defective or abnormal, 400 an honor group) or such as the three classes of animals (Reptiles, Birds, Mammals) or the three classes of structures needing remodeling (by priority: First Priority, aviary, lion house, seal basin, west parking lot, east refreshment pavilion, et cetera; Second Priority, reptile house, small mammal house, et cetera; Third Priority, primate house, lion show, and so forth). *** Space Divided by Separations, as in separate corridors (are provided for the guards and the prisoners) or each floor is separated from the other floor, or there are eight separate cell blocks, or the dining room has two separate entrances (so that the classes of inmates may be kept separate) or there are several separate cottages (a cottage for colored girls, a cottage for the younger girls, a cottage for older women, a cottage for women on the honor role, a cottage for women being disciplined, a cottage for the incorrigible), or as in separation is enforced (in the Auburn system by a rule of silence, and because the inmates must keep their eyes downward and walk in lock step). *** And finally, the Divisions of Space are seen as Shapes, such as an elliptical arc (forms the outside wall of the upper and lower chapel in the Hexenhaus) or a square (the shape of the lion house) or a circle (the shape for a prison in which there may be constant surveillance from the center) or such as the rectangular shape of a cell. Or the shape of a measuring rod. Time Divided The very words from which she will get into the way of forming sentences should not be taken at haphazard but be definitely chosen and arranged on purpose. For example, let her have the names of the prophets and the apostles, and the whole list of patriarchs from Adam downward.... -- ST. JEROME, Letter on a Girl's Education, 403 A.D. Time. The hour. The minute. The second. His clock. His universe ticking, he says, like a clock. (The number of man-hours it takes him to do a job.) His life span. The life span of a normal man. Time and the generations. As in the generations of Esau. (And these are the generations of Esau the father of the Edomites in Mount Seir: These are the names of Esau's sons; Eliphaz the son of Adah the wife of Esau, Reuel the son of Bashemath the wife of Esau. And the sons of Eliphaz were Teman, Omar, Zepho, and Gatam and Kemaz. And Timna was concubine to Eliphaz Esau's son; and she bare to Eliphaz, Amalek: these were the sons of Adah Esau's wife. And these are the sons of Reuel; Nahath and Zerah, Shammah, and Mizzah....) His Time. The years. As in the years of his reign. As in the reign of Ramses II. As in the Jefferson years. As in the Stalinist period. Time and his discoveries. As when Columbus discovered America. As when Cabot discovered America. As when Americus Vespucius discovered America. (As when Balboa discovered the South Sea, Cortez discovered Vera Cruz, De Soto discovered the Mississippi River, Hudson discovered the Hudson River, as when Watson discovered DNA.) *** Time. Time Divided. As in the Period. As in the Epoch. As in the Dark Ages. His Middle Ages. His Renaissance. As in the Ages of Man. As in the Iron Age. As in the Age of Industrialization. As in the Atomic Age. (And when he discovered iron, and when he discovered electricity, and when he split the atom, and when he invented plutonium, 2,4,5-tetrachlorophenoxyacetic acid and 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid.) Time divided and measured. As by the active life of plutonium (as in 250,000 years), as by traces of insecticide found in tissues five years later, as by contamination of the water supply for more than five years. Time divided and measured. Time marked by events. As in history. As in the history of his events. As in the Battle of Thermopylae. As in the First Punic War. As in the Peloponnesian Wars. The Sack of Rome. The Norman Conquest. The Conquests of Charlemagne. As in the Crusades. As in the Hundred Years' War. The War of the Roses. The Thirty Years' War. The Seven Years' War. The American Revolution. The French Revolution. As in the Congress of Vienna. And the fall of the Maginot Line. Time. Time. Time divided by his thoughts. As in the Age of Reason. As the Age of Ideals. As in the Classical Age and the Mannerist Period. Time divided. Divided by his words. As in the Homeric Age, or the Age of Chaucer, or the Age of Shakespeare. Time. Time divided by what he believes, as in the Age of Belief. As in his Reformation. And the Death of God. As in the Decadent Age and the Age of Anxiety. Time and his history. And the history of his creations. As in the history of the zoological garden. (The paradeisos, the menagerie, the period of the classical zoo, the modern zoological garden.) As in the history of incarceration. (The house for the interrogation of witches, the jail, the stocks, the prison, the reformed prison, the madhouse, the mental hospital, the detention camp, the concentration camp, the New Life Hamlet.) Time and his creations. As in the Mechanical Age and the Age of Technology. Time. Time divided by events. By his history. As in his birth. As in the ceremony of circumcision. The ceremony of becoming a man. The ceremony of graduation. And the ceremony of his ordination. The ceremony of his retirement. Time marked by events. Such as the time of His Birth. Such as the date of His Death, and the day of His Ascension. *** Silence I am reminded that a great compliment of my childhood was: "She's such a quiet girl." --MICHELLE CLIFF, Notes on Speechlessness In that photograph of the child and her mother there is a wide space between them and wide space all around them, and all that space seems to be filled with silence. The child looks as if she might have cried but is not crying. Her eyes look down intently to the ground. Her hands grip the wire of a barbed-wire fence. Maybe she has just tried to say what she felt. Maybe the language did not come to her, she could not find the words. Maybe what she felt got turned in her mouth into other words. She has that look of desperation on her face, that she had tried to speak and given up. In the mother's body is a different kind of helplessness. She stands with one hand on her hip, another shading her eyes from the sun, looking toward her daughter. Whatever her daughter tried to say was not something she could understand. And her posture might be righteous, or even angry, if there were not a clear longing in it. As if the child's attempt at speech had touched an old buried place in her and so she lingers, half turned to her daughter, half turned away, knowing she will never grasp that feeling and thus already having given up, yet not able to turn from it. And they stand there forever that way, locked in silence. HIS KNOWLEDGE (HE DETERMINES WHAT IS REAL) What He Sees (The Art of It) Watched all night by the dead body of a friend of Mrs. P--- ... Peace to his soul! I made a good sketch of his head, as a present for his poor wife. On such occasions time flies very slow indeed, so much so that it looked as if it stood still, like the hawk that poises over its prey. --JOHN JAMES AUDUBON, Journal, August 11, 1821 For weeks upon weeks he observed the habits of this bird. He could create in his mind the posture of the animal as it perched on the highest limb of a magnolia tree. He could predict every movement of the bird; he knew his habits. Now as the bird circled his nest, the artist knew he would light there and remain. He had planned this event. He had disturbed the nest of this eagle since he knew then that the bird would stay there, surveying the extent of the damage, and protecting what was his. So the painter did not hurry as he went to find his gun, and he took his time loading it. Then he sequestered himself in weeds about the tree and aimed slowly and carefully. At the sound of the gun the eagle flapped his wings, but could not bear himself into the air and finally fell to the earth. The artist, holding the dying bird in his hands, expressed his wonderment at the expression of the eagle's eye, which at one and the same time blazed as if illuminated with fire, and glazed over with death. As the sun descended the eagle died. Now he was excited. He had a fire built and spent the next hours preparing the bird, stuffing him, mounting him. He had acquired this skill through years of labor and experiment. He used wires to pierce and hold together the body of the bird in the posture he desired and the result of his efforts created an effect whose grace and naturalness were later said to have rivaled life. The next morning he ascended to the top of the magnolia tree, and in great danger and with enormous labor he succeeded in sawing off the limb on which the eagle had once rested. This then he attached the eagle to, perching in all his grandeur, an emblem, it was said, of freedom and glory. Finally he would capture the eagle on paper by placing the body against a background ruled with division lines in squares to correspond to similar divisions on his own paper. And if necessary, in addition, he would measure parts of the bird with a compass. He was meticulous and painted with great accuracy even every barb on every feather, so great was his love for his subject. And in this way, he preserved the birds of America. The Anatomy Lesson It is obvious that we cannot instruct women as we do men in the science of medicine; we cannot carry them into the dissecting room.... -- WALTER CHANNING, Remarks on the Employment of Females as Practitioners in Midwifery, by a Physician The medical student is overcome with feeling. She vomits when she ought to be lifting the corpse's arm, breaking it against the stiffening of death. She associates her own body with the coldness of this one, trembles before it. No measure is taken to relieve her fear. No one asks her to describe it or sing it out. No ceremony exists to reveal it. She is told instead she must learn to move about the human body without feeling. (She must leave feeling behind.) No one wonders if there might have been a use for that feeling -- it is discarded before it is examined. She shall never know about death. The anatomy lesson becomes lifeless. And now this probing of the body gives us no help against our fear of death. Yet isn't that why we wanted to see the body, despite our loathing, despite our fear, because of the fear, our feeling? Acoustics (What He Hears) They said that the animals were clocks; that the cries they emitted when struck were only the noise of a little spring which had been touched, but that the whole body was without feeling. -- LA FONTAINE, cited by Loren Eiseley, The Firmament of Time Wisdom, Circuit Judge: David Wiley, the appellant, and Eugene Cunningham, a co-defendant, were arrested on March 17, 1971, in connection with an alleged sexual assault ... on twelve year old Maxine Lewis ... they were charged with carnal knowledge .. . and taking indecent liberties with a minor child.... The jury found Wiley guilty.... The principal issue on appeal is whether there was sufficient corroborative evidence to take the case to the jury. We find there was not sufficient corroborative evidence. -- United States v. Wiley. 492 F. 2d 547 (D.C. Cir. 1973) It is said that what is heard is a delusion of the senses. That sound consists of waves. That the wave is a momentary shape produced by energy traveling through molecules of air, or wood, or steel. Whether this wave is heard by the human ear as sound, it is said, depends on the frequency of the vibration of the sound. It is said that there are vibrations too rapid for the human ear and vibrations too slow, that vibrations of sound increase in warmer or thicker media, that the structure of the inner ear increases or decreases the frequency of sound waves, that sound waves of one frequency mask the presence of those of another frequency so that the ear hears only one sound when there are two, that many sounds together are heard as undifferentiated noise, that there is no absolute relationship between what produces sound and what is heard, that what is heard is a delusion of the senses and cannot be said to be real. (It is established in the law that the testimony of an alleged victim of rape must be corroborated. It is said that corroboration is required because the complainants in such cases too frequently have an urge to fantasize or a motive to fabricate. Therefore the credibility of the alleged defiled, it is said, must be approached with skepticism, especially when the complainant is a young girl.) It is therefore said that sounds do not exist without ears and a mind to hear them, that all sound exists only in the mind. (And the evidence that shortly after the alleged event a witness said that he saw the alleged victim on the street, crying, in a disheveled condition, upset and without a coat though the day was cold, and that she told him she had been attacked and pointed to her alleged attackers a short distance away, is held not to be corroborative, nor is the evidence of another witness that she appeared to him crying and saying that she had been raped held as corroborative since this is evidence that some event took place but not necessarily evidence that sexual intercourse took place.) And since sound is a product of the mind, it is further argued, it is absurd to believe that sound can exist in an unthinking substance, in the violin, or the wood of the violin. And since all evidence for the existence of matter is sensual evidence of a like deceptive kind, existing only in the mind, it is concluded that matter exists only in the mind. (It is therefore the judgment of this hearing that the defendant was innocent of rape and that no such crime took place.) *** His voice. She hears his voice speaking. He tells her she is always defending herself. For no reason, his voice implies. She tells him that while he was away, she was sick and the baby cried. He tells her that she has told him this to make him feel guilty. He raises his voice. His arms flail out as he speaks. His voice sounds violent to her. Her body flinches. She holds back the words she was going to speak. She feels a weight descend inside her. Her mouth is dry. She puts no name to this. She does not tell herself she is afraid. She does not pronounce the word "violence." His arms stop again and again short of her cheeks, of her breasts. She convinces herself that she is imagining danger. That she has no reason to defend herself, she says. That perhaps she is even now, in her fear, conjuring this up in him. That perhaps she is seeking a reason to hate him. She is ashamed for hating him. She tries again to speak with him. She says that she is tired. He falls into silence. I am tired, she says again. He turns his head away. She wonders if she has used the right words. She wonders if the tiredness in her body is real. Did you hear me? she asks. "Did you hear," she finds herself screaming. He walks out of the room. A violence fills her. Her voice lacks air. Words spit from her mouth. BASTARDSONOFABITCHIHATEYOU, she rasps. Her voice becomes ugly to her. Her words come back on her. She disowns this voice. There is no hearing, no response. She is surrounded now by silence. The voice that started in her dies within her. *** The soldiers testify. They report she was killed in action. (They say the instruction was given to them in order to avoid problems: pay the women money or kill them after you are finished.) The general testified that these were rumors, stories told in jest. (They said they kept her five days before they killed her.) The journal reported the cases were all uninvestigated. The inquiry excluded mention of.... (Her hands were bound behind her back. Her mother ran after the soldiers with her scarf. One of them tied it around her daughter's mouth.) They testified that they had never learned her name. Since the existence of matter is unverifiable Each of us can say we have heard footsteps behind us and since sensual data are deceptive each of us tried not to show fear it is questioned if there is any reason since in acting the part of the victim to examine what is called reality we may become the victim or if there is any way each of us has hidden what we are that anything can be known each of us has denied desire since no existence can be verified since it has been said to us that it is our own lust to be known and therefore which is lived out in the body of the rapist how can the act of knowing be known and our terror which inspires attack and therefore neither mind nor body and our own guilt can be said to exist which attacks us through his hands and therefore all existence even to the point of our own death is denied. *** Reason They said that in order to discover truth, they must find ways to separate feeling from thought Because we were less That measurements and criteria must be established free from emotional bias Because they said our brains were smaller That these measurements can be computed Because we were built closer to the ground according to universal laws Because according to their tests we think more slowly, because according to their criteria our bodies are more like the bodies of animals, because according to their calculations we can lift less weight, work longer hours, suffer more pain, because they have measured these differences and thus these calculations, they said, constitute objectivity because we are more emotional than they are and based they said only on what because our behavior is observed to be like the behavior of children is observably true because we lack the capacity to be reasonable and emotions they said must be distrusted because we are filled with rage that where emotions color thought because we cry out thought is no longer objective because we are shaking and therefore no longer describes what is real shaking in our rage, because we are shaking in our rage and we are no longer reasonable. The Argument (One Thing from Another) Gentlemen, we are opposed to the legislation but we are not opposed to natural beauty. -- ROBERT E. LEE HALL, President, National Coal Association Testimony, Senate Interior and Insular Committee In Paris, during the ninety years ending in 1876, not a successful Caesarian section had been performed. -- ALAN GUTTMACHER, Into This Universe Enfin, se l'on ne peut sauver que la mere ou l'enfant, en se servant de l'operation cesarienne, sans esperance bien fondee pour l'autre, lequel des deux est-on oblige de preferer? -- Messieurs les Docteurs en Theologie de la Faculte de Paris, 1733 [1] In defense of this operation, to cut away the mountaintop (one hundred and five tons in the bucket of the steam shovel) to reveal the seam of the coal (the cliff exposed, like an unfinished road, like a washboard, topsoil carried away, slate and pyrite exposed) they cited a vital contribution to the nation. In defense of this operation, to cut into her womb (an incision made diagonally under her navel, across her abdomen or vertically under her navel to her pubis, or vertically to the right and below her navel) they cited his eternal soul. In defense of this decision (hemorrhage from the uterus into the abdominal cavity, severe pain, severe shock, infection of the wounds) they mentioned charity over justice. In defense of this act (pyrite oxidizing, sulfuric acid in the water, fish poisoned, ponds red with acid, plants, trees disappearing) they put forward a greater good. Yes, they argued, considering only justice, the life of the unborn should be sacrificed to save the life of the mother. Yes, they exclaimed, they are not opposed to natural beauty. But does not charity ask that the mother prefer the life of her unborn infant over her own life? they asked. But "beauty," they argued, is only a relative term, and beauty, they said, has been said to exist only in the eye of the beholder. Yes, they said, we do have the right to struggle against whatever endangers the life God has given us. And they said, yes, in areas set aside just for the purpose of natural beauty one might object to these mines. But, they argued, this infant is innocent and therefore who can say that this innocent endangers the life of his mother? But, they said, the same operation might be tolerated in other areas because it provides a material essential to the nation. Yet, they argued, it is true that the innocence of the infant does not deprive the mother of her rights. But is not this infant, they warned, in danger of going without baptism, and does not charity demand she choose his eternal soul over her temporal life? Is not her temporal life clearly inferior? they argued. And considering the economy of this place, they argued, the jobs and the income these mines will bring, they said, might one not look on these mines as "things of beauty and joy forever"? *** But should the mother We were urged to weigh they argued risk her life the mother's life when she is not herself in a state of grace? against the life of her unborn. Does she not risk her own eternal soul? We were urged to weigh our lives against the lives of our children. Our survival against the beauty of this place. But no, they said (And they argued that the coal company was not responsible for the floods in those places where rubble had fallen into the streams since the rainfall was an act of God) it is not necessary for the mother's life to be free of all guilt, they argued, she need only experience contrition, she need only have lived a life based on the Christian sacraments, if she wishes to sacrifice her life for her unborn child. (And which is of more beauty, they asked, this place or the welfare of the nation?) And to give one's life for one's brother is considered an act of ardent charity, they said, therefore these metaphysical decisions always being difficult And we did not choose the beauty of this place they finally concluded we did not choose each other that the life of the unborn infant should be preferred over the life of the mother. We never chose ourselves. HIS CONTROL (HOW HE BECOMES INVULNERABLE) Childish Fear I have small hands and feet like a woman. Could I have been meant to be a woman? -- FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, My Sister and I A man desiring a youth was obliged to abide by legal procedure ... When of age, a boy could be courted and often many admirers would vie for his favor in open competition with gifts, flattery and even cash. Once a suitor was approved, the lucky man was permitted to possess the boy by rape. -- FLORENCE RUSH, "Greek Love: The Sexual Abuse of Male Children"
See how -- MARTHA KING, Women and Children First This darkness. He cannot sleep in this darkness. They tell him there is nothing to fear and he tries to believe Them. He tries his best to believe Them but still he is frightened. This darkness deepens into the darkest corners of his room at night. They say all the terrible creatures he has described to Them are part of his dreams. But this frightens him more. He does not know how to say this to Them but it frightens him more that these creatures live in his dreams, because now they are closer to him. They are inside him. He is utterly helpless against them. They say such creatures do not live in houses or in cities or anywhere he has ever been. But They do not know how alone this makes him, for now he knows he is the only one who has ever seen them. The creatures crowd into his room whenever the darkness allows them to come. So he continues every night to plead to Them for light. And every night They protest that he is dreaming, that no one has ever heard of what he describes, until finally, giving in to his panic, which does continue despite Their efforts and his, giving in to these tears and clingings of his, They leave the light on in the room. Sometimes They even sit with him. They are there; They soothe him to sleep with these words; They protect him. And then as he starts to drift off, overcome by tiredness, the softness of his bed surrounding him, he is overwhelmed with gratitude, and so clutches one of Their hands even in his sleep. He knows he could not exist without Them. The thought of Their death terrifies him. Without Them he would not be fed. Without Them he could never live in this house. He could not even cross the street. Without Them he would never learn the names for things. (They gave him his own name.) They explain the mysterious to him. Their knowledge is endless, and Their voices grand. Yet They cannot satisfy his need to know. They tell him there are things he cannot understand. They keep secrets from him. They tell him what is best even when he cannot understand why. They tell him what must be. Even though he cries They are unyielding. And even though he pleads with Them They say no. Even though he pleads until he feels his smallness before Them becoming infinitely smaller, They show no sign of yielding. He searches Their faces for a sign. He is always watching Them, Their bodies, Their eyes, to see what They will do, if he has displeased or pleased Them. If They praise him, he is pleased with himself. He imitates what They do. He makes his voice grand. He makes himself tall. He dresses in Their clothes. He imitates Their walk, Their gestures. A smile crosses one of Their faces. He believes he is pleasing Them; he believes he has become one of Them; They begin to laugh. He uses his grand voice. They cease listening to him. He swaggers in Their presence. They turn as if They did not see him. They tell him he must go to bed. And then he is making noise. And then he is saying bad words. And then he is pounding his fists and kicking his legs and his face is covered with snot and They are carrying him up the stairs. And he sits alone in the darkness, until They come back to comfort him. The anger run out of his body now, he lets Them hold him, lets Them rock him to sleep, he feeling good now, feeling soft in Their arms, except that he holds on to Them with one hand tight, one hand awake even in sleep because of his fear, this fear of the dark. Speed The Futurist Morality will defend man from the decay caused by slowness, by memory, by analysis, by repose and habit. Human energy centupled by speed will master time and space ... The intoxication of great speeds in cars is nothing but the joy of feeling oneself fused with the divinity. -- F. T. MARINETTI, "The New Religion Morality of Speed" No material body can move faster than the speed of light. -- ALBERT EINSTEIN and LEOPOLD INFELD, The Evolution of Physics The race-car driver is fearless. He speeds past death. In his speed is endless virility. As a lover he amazes flesh. Women fall. He is like lightning in his gestures. His will pervades all matter. He sees no boundaries. He tolerates no entanglements. Nothing must slow him down. Slowness is his enemy. If he engenders children, he does not remember them. Memory is his enemy. He does not stay in one place. He never spends time. Time is his executor. In his quest for greater and greater speed, he casts away whatever gives him weight. Weight is his enemy. He seeks weightlessness. He casts away excess. He does not tolerate the superfluous. He wants only the essential. His life is reduced to the essential. At the speed of light, which he longs for, he would shed even his body. But still he would have weight, still gravity would determine his path, still he would curve toward the earth. He glides as quickly as he can over surfaces. He does not want to touch the earth. Friction is his enemy. The smell of friction is the smell of burning is the smell of death. He cannot afford to think of death. Death is the commander of his enemies. He sheds his knowledge of death; he cannot afford to fear. The air is filled with anxiety. Space is filled with longing. He must traverse space instantly. (He must not give in to longing.) He must take the air by surprise. (He must not give in to terror.) As his speed increases, so does his power. He takes everything. Everything yields to him. He never waits. His hands move with infinite speed. What he steals vanishes. He keeps no records. He has no time. No memory. He moves. Motion is all he knows. He does not know what he moves through. The world is a blur to him. We are a blur to him. To the world he says that clear outlines and separate existences are illusion. Only I exist, he says. The sides of your bodies, he states, wash into nothingness. Every irrelevant detail disappears from his sight. The line of his movement alone is clear. He worships the straight line. He abhors change of direction. Change of direction is his enemy. Curves are his enemy. He wants to be more than light, more than an electromagnetic wave, which has weight, which curves. He wants to he pure number, proceeding without the passage of time infinitely forward. This is his dream. Nothing will distract him. He will dream only of the future. He will escape gravity. He will escape his enemies. In his solitary world of speed nothing enters to disturb this dream. He is like a sleeper rapidly vanishing. We cannot imagine his destiny. His destiny terrifies us. Burial Fuel assemblies were shipped by truck ... and were uncrated on arrival and stored under water for an average of five months to let shorter-lived radioactive wastes decay. Fuel elements were then taken out, chopped into pieces, and the spent fuel was dissolved in nitric acid. The hulls of the fuel elements and all other hardware were rinsed off and sent to the burial ground. -- GEORGE G. BERG, "Hot Wastes from Nuclear Power" That had been long settled: "Fling them into the canal, and all traces hidden in the water, then the thing would be at an end." So he had decided in the night of his delirium .... -- FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY, Crime and Punishment He separates energy from matter. (This evening. however, on coming out into the street, he became acutely aware of his fears. "I want to attempt a thing like that and am frightened by these trifles," he thought....) What is left over he calls waste. ("One death and a hundred lives in exchange -- it's simple arithmetic. Besides, what value has the life of that sickly, stupid, ill-natured old woman in the balance of existence ... ?") He discovers that this waste is dangerous to him. ("Of course she does not deserve to live," remarked the officer, "but there it is, it's nature.") He determines to rid himself of this waste. ("Oh, well, brother, but we have to correct and direct nature....") He sends this material to where (He laid the ax on the ground near the dead body.) he cannot see it (He remembered afterward that he had been collected and careful, trying all the time not to get smeared with blood....) to where he cannot touch it (He rushed at her with the ax; her mouth twitched piteously, as one sees babies' mouths when they begin to be frightened) or smell it, to where there is no evidence of it. (Fear gained more and more mastery over him, especially after this second, quite unexpected murder.) He sends it into rivers and creeks. ("Fling them into the canal, and all traces hidden in the water...." But to get rid of it turned out to be a very difficult task.) He releases this waste into the ground. (At last the thought struck him it might be better to go to the Neva.) He lets it flow into open-bottomed trenches. ("Here would be the place to throw it," he thought.... "Here I could throw it all in a heap and get away.") He sends it in concrete-lined drums into the sea. (He bent down over the stone, seized the top of it firmly in both hands, and using all his strength, turned it over.) He says he will let it melt into the Antarctic ice cap. (Under the stone was a small hollow in the ground, and he immediately emptied his pockets into it. Then he seized the stone again and with one twist turned it back ...) He says he will drop it between the continental plates, at the bottom of the ocean (... he scraped the earth about it and pressed it at the edges with his foot.) and hope it will work its way to the core of the earth. (Nothing could be noticed.) He says the atmosphere will absorb this material. (He hid his face in his hands again and bowed his head. Suddenly he turned pale) He says the rivers will wash it away. (got up from his chair, looked at Sonia ...) That the oceans will take in this substance (A sort of insatiable compassion ... was reflected in every feature of her face ...) the earth will bury this matter (His sensations that moment were terribly like the moment when he had stood over the old woman with the ax in his hand and felt that "he must not lose another minute,") that the core of the earth will receive this threat ("I know and will tell ... you, only you. I have chosen you out ... I chose you long ago to hear this ...") and take this danger from him ("Lizaveta! Sonia! Poor gentle things, with gentle eyes ... Dear women! Why don't they weep? Why don't they moan? They give up everything.") HIS CERTAINTY (HOW HE RULES THE UNIVERSE) Quantity Mathematics is thought moving in the sphere of complete abstraction from any particular instance of what it is talking about. -- TOBIAS DANZIG, Number, The Language of Science Granted, granted that there is no flaw in all that reasoning, that all I have concluded this last month is as clear as day, true as arithmetic.... -- RASKOLNIKOV in Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment He says that through numbers 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 we find the ultimate reality of things 8 9 10 11 He says 12 13 14 that quantities are the most rigorous test of things 12 13 He says God created numbers and our minds to understand numbers 14 15 16 He says the final proof 16 17 is always a sum 18 19 20 (Counting. She is counting. The number of seconds in a minute, the number of minutes in an hour, the number of hours) He measures the distance from his land to his neighbor's land. He measures his wealth. He numbers his wives. He numbers his children 21 22 23 24 25 26 He weighs what will be traded (1 Faning Mill $17.25, 1 red-faced cow $13.25, 1 yearling calf $4.25) He calculates the worth of what he has (1 plow $1.60, 1 Wench and child $156.00, 8 fancy chairs $9.25) He assesses the value of what is his. (He measures the gallons of milk she produces. He measures the board feet they yield. He measures the hours she works, the value of her labor.) He tells us how big he is. He measures his height. He demonstrates his strength. He measures what he can lift, what he can conquer. He calculates his feelings. He numbers his armies. He measures our virtue. He counts the reasons why we fell. (570 through poverty, he says, 647 through loss of their parents or their homes, 29 orphaned with elder brothers and sisters to care for.) He counts the reasons why we fell from grace. (23 widowed women with small children, 123 servant girls seduced and discharged by their masters.) He tells us how strong he is. He counts the sperm in his seminal fluid. He numbers his genes.... (She numbers the seconds. She numbers the hours. She numbers the days.) 27 28 29 30 31 Counting. They count. They count one billion suffering from hunger. 32 33 34 35 They count twelve thousand dying of starvation. 36 37 38 39 He counts the number of children being born. 40 41 42 He measures the growth of food. 43 44 45 He calculates the sum. 46 47 48 He says that through quantities we find ultimate reality. (She is counting the number of days in a week. The number of months in a year.) He tells us how rich he is. He is counting his possessions and all he might possess. He measures his intelligence. He measures the coal in the ground. He calculates his life expectancy. He estimates the oil in the sea. He adds up the value ofhis life. He measures productive acres. He calculates the value of his existence. 49 50 51 52 53 He tells us how long he will live. He measures his neighbor's land. He numbers their children, the bellies of their cows, the spans of their horses, the numbers of their bridges, their cities, their hospitals, their armies. He counts their dead. He counts his dead. He calculates. He calculates the sum. He gives us the final proof. 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 (She has numbered each second of each hour of each day of each year. She has been counting.) 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 He counts 82 83 necessity. He counts what he imagines to be necessary. He says six combat divisions are necessary; he counts thirteen training divisions as necessary, four brigades, two maneuver area commands. 84 85 86 87 88 89 He says 1,700 ballistic missiles are needed and seven hundred bombers. 90 91 92 93 94 He counts bombs, he counts 70,000 bombs. 95 96 He says when people. He counts the number of people. He says when people have nothing they starve. He counts four hundred million on the edge of starvation. He says when starving people are fed. He counts ten million children risking death from starvation. When starving people are fed, he says, they reproduce. He counts. 97 98 99 100 101 (She has numbered her children. She has counted the days of their lives. On this day, she can say, this one learned to pronounce her name. In this month, she can say, this one learned to walk. She has counted the moments.) 102 103 104 105 106 He has counted. 107 He has counted the effects. 108 109 One roentgen, he says 110 11 shortens a life by 3.5 days. 112 113 114 One hundred roentgens will shorten a life. 115 116 by one year 117 and one thousand roentgens by ten years. 118 119 120 121 122123124125126127 Counting. They have counted the targets. Of 224 targets they count, 71 were cities. They count the bombs. 128 129 130 They count 263 bombs and 1,446 megatons. 131 132 133 They count the dead to be 42 million. They imagine 42 million to be dead. They count the injured to be 17 million. They imagine 17 million injured. 134 135 136 137 He tells us how powerful he is. 138 139 And they count what they imagine will survive. They count 23 percent of electrical machinery. They estimate 28 percent of fabricated metal products. They say 29 percent of rubber products. Thirty percent of apparel. Thirty-four percent of machinery. Forty percent of chemicals. Fifty-one percent of furniture. 138 139 140 141142143144145146 (Counting. She has counted on this life continuing. She has counted on continuing. Each day she has counted, each day she has done what she must, done what she must to go on.) 147148149 57 percent of food, 60 percent of construction, 89 percent of mining, 94.6 percent of agriculture. Counting. He is counting how much. He is counting how much tragedy is acceptable. He imagines ten roentgens of radiation. 150 151 152 He imagines the birth of one million defective children. Counting. He counts 153 154 155 156 157 Counting. We count each second. No moment do we forget. We live through every hour. We are counting the number he has killed, the number he has bound into servitude, the number he has maimed, stolen from, left to starve. We measure his virtue. We count the value of our lives. We are counting the least act of the smallest one, her slightest gesture, and we count the ultimate reality of her breath barely visible now in the just cold air, 1, 2, 3, we say, as it shows itself in small clouds. 4, 5 and 6, and disappears from moment 7, 8, 9 to moment. Probability The theory of chance consists in reducing all the events of the same kind to a certain number of cases equally possible ... and in determining the number of cases favorable to the event whose possibility is sought. -- PIERRE SIMON DE LAPLACE, "Concerning Probability" ... within a mere ten to fifteen years a woman will be able to buy a tiny frozen embryo, take it to the doctor, have it implanted in her uterus, carry it for nine months, and then give birth to it as though it had been conceived in her own body. The embryo would, in effect, be sold with a guarantee that the resultant baby would be free of genetic defect. The purchaser would also be told in advance the color of the baby's eyes and hair, its sex, its probable size at maturity, and its probable I.Q. -- DR. E. S. E. HAFEZ Where he begins. How he begins. Where he begins to doubt. Where he begins to doubt how he began. If this should happen. If he does this. Where he begins to think himself a prisoner (Supposing that a thin coin is thrown into the air with opposite faces, heads and tails. To figure the probability of throwing heads at least one time in two throws, it is shown that four equally possible cases may arise, heads at first and at second, heads at first and tails at second, tails at first and heads at second, and tails at both throws.) of fate. How circumstance determines him. If he does this. Each step. If he moves this way. Each possibility. Where he arrives. All the dangers. He has no assurance. Where he begins, he has no assurance, he does not know what will happen. (And thus the first three cases being favorable to the event, the probability is equal to three quarters and it is a bet of three to one that heads will be thrown at least once in three throws.) And he considers that he may not have begun. That this may not have been his starting place. That he may never have seen this place. That he may have been born differently. That he may have been born blind. That he may have been born someone else and not himself. That he may not have been born. (And discovering the numerical correspondence between the number of groups of hereditary qualities and the number of pairs of chromosomes and determining that there are twenty-three chromosomes, there are then over a million possible kinds of germ cells, and two such sets will give a possible number of combinations which is vastly greater.) He sees her swelling. She is growing bigger. What is beginning in her he does not know. What will come out of her he does not know. (The doctor guides a four-inch needle through the abdominal wall, into the peritoneal cavity, through the uterine wall, and lastly, into the amniotic sac.) But what is inside her grows without his willing it. (This must be done without nicking a blood vessel, or any of the blood-filled sinuses laced around the uterus, without penetrating the fetus, or any portion of the umbilical cord, not trusting to luck, not blindly, but knowing exactly how the fetus lies and the location of the placenta.) He says she is a mystery to him, that he does not know what is inside her, that he cannot penetrate her. (The amniotic fluid obtained in this way reveals if the fetus suffers a genetic defect, and if it is male or female.) He knows there is no mystery in him. What he does is always perfectly clear. And if he can learn what will happen next, he says, then what he will do will also be clear. (To carry out conception in vitro, oocytes, surgically freed from the ovary, are placed in a glass tube, in a carefully balanced fertilization medium into which spermatozoa are introduced. After fertilization, oocytes are then washed and transferred to a culture medium.) The movements of his life, he says, are determined by the predictable lines of logic. Each move he makes is an improvement, he declares. All his efforts lead to betterment. His body was made to struggle for this, he says. His mind was meant to find the way. He was determined at the beginning, he says, to determine what will happen. He fulfills necessity, he says. The history of his life (In order to alter genetic structure) may have been predicted (the plasmid DNA was snipped open with a restriction enzyme) from events in the past which in turn were determined (and into the broken ends of the ring, synthetic rings of DNA were attached) by the events in the past, so that what exists could not be otherwise, he points out, and what will be (with DNA complementary to plasmid DNA acting as glue) is inevitable. Gravity Sooner or later the uniformly moving body will collide with the wall of the elevator destroying the uniform motion. Sooner or later, the whole elevator will collide with the earth destroying the observers and their experiments. -- ALBERT EINSTEIN and LEOPOLD INFELD, The Evolution of Physics ... it is always possible to be "oriented" in a world that has a sacred history, a world in which every prominent feature is associated with a mythical event. -- MIRCEA ELIADE, "A Mythical Geography" The scientists are in a box. There are no windows. Nothing tells them which is right side up. The walls are empty. The ceiling and the floor are the same. They are standing in a perfect cube. Every surface is a square. This they measure and prove with their rulers. The scientists prove by experiment what is the nature of this world. One drops his handkerchief into space. It does not fall to the ground. It rests where the scientist's hand left it. Over time the handkerchief still does not move. This experiment is repeated with another scientist's eyeglasses. The scientist's eyeglasses do not move from where he has placed them in space. This experiment is repeated with different objects. First they push the eyeglasses, lending them motion, then the handkerchief, a pen, a piece of paper, and then their ruler. Each object moves continuously across space until it collides with the opposite wall. The scientists are delighted. They discover they are living in a perfect inertial system. Every body continues in a state of rest or motion. They will continue resting infinitely. They are delighted with this perfection. But gradually one scientist allows a question to enter his mind. It occurs to him that they do not know if they are at rest in an inertial system or if they are moving at a continuous rate of acceleration. Perhaps in a vacuum. Perhaps, and now the scientist feels a sense of disquiet, perhaps they are in a field of gravity, and are therefore accelerating continuously. He realizes that they do not know for certain where they are, nor where they are going, if they are going. He decides to break through the cube. Suddenly air rushes in. (They were suffocating, he realizes.) Through the hole he has made he sees the face of the earth coming closer and closer. "Do you suppose that what we thought was true is not true?" he says with alarm. "We are falling," he admits, "down." Headfirst, the scientists dive from their cube. "I know where we are now," the doubting scientist shouts. "We are in a field of gravity." "And we are no longer falling at the same rate," another observes, "because of the resistance of the air." "Air!" another scientist sighs. "We are certainly not at rest now," the scientists assent. "We are moving," they agree. "We know where we are now relative to the earth," they pronounce. "And we know where we are going," another adds quickly. "To the earth," they whisper. "Where we were born," one says. "And we know what will happen next," all of the scientists choir back. "We will all of us die." HIS CATACLYSM (THE UNIVERSE SHUDDERS) Prophets I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds. -- SRI KRISHNA, the Exalted One, as spoken in the Bhagavad-Gita and remembered by J. Robert Oppenheimer at the moment of the first atomic blast (NOAH) We were told that Noah was chosen to hear the word of God. We were told that God said to Noah. "I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth." That there was a flood. That it was unmerciful, and every living thing perished. (That it rained forty days and forty nights and every bit of the earth was covered with water, even the highest peaks of the highest mountains.) (ISAIAH) We were told that Isaiah had seen God and that God was angry. (That the anger of God will darken the earth, Isaiah said. That the people will be like fuel for his fire. That God said He would be like a man of war, that He would cry, roar and prevail against His enemies. That the daughters of evil would be uncovered. Their shame seen. Woe to rebellious children, He said. There would be no deliverance from this flame.) (THE DOCTORS) We were told that they knew what was inside the atom, and that they could destroy a city with it. That unfathomable energy was locked inside matter, heat, light, fire. That the sky would light up. That the heat would melt flesh. And the roar would be deafening. Plutonium We hear there is a substance and it is called plutonium. We hear that "they" are somewhere (do you remember the name of the state?) manufacturing it. We don't know how it is made. We think the substance uranium is used. We know it is radioactive. We have seen the photographs of babies and children deformed from radiation. The substance plutonium becomes interesting to us when we read that certain parts of the building where it is manufactured have leaks. We don't know really what this means, if it is like the leak in our roofs, or the water pipe in the backyard, or if it is a simple word for a process beyond our comprehension. But we know the word "leak" indicates error and we know that there is no room for error in the handling of this substance. That it has been called the most deadly substance known. That the smallest particle (can one see a particle, smell it?) can cause cancer if breathed in, if ingested. All that we know in the business of living eludes us in this instant. None of our language helps us. Not knowing how to drive, to cook on a gas stove, to soap the diaper pins so that they pass more easily through the diaper, to wash cotton in cold water so that it doesn't shrink, to repair the water pipes, or dress a wound. No skill helps us. Nor does quickness of mind, nor physical strength. We are like an animal smaller and more vulnerable than any nature has ever created. We have no defense. We try not to remember whatever we may know of plutonium. Pollution "I wish I could hold you," she continued bitterly, "till we were both dead! I shouldn't care what you suffered. I care nothing for your sufferings. Why shouldn't you suffer. I do! Will you forget me ....?" -- EMILY BRONTE, Wuthering Heights I did not have to remember these things. they have remembered themselves all these years. -- Black Elk in John G. Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks There is no turning away. There is no escape. Every attempt to destroy this matter brings it back again. For every head cut off a new one grows. Every particle ignited, the least bit of dust blown away, what rises in the air expanding, bursting into flame, incandescent, seeming to vanish, be gone forever, returns, returns, always comes back to him, unmercifully. What he has sent into the rivers comes back, blackens the shore, enters the land, feeds his crops, enters his mouth, festers in him. What he has burned gathers in the air, hangs in space, yellows his vision, stings his eyes; he breathes it. What he has worked out of the ground and transformed darkens the skies, gives out an odor he cannot forget, wherever he turns. What he has denied from his own body accumulates, grows, floats back to him, overwhelms him, gives him no way out. He has gone to the very root, he says, of existence. He has deciphered the secrets. As to the persistence of matter, he insists he can alter the structure of molecules. At his hands, the molecules change, and changed and changing they enter his skin, hide in what he eats, secrete themselves in his tissue, alter the molecular structure of his body. He goes inside the heart of life, be says. He takes apart even the form of matter itself, he strips energy from mass, he splits what is whole, he takes this force for his own, he says. But what he has split does not stop coming apart. Fractures live in the air, invisible fractures come into his body, split his chromosomes, unravel the secrets of life in him. *** This secret life in us. The seen and the unseen. The speaking and the unspoken. The one who is what she ought to be and the one who is not. This other. The one from whom we are split away. Who follows us. Whose words lie under our tongues. Who speaks to us in our dreams. *** Barely seen, soundlessly surrounding him, with hardly a breath of evidence, all he has burned, all he has mined from the ground, all he cast into the waters, all he has torn apart, comes back to him. He is haunted. Carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, beryllium, arsenic, peroxyacetylnitrate, formaldehyde, do not desert him. Dioxin, DDT, will not let him forget. Lead, mercury, live in his dreams. Strontium sticks in his bones. The equation for oxygen stays in his mind but he cannot breathe what he used to call air. The equation for water stays in his mind, but there is nothing he can drink that will not poison him. What the cells of his own blood should be he has recorded in his books, yet these cells begin to fight among themselves, some cells multiplying, and he is weakened by his own blood. Who speaks to us in our dreams. Sings in our blood and will not be still there. Every attempt he makes to order this world decreases his space. The dimensions of his life are filled with ghosts. Making us grieve for no apparent reason. Making us rage for no visible reason. Filled with shadows, with tiny reminiscences. Nothing he has ever set his hand upon has forgotten that weight. This fury in us that will not die, who has captured our bodies, who claims to have been with us for years. Who is making us see what we have not seen before. He is haunted: all his victims speak in his body. He cannot escape pollution, there is no way for him to be free of these ghosts. HIS SECRETS (WHAT IS SLEEPING WITHIN) Dream Life Niels Bohr, upon receiving the Nobel prize, revealed to the world that his dreams had depicted the structure of the atom. And August Kekule, the chemist, was likewise honored for the great advances made possible through his dream of the structure of the benzene ring. -- E. STANTON MAXEY, "Biopsychophysics -- The Proper Study of Man"
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra
vita -- DANTE ALIGHIERI, Inferno He had left the true way when he was deep in sleep, and he cannot say how he came there. He looks back to see the dangers he has just passed, and is terrified. When he goes forward, he meets ferocious beasts on his path, three of them, and the last, he is certain, is very hungry. She pursues him. He runs from her into the presence of a man he slowly recognizes as one he had before taken as a mentor. This man has been known for his great power over words, and the sleeper takes this power as his own. When he makes a plea for help, this man tells him that the creature who pursues him has an insatiable appetite, that each bite she takes makes her want more, that he must choose a different road. This man offers to guide the sleeper to an eternal place, but he warns that there they will hear sounds of despair from spirits who live in pain, who endure a second death. [MARIE CURIE, 1867-1934] I want to be left in peace. -- MARIE CURIE, last words In this mass of substances she searches for the elementary, for what cannot be reduced. Sifting through the residue of pitchblende, she removes pinecones and rocks. Over days and weeks, over years, she grinds this material, she dissolves it, she filters it, precipitates it, collects it again, dissolves it again, precipitates again, crystallizes and recrystallizes. Thousands of gallons become teaspoonfuls. Finally, she can call this material pure. Yet it does not stay still. It gives off heat. Its emanations fill the air. It glows. Its rays pass through paper, glass, rubber, cloth, skin. A piece of metal placed near the radium but not touching it becomes radioactive. The pure radium burns itself away. Now this substance has entered her hands. Her skin is burned. There are open sores. The lenses of her eyes become opaque. She cannot see. She has pains in her arms. She is exhausted. She collapses. She burns with fever. Yet she will not allow these symptoms to be spoken of, and despite the complaints of her body, returns again and again to work this material. But what the scientist touches she becomes. At her death, she declares, "I can't express myself properly." She says, "My head's turning." She tries to turn a spoon in a glass as though it were a rod in a beaker. She asks, "Has it been made with radium or mesothorium?" Its temperature becomes her temperature. She shakes with its coldness. "Thirty-eight degrees! I don't know if it's right. I'm trembling so." Its properties become her own; her body, the experiment. "I'd like to set myself straight, my head's turning." At the end, she speaks for herself. "What are you going to do to me," she says, "I don't want it," and demands, "I want to be left in peace." [SIGMUND FREUD, 1856-1939] What then [is] it? Those it is which [are] upon their altars, the image is of the eye of Ra and the image of the eye of Horus. O Ra Tmu, the lord of the Great House, Prince, life, strength, health, of gods all, deliver thou from god that whose face is [in the form of] a dog, [and] his eyebrows like [those of] men, he liveth upon the enemy, watching bight that of lake of fire, devouring bodies and swallowing hearts, and voiding filth, not being seen himself. Who then is it? "Eater of millions" [is] his name.... "The Papyrus of Ani," The Egyptian Book of the Dead We displayed an unmistakable tendency to "shelve" death, to eliminate it from life. -- SIGMUND FREUD, "Thoughts on War and Death" The doctor's study is filled with figurines. They sit everywhere, stand everywhere, small gods staring out from glass cases, heads of goddesses assembled on tables, an army of deities at the front of his desk, facing the chair where he sat to write. (To his colleague he remarks that he must never abandon the sexual theory, that it must become a dogma, "an unshakable bulwark ... against the black tide of mud of occultism.") On top of one glass cabinet sits a Greek vessel in the shape of a sphinx, and inside, Sakmet, the goddess with the head of a lioness. (He writes that religion to the common man is a palliative remedy, designed to explain the riddle of the world and assure him that a solicitous providence, in the form of a greatly exalted father, looks over him.) On the table to the right of his desk, with two other figurines, is the Egyptian figure of Imhotep, god of learning and medicine, holding a papyrus scroll in his lap. (In a lecture he says that he has taken the liberty to point out that that deep belief in psychic freedom and choice which men have "is quite unscientific and that it must give ground before the claims of a determinism which governs mental life.") Among countless others on his desk, Osiris, Isis, Amen-Ra, Isis nursing Horus, a Chinese tomb figurine, Aphrodite, Horus as a child. (He writes that "the patient must regard his doctor as a father," that "the father-transference is the only battlefield on which we conquer and take the libido prisoner.") A Janus head of Silenus and Minerva. On a table before his bookcase, the head of Bodhisattva, head of Buddha, bust of Seraphis (He records that in the early life of man, the sons lived in fear of death or castration from their father. That the brothers thus driven out of the family banded together and murdered the father, making a feast of his body) part of an Egyptian mummy cover. (And that in the childhood of each man lives a fantasy of murdering his own father.) In the cabinet between the entrance and the window, Egyptian funerary figures, six ushabti figures, named the "answerers" because they always respond to the call of their master. (During a discussion with a colleague about the decision of Amenophis IV to erase his father's name from the steles, Freud falls to a faint.) On a shelf, to the right of a vase filled with flowers, an Egyptian cobra, Uraeus, emblem of the Pharaoh's power, taken from a mummy's crown. (He writes that he will "suffer the just punishment that none of the undiscovered provinces of mental life which I was the first mortal to enter will bear my name or follow the laws I have formulated.") Centered above two bookcases, two Egyptian funerary steles, one with an inscription to the dead Hordiefnakht as he appears before the gods who will judge his fitness for the afterlife. (He fixes his death as occurring in 1918; suggests he will die in his forties of a rupture of the heart; on parting from his friends says, "Good-bye, you may never see me again," develops a fear of trains and writes that journeys on trains are common symbols of the fear of death.) In a bookcase, the Egyptian warrior goddess Neith, originally a female body with a penis. (Freud answers the puzzle of the androgyny of Neith by describing the castration fears of the young boy.) In front of his books, portraits of three women, Marie Bonaparte, Lou Andreas-Salome and Yvette Guilbert. (He writes that femininity is a riddle he cannot solve.) In a cabinet two Near Eastern mother goddesses, on a table Horus, the falcon-headed god (As a child he dreams his mother, with an expression of sleep on her face, is carried into the room by three people with bird beaks and laid upon the bed.) between the Egyptian steles a bas-relief of the death of Patroclus. (He writes of a dream in which he seeks food from women in a kitchen, and then recalls as a child asking his mother if the words "From earth you come and to earth you shall return" were true, and he continues that his mother answered by rubbing the palms of her hands together and thus showing him the earth-colored skin of her hands.) In his consulting room the engraving La Lecon Clinique du Dr. Charcot, depicting a hysterical female patient as she is shown to the members of the staff of Salpetriere hospital. [EMPEDOCLES, c. 495-c. 435 B.C.] Fools! For they do not take the long view.... -- EMPEDOCLES He says that emanations are given off by all things that are created, and that these emanations enter into the pores of other created things. That sensation occurs when the emanation fits the pore. He says there are elements, homogeneous and unchangeable and indestructible, and those elements mix together to create all things. He says therefore that what we know as birth and death is a delusion. That we think of birth as a coming into being and death as annihilation, but that nothing can be created out of nothing, and that which is cannot perish utterly. There is no birth or death, he says, but rather there is change, and the mingling of things changed, and these are perceived by us as birth or death. All creation, he says, all dissolution, is but change. [RENE DESCARTES, 1596-1650] Am I not that being who now doubts nearly everything ... ? -- RENE DESCARTES, Meditation on the First Philosophy in Which the Existence of God and the Distinction Between Mind and Body Are Demonstrated 10 November, 1619, when I was full of enthusiasm, I discovered the fundamental principles of a wonderful knowledge. -- RENE DESCARTES, Journals On this night of the tenth of November, he has three dreams. In the first, while walking in the street he is filled with terror and feels a great weakness on his right side, thus must bend over to his left side to get to his destination. He is embarrassed by this posture, yet be cannot straighten himself out. A wind whirls him around on his left foot, like a tornado. He tries to reach the church of the college he has seen ahead of him so that he might say a prayer. But at that moment he realizes he has passed an acquaintance without saying hello, yet the wind blowing in the direction of the church prevents him from turning back. But now he sees another man standing in the courtyard of the college. This man is friendly and calls him by name. He realizes with astonishment that those standing about are having no trouble standing up straight, but Descartes is still bent over and staggering. He awakens and turns from his left side to his right, then prays for God to protect him from this dream. After two hours he falls asleep, dreams of a violent noise, and awakens again, seeing fiery sparks about the room. Thinking about the philosophical explanations for their existence, he focuses on various objects about the room, and this gives him a sense of peace which enables him to fall asleep again. Now he dreams of finding a book on the table. Not knowing who put it there, he opens it and finds with delight it is a dictionary. Then under his other hand he finds an anthology of poetry titled Corpus Poetarum. [3] He opens the book and reads: "Quod vitae sectabor iter?" [4] But at this moment he notices a man, who hands him a poem beginning "Est et non" [5] and praises this poem. Saying this poem is by Ansonius, he leafs through the pages of the book to show the man Ansonius's "Idylls." But though he knows the order of the book, he is having trouble locating these poems. The man asks where he got this book, and Descartes answers he does not know, and that he also had another book, which has now disappeared. But at this moment the dictionary reappears, no longer as complete as it was before. Now he finds Ansonius's poems, but not "Est et non." He shows the man what he says is a more beautiful poem, "Quod vitae sectabor iter?" Then he realizes when he finds some copper engravings in the book, which he says are very beautiful, that this is a different edition from the one he knew. The man disappears. Now he is aware he is dreaming, and still asleep, he interprets his dream. The dictionary is the interconnectedness of all science; Corpus Poetarum the closeness of philosophy with wisdom. Divine enthusiasm and imagination, he says, make the seed of wisdom in each spirit grow more profusely. "Quod vitae sectabor iter" is moral theology, or the counsel of a wise person. When he awakens he decides that the spirit of truth had visited him to reveal to him the treasure of knowledge. And this dream, he said, led him to his "methode," and to seek ultimate truth in mathematical knowledge. [ISAAC NEWTON, 1642-1727] ... so happy in his conjectures, as to so seem to know more than he could possibly have had any means of proving. -- DE MORGAN, "Newton," 1846 He said he made his discoveries by always thinking into them, that he would keep the subject constantly before him and wait for the first dawnings to open little by little into full light. His assistant recorded that his efforts were prodigious at the spring and the fall of the leaf, the fires scarcely going out day or night, sitting up all night until his chemical experiments were complete. His assistant suspects, because of Newton's pains and diligence at these times, that he reached for something beyond human art and industry. In Newton's library are found the titles The Mirror of Alchemy, Musaeum Hermeticum, The Philosopher's Stone, De Transmutatione Metalorum, De Occulta Philosaphia and Alchymia. At his death a box of his papers is found which during his life were never published. On examination, these papers are put away, not to be read or printed. Among these notes he had written: "Because the way by which mercury may be so impregnated has been thought fit to be concealed by others that have known it, and therefore may possibly be an inlet to something more noble, not to be communicated without immense danger to the world ..." Appended to his Optics is the query: "Have not small particles of Bodies certain Powers, Virtues or Forces, by which they act at a distance, not only upon the Rays of Light for reflecting, refracting and inflecting them, but also upon one another, for producing a great part of the Phaenomena of nature ..." and he speculates that these small particles might have attractive forces of an electrical nature: and he wonders if it might be that mass may be able to exchange with light. It is said after his death that he most often had the truth before the proof. Of himself he wrote that despite how he may appear to the world, he felt himself to be like a boy playing on the seashore, diverting himself by finding a prettier shell or smoother pebble than ordinary, "while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." [CHARLES DARWIN, 1809-1882] If Darwin's ill health was not, as some seem to think, a pretext to isolate himself with his work, neither was it, as Darwin had right to fear, an insuperable obstacle to his work. One reason why it did not prove fatal to his ambitions was the devotion and sympathy of his wife. -- GERTRUDE HIMMELFARB, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution Beginning early in the day, after taking breakfast alone, and a walk, he worked in his study from eight until nine-thirty in the morning. Then he went into the drawing room with his family; he looked over the mail, and sometimes listened as a novel was read aloud, he resting on the sofa. ("All that we can do," he wrote, "is to keep steadily in mind that each organic being is striving to increase in a geometrical ratio ...) He returned to his study at ten-thirty and emerged again at noon. (... that each at some period of its life, during some season of the year, during each generation, or at intervals, has to struggle for life or suffer great destruction....") Then he took another walk, past the greenhouse, perhaps looking at an experimental plant, and then onto a gravel walk encircling an acre and a half of land, taking a specified number of turns, perhaps watching his children play, observing a bird, a flower. Or before he took too many spills, taking a canter on an old and gentle horse. ("What a struggle must have gone on during long centuries," he wrote, "between several kinds of trees each annually scattering its seeds by the thousands, what war between insect and insect -- between insects, snails and other animals with bird and beasts of prey --) After this, lunch was served to him. And then he read the newspapers and wrote letters. If they were lengthy he dictated them from rough drafts. At three o'clock, he went to rest in his bedroom, smoked a cigarette, lay on a sofa, and listened again to a novel read aloud to him by his wife. (-- all striving to increase, all feeding on each other, or on the trees, their seed and seedlings, or on the other plants which first clothed the ground and thus checked the growth of trees!") This reading often put him to sleep so that he complained he had missed whole parts of books. His wife feared the cessation of her voice would wake him. (Of the Formica refescens, he wrote, "So utterly helpless are the masters, that when Huber shut up thirty of them without a slave ... they did nothing; they could not even feed themselves and many perished of hunger.") At four he took another walk, and worked for one more hour. Then after another period of listening to a novel, he ate his dinner, played two games of backgammon with his wife, read some of a scientific book, and when tired finally, lay back again to listen while his wife read to him or played the piano. When he retired at ten or ten-thirty, he often lay awake for hours afterward in pain. On bad days, he could not work at all. (Of the process of selection he wrote: "... the struggle will almost invariably be most severe between individuals of the same species, for they frequent the same districts, require the same food and are exposed to the same dangers.") In a letter to Lyell he claimed that he was bitterly mortified to conclude that "the race is for the strong," but that he would be able to do little more than admire the strides others would make in science. ("... the swiftest and the slimmest wolves," he wrote, "would have the best chance of surviving and so be preserved or selected.") Because of his own ill health, and that of his grandfather and his brother, and mother-in-law and aunt (And he wrote: "... so profound is our ignorance and so high our presumption, that we marvel when we hear of the extinction of an organic being, and we do not see the cause, we invoke cataclysms ...") and because of the sick headaches which his wife suffered ("natural selection acts only by preservation and accumulation of small inherited modifications, each profitable to the preserved being ..." he wrote) he feared for the health of his children, of whom one died shortly after birth, one died in his childhood, and others suffered chronic illness. In 1844, of his discovery of evolution, he recorded: "At last gleams of light have come and I am almost convinced (quite contrary to the opinion I started with) that the species (it is like confessing a murder) are not immutable." [JOHANNES KEPLER, 1571-1630] Ma Kepler [Katherine] was released, after fourteen months of imprisonment. She could not return to Leonberg, though, because the populace threatened to lynch her. Six months later she died. It was against this background that Kepler wrote the Harmony of the World.. -- ARTHUR KOESTLER, The Watershed She was carried out of her house in an oak linen chest, and taken to the prison in Leonberg. She was then seventy-three years of age. (He writes that God himself "was too kind to remain idle and began to play the game of signatures, signing his likeness into the world.") There were forty-nine accusations against her, and numerous supplementary charges. She was said to have failed to weep when the Holy Scriptures were read to her. (He resolves the harmonies into regular polygons.) Katherine Kepler replied that she had shed so many tears in her life, she had none left. (The irregular polygons, and all figures that cannot be constructed by compass and ruler, he says, are unclean because they defy the intellect. Inscibilis. Ineffabilis. Non-entia. Unspeakable. Nonexistences. And this is the reason, he writes, "why God did not employ the septagon and the other figures of this species to embellish the world.") Her son Johannes Kepler answered the Act of Accusation by an Act of Contestation, which was refuted by an Act of Acceptation to which was submitted an Act of Exception and Defense which was answered by an Act of Deduction and Confutation. Finally, in her defense her son submitted an Act of Conclusion, one hundred and twenty-eight pages long. (He then discovers regular polygons inscribed in the movements of heavenly bodies. And of these he writes: ''The heavenly motions are nothing but a continuous song for several voices ... a music which ... sets landmarks in the immeasurable flow of time.") After that, her case, by order of the duke, was sent to her son's university, where the faculty found that Katherine should be questioned under torture, but suggested that proceedings stop at the territio -- questioning under threat of torture. (As part of the harmony of the world, Kepler reveals that the ratio which exists between the periodic times of any two planets is precisely one and one half of the power of their mean distances.) She was led to the place of torture; the executioner was presented to her; all his instruments shown her and their effect on the body described. Great pain and dolor awaited her if she did not confess, she was told. The terror of the place had wrought confessions from many before her, but she said that even if they tore her veins from her body one by one, she had nothing to confess. (On discovering that the heavenly bodies move in ellipses rather than perfect circles, Kepler apologizes for having to bring a small cartload of dung into the universe in order to rid it of a far vaster quantity of dung.) She fell on her knees then and asked God to give a sign if she was a witch or a monster, and then said she was willing to die, that God would reveal the truth after her death. (He writes: "Yes, I give myself up to holy ravings. I mockingly defy all mortals with this open confession; I have robbed the golden vessel of the Egyptians to make out of them a tabernacle for my God....") In this way, and due to the efforts of her son, and the respect he commanded in the world, Katherine Kepler was released. [LINNAEUS, 1707-1778] The first step of science is to know one thing from another. This knowledge consists in their specific distinctions; but in order that it may be fixed and permanent distinct names must be given to different things and those names must be recorded and remembered. -- CAROLUS LlNNAEUS By naming and by knowing the names of things he proposed to see into the secret cabinet of God. Travelers from Madeira, Virginia, from all over the world, risked dangers in vast forests, on high cliffs, in the deepest chasms to send him packets of seeds. He catalogued American falcons, parrots, pheasants, guinea fowl, American capercaillie, Indian hens, swans, duck, geese, gulls, snipe, American crossbills, sparrows and turtledoves. He classified creation according to sexual organs; he gave each creature two names, a general and a specific name. He wrote that riches vanish and stately mansions fall into decay, that even the most prolific families die out sooner or later and that the mightiest of states are overthrown, but that all of nature must be obliterated before the genera of plants and "he be forgotten who held the torch aloft in botany." But as he grew older, he suffered a stroke, and after this he began to lose more and more of his memory. Gradually he no longer knew Systema Naturae, and after all this, in his last years, he forgot even his own name. Nightmares We dreamed we were the daughters of evil. But you are mistaken, we cried, there has been some mistake. And we cried to be accepted for our true identity. We produced documents. The testimony of our parents. But the documents were changed. And our parents said things were different from what we had thought. Did you lie to us? we questioned. But they would not speak to us. No one would speak to us. We were in rooms by ourselves. We were under the sheets. No one had accused us. We dreamed we were the daughters of evil, because we knew we were. We had been hiding this secret all our lives. *** We dreamed we were speaking in tongues. That all we had ever felt, our whole lives, became clear to us. That language was beautiful. Lyrical. That we were singing. That we wept to recognize ourselves in these voices. But when we awakened, we dreamed, we could only remember babble, and all language was foreign. *** We dreamed we traveled at the speed of light. And our flesh vanished to nothing. We were in the void. But before we reached this void we saw a glimpse. There was the world we always knew possible. In our fleshless bodies we felt our hearts drop infinitely. To see what we had given up. In our terror. In our desire to speed as fast as possible. To be away from the terrifying roar, the blinding light, the cataclysm, we had sped into the world of impossibility. But there, behind us, green and still living, was this possibility -- a day's walk back into a future we could have touched: Such tenderness, such joy. Terror is the realization of the law of movement; its chief aim is to make possible the force of nature or history to race freely through mankind, unhindered by any spontaneous human action.... The rulers themselves do not claim to be just or wise, but only to execute historical or natural laws.... -- HANNAH ARENDT, The Origins of Totalitarianism
You if you were sensible -- D. H. LAWRENCE, "Under the Oak" He speaks of the natural order of things and the regular movements of heavenly bodies. As for her efforts to make anything different, he directs her gaze to the skies. There is no caring in natural law, he says, things are as they are. As to any meaning in these movements, he says, he cannot say, but listen, he says, to the measurements. He is rarely very much over six feet tall, he says, and there are 5,280 feet in one mile, and the average distance from the earth to the sun, he says, is 93 million miles. Think about immensity, he tells her. The planet Saturn is 886 million miles from the sun. No star is less than 26 trillion miles away from the earth. Think of the smallness of this life, he says, and the vanity of supposing significance. He reminds her she could not exist in that void. He says the average temperature of the human body lies at 119.5 Centigrade. Do you know how hot the sun is? he asks. The temperature of the sun, he raises his voice now, is 5,500 degrees Centigrade at its exterior, and, he leans forward and shouts, 40,000,000 degrees in its interior. He tells her how perishable she is and how little there is to perish. A speck weighing usually only from forty to one hundred kilos. But the earth weighs 6,600,000,000,000,000,000,000 metric tons, he says, and the mass of the sun, he tells her triumphantly, is 332,000 times that of the earth, and the stars and the gases, the stars and the gases in this galaxy alone, he crows, are as heavy as 100 billion suns. But at the speed of light, he lets her know, mass no longer exists; she is incapable of that kind of speed, he says, she would perish at that speed. And time in the sky, he tells her, is measured in light-years. From the earth to the moon, he says, is five and one half light-seconds. From the earth to the sun, eight light-minutes. The diameter of the whole solar system, he says, is not quite one half of a light-day. This is closeness, he says, this is intimacy. Distance, he says, is farther away, unimaginably, unspeakably vast. The nearest star, he tells her, is over four light-years away. Sirius, he says, is eight light-years away. To cross this galaxy would take 100,000 light-years. Even if she could "travel at the speed of light, he says, she could never survive that journey. Her life would end thousands of years before she could reach her destination. She would die surrounded by the void. And this galaxy, he states now, is just part of an open cluster of galaxies three million light-years in diameter. (Out of the corner of his eye, he sees a gesture. The image rubs against the inside of his head. Wakens him at night. Keeps his mind off what he is doing, his eyes out of focus. Of whom does this gesture remind him? Of what? So quick. And coming as it did from a woman. What did she have in mind from doing it? But this he thought he knew. Uncannily he thought he knew. And this he hated her for, the outrage of seeming to be like him, of imitating him, of mocking his dignity, of forcing in him some recognition, so that he might see himself in her. She did not know what she was doing, to imitate his carriage, to lift her head in that manner, calmly. There is something that repels him in that gesture. He has made other men laugh, many times, over that movement, telling how she drew herself up like a man, how silly she looked, dressed as she was, smaller than he, how out of place in that defiance. What was there to defy anyway? Just the natural order of things. But it was here, alone, out of the sound of their laughter, that the hatred came upon him. She was trying to steal something that belonged to him and of which she knew nothing. Her ignorance showed all over her as she tried to claim that her words were spoken with as much weight as his. And in this moment she made a mockery of his judgment. By imitating his certainty, she made him uncertain. We recognize two sets of gestures. We know the stories of those gestures. How the one set of gestures was our own which we took care to conceal except among ourselves and they were like the gestures of any beings, carrying a simple air of earnestness that accompanies the performance of necessary tasks, and how the other gestures were performed for those others who looked to us for that slowness of wit which means dullness of feeling and an absence of pride. For if there were wit, or feeling, or a dignity, would not they have to know what we knew because in the privacy we had among ourselves we laughed, that speaking to each other, we could strip the dignity off them like bark, like the skin of an apple, that the truth of their movements, in our private moments, was laid bare, and then, yes, the skies and the stars were unmerciful witnesses. And then ideas entered his head on certain nights in the shapes of dreams. On these wild nights, he saw himself in her body and then he moaned at the injustice of finding his humanity concealed and trapped in this way until he would wake up screaming in terror. And into these first moments of waking crept this doubt that seemed to edge into him and stick, creating an unnatural space between his soul and his flesh, this doubt of the justice of things after all. Suppose that gesture of hers meant her soul was like his. And then another thought came upon him, so terrible he could scarcely hold on to it. Suppose there is no difference between them except the power he wields over her. And suppose that in an instant of feeling himself like her, he let this power go, then would he not become her, in his own body even. And some part of him seemed to know what it would be to be her in his body, and how he came to know this he does not choose to remember. And he went no further that way in his thoughts because space closed in on him and slowly he had to push it back to give himself room to breathe. He had to push space as far as it could go, to the outer limits of the universe. And in that universe, vaster than he or she could imagine, that gesture of hers meant nothing. She may say the stars look like jewels on a velvet cloth. But he knew to distrust appearances. She had too much eagerness to attach meaning to things. He reminded himself that all this life is determined, that what meaning there is in the movements of matter is indecipherable, that he himself is made up only of particles in space. And beyond this, he tells himself, only the stars burn, burn in a dreadful void.) What man sees taking place across the skies, he tells her, happened 3,000,000 years ago. What is happening at this instant, across space, he says, she will never know in her lifetime. He recites the figures to her. The Andromeda galaxy, he says, is over 2,000,000 light-years away. The Magellanic Clouds, 30,000 light-years in diameter, are 160,000 light-years away. There may be, he suggests, nearly 1,000,000,000 galaxies in this universe. And he tells her how all this began indifferently to her. He suggests there was an explosion. He says to her these explosions are still going on and have gone on, before she was born, after her death. He mentions in fact the Crab Nebula, 3,500 light-years away, which has been exploding for 900 years and increases in diameter by 120 million miles every day. Galaxies are moving away from this earth and one another, our galaxy is moving out, he says, everybody is moving, he says, some at the rate of 76,000 miles each second. And faint galaxies, he says, his voice filled with terror, at the edge of the universe, whose existences have been traced by radiotelescope, seem to be moving away 93,141 miles each second. And it is still unknown, he speaks these words slowly, if there are farther stars, moving faster away, still unknown if there are explosions or black holes toward which we move and what the fate of this earth will be, he says, is still unknown. ______________ 1. Finally, if one can save only the mother or the infant, in doing the Caesarian operation, without hope of saving the other, which of the two should be chosen? -- Doctors of Theology of the Faculty of Paris, 1733. 2. In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood whose straight way was lost. 3. "The Body of All Poets" -- the collected works of all poets. 4. "What path of life shall I follow?" 5. "He is and he is not."
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