Control - April 2019

‘It had nothing to do with me, but I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves.’

I. The Disposal of the Inconvenient

Silence does not come down these days,

Calling to us but failing to be heard,

Above the sound of complications,

The unwelcome thoughts of mortality,

Knocking gently on the brain,

Like beetles digging in the grain of wood,

And we are conscious of all this,

But do not acknowledge rain,

The spring rain that displaces snow,

We used to ski down the mountains,

And in town we would sit with coffee,

In the shadow of the Zugspitze,

Waiting for later seasons to move the sun,

Turning the entire world into the face,

Of our own star, our own green world,

And melt the snow into the Partnach Gorge,

Down into the plains of industry and trade,

And your eyes were the last thing I saw,

Fading into the dusk as the night took on,

We were wet with the cold of summer,

And you had flowers in your hair,

I scolded you for stealing them,

Perhaps it was an old man’s only beauty,

The pride of his garden by the river,

Tumbling down into distant industry,

But you didn’t care, and ran laughing,

Into the evening and forever,

The only one, my little thief, my flower girl,

Into the swirl of the modern world,

Still warm from the cheerful climb,

Later we pressed the flowers and went North,

With the book we kept them in,

I still have it, never moved, 

Save for an afternoon a year, in reverence,

The flowers are spread like your hair,

On the grass in the hotel garden,

A fiction of all futures building,

Dream it and live it, high in the dust,

Of mountain towns like this,

Begging water from the distant clouds,

That flow from the colder North,

The flowers here are spare confections,

Busy like Mozart my brother, singing,

Forever at the moon and stars,

“Give us water, we could be beautiful,

“For the ground here is miserly,

“Keeping the streams underground,

“For pinched-faced bloody-minded nothings,

“Where is the water you promised us?

“Years ago you said you’d bring us water,

“And still nothing, we must believe you,

“Brother, Sister sky, bring us water!”,

II. The War Game

At home, our boss laid on a gamers' feast,

Celebrating the hacking of the century,

All futures falling to us and ours,

And we had no thoughts of what to do,

With the money that rolled in,

And backed up all our systems,

We’d handled our commission with assurance,

And broken down all the doors,

With nothing more than electricity,

Coaxed through rusty tracks,

Through obsolete prose and metaphor,

This was like the end of the world for them,

And we were here getting drunker,

Than we’d ever done before,

Taking control from the less enlightened,

The plain ignorant, thinking they deserve this,

They’ve worked hard to be so stupid,

It’s a fine art to be able to believe anything,

We’ll make you a flying whale,

Brought soaring into your world,

The biggest joke is “do no evil”,

We’d drop it across a screen in Times Square,

If only we thought it would do any good,

“Madam, where do you get your news?

“Is there any truth in this?

“What do you believe in?

“Not what do you believe?

“Because we all know you believe anything!", 

Sally! There are ghosts about tonight,

Take this and think of me as they knock,

Coming slowly down the stairs for us,

It used to be the tiny folk in this town,

Brought with the ships to the new world,

To challenge the old-world gods and men,

But now they are the ghosts, the supernature,

Or all the bright fictions of Television,

Poltergeists who have no form but us,

Making naïve children fly,

And no grammar, save for that of objects,

Made dumb like all of us by night,

III. The Return of the Fisher King

The river is high and fast today,

No joy at this bank will come my way,

And the boats fly past and the crews wave,

Friends from the seas distant to me,

I see my daughter’s downward glance,

Coy would-be lovers meeting at the quay,

Where the fish come in for the feasting,

It’s no contest, no game, this survival,

I’m irrelevant down here,

Angling for eternity,

Hoping for the future like an old man,

The girls have gone off into the wind,

Where the tide meets the river flow,

And it dances up in the wind, fresh and cold,

Like walking into a newly-wintered valley,

It’s brought the scent of the high country,

The green of the pastures and earth,

Where the cattle pass days and nights,

And the living is hard for those who hide,

In the mountains, they are broken,

By the monotony of life,

Winter is coming the trees are hissing,

Winter is coming and we float away,

Out into the warm oceans where the fish fly,

And the days pass in drowsy oblivion,

Pass that, the thing that has no name,

You’re not used to this lad,

The sea will kill you in many ways,

Steal you from the heaving deck like a feather,

Freeze you where you work, half way,

With the nets reeled in, feet heavy,

Like walking on giant planets,

Rooted like mandrakes and screaming too,

Pulled from this pitching vessel,

Until your name is the last thing on the wind,

Ululation and shocking frequency,

A man with his hand on an electric fence,

Spasm and blank eyes tracing parabolas,

Where do you get your long words old man?

We’ve no time for books or theatre,

And I’ve never seen you rest,

(Hold it there for the camera,

Feet on the marks and mark them well),

It sinks in lad, it sinks in well,

I’m crafty you see, adept at theft,

We are in this world, like you,

Before you left the sane earth,

Down in the greasy edges of the river,

The vermin squirm and slide,

Dragging themselves to eat my catch,

This sorry heap of fish,

A treat for the bloody rats they are,

Bait and cast and wait and reel, repeat,

Repeat and on and on and on,

Down to water, eat spare scran,

And call the guards to carry me home,

The sun has found its way in,

Worming in its slow light like fog,

Set to stealthy working by the sky,

And it gutters on the far wall,

As the landscape gives it life,

The wind in the trees makes dances,

Until, broken by the door they fade,

Spark briefly back, their curtain call,

Thin curtains drawn, and out fades the light,

She remembers the room shadeless,

Like a clinic when she first lived here,

But that single bulb softened,

With her parents’ gifts, the cutlery,

The tableware and other cheap adornments,

It’s home and most definitely locked,

The smoky mist is (mostly) barred,

And the street four floors below,

Blurred both in sound and vision,

Remains just a thought for the morning,

The hall, undecorated,

Is only a place for letters,

A no-man’s land between her cell,

And all that busyness of days,

The rush to eat to live to sleep,

He phones at ten, and though bored with him,

(She wants to catch the news),

She’s happy for a little humour,

A call to satire and political dismay,

To climb through all emotions,

To even claim she loves him,

But money and home are what she loves,

She’s happy to rush him now,

With promises of meeting sometime,

Signed off with a vague eroticism,

Which she feels is faked,

At her end anyway,

Goodbye, goodbye and then relief,

That the city is far below and he,

Is far away and sleep comes easily,

This mind is wasted on the mundane and profound,

Exoticism of youth, it longs for age and understanding,

Where expertise is called with logic,

Helping to improve, continually,

The health of mankind, the rocket ships,

We build to take us to the stars,

Her world is secret, a few streets away,

And she is nameless, in intelligence,

Control nameless too, 

All acquaintances only this,

Old lovers pushed away by subtle means,

The craven government requiring this,

Needs her to be anonymous,

Undercover in her own life,

Until one day, she’ll introduce herself,

As just a number, a subtle slip,

But recorded as a marking in some file,

A coded pictogram, an old boy’s affectation,

Hieroglyph or Greek in the margins,

Where the rushes grow wild

And the wild mountain streams fall,

Branch and split and recombine,

Into the white-waters of information,

The old man, reflecting and regretting,

Is in love with this agent,

The world turns and turns,

An axis for a planet in this small room,

At early morning, the rain gets in,

Through open windows,

And curtains lifted by the wind,

Gentle rain to wake the agent,

Overheard in accidental positioning,

Of screens and microphones,

It calls her to half-remembered history,

The subtle embroidery in quiet gardens,

Medieval princesses pivotal to kingdoms,

The sun sets with us,

At play in the evening light,

Down river to Greenwich,

Where the staff gather like mist,

And the dogs tumble,

In the dying day,

The bells call to evensong,

Appealing like angels,

And this last smile is gone,

Shivering away like dust,

And the women weep,

And the men stand hard against it,

The bells call to evensong,

Appealing like angels,

Tomorrow you must smile,

And hear the whispering,

And the hidden feet,

Of the executioner,

Dancing around you,

The bells call to evensong,

Appealing like angels,

This house has no notable features,

No pretensions in its high windows,

But reading between the lines,

It is stealing history still,

Warrants and accusations signed here,

Have made the world,

The military have hidden these rooms,

And Court has made camp here,

With three Queens Regnant,

Directing their own wars in other histories,

IV. Olympia – A Game of God

馬鹿外人

The dead are always here,

Haunting the aisles of arms fairs,

The unseen, suffocations,

dark at the shoulder,

Of these grey suits,

In the pick and mix of missiles,

The dark trade of what they know,

Yet cannot leave,

I imagine God as salesman,

Testing the respectable with guns,

Despairing at the disconnect,

Between manufacturer and use,

These blank-eyed bankers,

Selling ingenuity to senselessness,

Despair to the common man,

For a buck, for a fuck, to a man,

With his face torn out by shrapnel,

To the child in the rubble,

Expiring as they retire,

Calm and washed of the world,

Of the dust of other continents,

Quiet and safe in the twilight nulls,

But a last breath stalks the atmosphere,

The final lift of ash in a dying sigh,

Diffuses like poison in the whole air,

Inspired into his restless sleep,

To bind as divine messenger,

Of the mass effect of death,

The millions of de facto graves,

Bodies cast-off where they fell,

Standing at his right hand in sleep,

The shadows of dark actors,

Mark his name on the hotel wall,

These are evil trees, the devil’s hand,

A calling to a trade in organs,

To a trade in souls,

And the sweet wind bends them,

To the earth, to the abyss of no sense,

I cannot see a vector,

There is no unseen path between us,

But they wake me almost every night,

These shades I do not believe exist,

Beating time in the mind,

Overcoming drugs and sleep,

With effect at distance,

My own conscience is replaced,

Taking on the immoralities of mankind,

The sins of the man who made this,

This toy, some yellow scrap,

A doll in the concrete dust,

Or a dull glider part,

Ticking away until dawn,

Or until it’s kicked in curiosity,

Whichever comes the soonest,

And then it beeps in greeting,

And then explodes,

I’m sick for this sleeper,

His malaise is mine,

But he is just a carrier,

Asymptomatic and contagious,

Fatal at a distance,

A catalyst for chaos,

Unaffected in disaster,

And running the world with malice,

The smell of a solvent wakes me,

Tugging me up like a noose,

Painting me into some corner,

As it overcomes the air,

Filling my rooms with ether,

Until all space is flammable,

Tuning out the flat brass,

And the rotten woodwinds,

The dogs are here again,

Black and drooling this empty morning,

Ready for their servants,

Ready as the burden they become,

But I’m not ready for this today,

I’m armed against them,

By dreaming of my sister,

The owner of a better mind,

I’m black-clad and stealthy,

Through her I’m girded,

With strategies and plans,

They have not seen me leave,

Calmly taking taxi-ways,

Cruising the dawn streets,

With no interaction,

No light, no gravity,

No strong or weak nuclear force,

I’m taking all paths,

Unified without the maths,

It’s the craft of a hundred years,

The power in these quiet rooms,

Where the children whisper mischief,

In The Wars of The Libraries,

You’ve got no point in you,

You’re like the wind around the castle,

Jetting into the stinking sewers,

The latrines last used in sieges,

Five centuries ago,

I am the idiot; that I know,

It puts me into neutral, idling,

Knowing only the shells of books,

A cursed and cursory understanding,

Lost in the ways of the literate,

Those whole girls, gifted time,

Have beaten Western Philosophy,

Until it lies bleeding in the mind,

Near-dead, irrelevant, and incorrect,

Aware of the shadows fading ahead,

On the road to understanding,

They’ve gained victory in knowing,

They’ve gained victory and treasure,

Without letting blood or stillness,

Knowledge is in the trees and fields,

The swell of English winds and birdsong,

Lifting last year’s leaves,

With a breath of the old religions,

The summer palaces of the invaders,

Are surfacing again,

Stripped of the old horror, they come back,

Into this silence, lifted by the plough,

And so the rivals in my night terrors,

Find them in the dust of travel,

In the distant gloom of libraries,

With floors beyond my access,

V. Early Closing

It’s bright early-closing, some years ago,

In the mangled tense of past historical,

The butcher's shop, cleaned forensically, 

Is a crime-scene, post crime, 

All evidence of life and death erased, 

A matt white house of the spirits, 

Set like a jewel in the stone streets, 

There is a grey glint on the steel, 

Of a sharp machine, its function veiled, 

Reeking of sterile absence, 

But witness to quiet dissection,

We move on, past all shops shut,

And the sun, unseen except by ghosts,

Cracks the ground over a thousand years,

Sounding aloud in our senses,

The continuous explosions of decay,

The tiny settlements of airborne life,

Filling the cracks, filling the world,

With the relentless onward haul,

Of life and entropy and fission,

In the noon-blind bar on the corner,

Where the burning town fades out to grass,

And agriculture,

The afternoon endures at human pace,

Set to rights in the glow of beer and spirits,

Lifting the meek as heroes,

Bilingual knights, chivalrous and bold,

Imagining themselves as leaders,

Facing trembling dragons (councillors),

In petty things, disputes and boundaries,

It’s a rare thing in this valley,

A man who helps not himself,

But would lie down on the steps,

Of the council chambers there,

Wishing for small wars to raise him,

From the tediousness of the parochial,

Like playing tennis without the net you see,

Where the wind sets fair for his quest,

But our man is quieted (not unkindly),

By the whiskey-softened waves,

Of his comrades in this conflict,

And the motion is forgotten,

Until the sun returns another week,

It is always plausibly denied,

The ordering of the dead to be,

Air-gapped politically, smoke-free,

A distant separation of state and state,

Control has called a meeting,

On the burial of waste and stranger things,

Of gas and poisons in the wild,

Stalking the streets like fog at closing time,

And the whole town is collateral in this,

Generations obliterated for some small secret,

Which will out anyway,

And here is out, this day, this woman,

There is revolution in this assembly,

All loyalty betrayed and crumbling,

His lover (only imagined), discarding clearance,

Screams inwardly and he knows his end,

Old age and disgrace, old age and his real name,

In that last downward look across the room,

Control is gagged and tagged and walked out,

To his slow death in the Spanish Moss,

VI. A Spring Tide

There’s a shout above the white noise,

A factual call out from the Fisher King,

“Hold hard and look to seaward,

“The water is highest in an hour or two,

“And the weather there (he points),

“Threatens a surge and a high wind,

“It will be up to the house before long”,

But no one runs, no one runs,

She welcomes the sea to the garden,

A fluid, dynamic rush of white water,

Bringing in the waste of whole oceans,

And sucking out the filth of aeons,

The spooks and all their corpses,

Sucked out to the sound of chaos,

Now the wind is passed and salt remains,

Tasted on the daughter breeze,

Riming the hedge and shrubbery like jewels,

“We need rain” she thinks,

“The salt will kill the garden,

“And the salt will kill the garden”,

(But then realising she has said it twice),

“We are dealing with the future,

“And it’s no matter now the sun is out... -"

 

 

A Review of :

American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of 

J. Robert Oppenheimer 

by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin

Current editions of this book come with the standard “SOON TO BE A MAJOR HOLLYWOOD MOVIE”, a phrase which often accompanies the common coincidence of Biography and Biopic. However with such a definitive and lengthy life story as this (770 pages including copious notes on sources), it is clear that however suitable the director, however brilliant the actors, and however much money is sunk into the historical feel of the thing, a film like this can only ever be a murky window into the life of its protagonist.

Oppenheimer is a towering figure in Atomic physics, not only for his own work but for the leadership of the US Atomic Bomb programme, which from a standing start produced the world’s first atomic bombs in only three years. After their first (and thankfully last) use in war, and against people, Oppenheimer’s deep understanding of science, literature, and history led him to question further development of atomic weapons and he became a strong advocate of international agreements not to produce further devices. This stance put him on a collision course with his own government. The hastily-convened, and constitutionally-illegal enquiry which resulted in him losing his security clearance has become a notorious low-point in the United States’ long history of consuming its own children.

Julius Robert Oppenheimer, known as Robert or “Oppy”, was born in New York City in 1904, the son of Julius, a wealthy textile importer, and Ella, a painter, both of Jewish-German descent. He had a younger brother Frank, who like him became a physicist. From the start, this biography does not skimp on detail, it does not speed through Oppy’s early life, an approach which allows a proper understanding of his character and motives in the years when he was a radical liberal, a “fellow traveller” with the early US communist movement, through his conversion to patriot motivated by the perceived need to beat Nazi Germany to build an atomic bomb. Without this detail of Oppenheimer’s life, his sudden change of political mind might seem jarring, perhaps motivated by a desire to get paid by government to do something simply to confirm that it could be done. Seen with the supporting detail of a wide-ranging education, and a love of learning for its own sake however, it is easy to understand Oppy’s progress from liberal professor at the cutting edge of Quantum Theory, to a respected icon of scientific endeavour.

Nevertheless it is also clear that Oppenheimer was tragically flawed. He was able to keep an audience of non-scientists enraptured, speaking in whole sentences without notes and yet with fellow scientists and politicians at all levels up to The President himself, he could be dangerously candid. He produced the analysis which let the US Military choose Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the targets of the bombs which supposedly ended the War in the Pacific. However, at the time of these decisions, the US was already aware of secret Japanese communications suggesting they were looking for a way to end the conflict. The Americans were also aware that The Soviet Union was about to declare war on Japan and it is probable that the surrender would have happened without the attacks. Oppenheimer was not party to this information, and went ahead with the analysis. On his first and last meeting with President Truman after the bombs had been dropped he said he felt like he had blood on his hands, an emotional statement which led Truman to decree that Oppenheimer should never be readmitted to the Oval Office and to embellish the details of the meeting in future increasingly melodramatic accounts designed to make Oppy look weak.

Oppenheimer, obviously deeply affected by his role in the Manhattan Project, became a strong advocate of International control over nuclear weapons and disagreed strongly with some of his more gung-ho Los Alamos colleagues such as Edward Teller who immediately started advocating for what became known colloquially as “The Super” – the thermonuclear or hydrogen bomb, a weapon with the potential for detonations many multiples of the simple fission weapons of 1945. It was clear to Oppy that there were no targets of The Super which were big enough and that its use would be simple genocide, a race towards complete destruction of both opposing nations together with much collateral damage to the entire planet. In the face of the Soviet acquisitions first of fission devices and then their own hydrogen bombs, this call for sanity flagged Oppenheimer, after the war a consultant to the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), as an obstacle to the further development of such weapons. In addition, his prickly demeanour, easily dealt with by many of his fellow scientists, became a stimulus for personal vendettas from certain politicians and Washington insiders. Notable among these was the businessman, Lewis Strauss, the chairman of the AEC who developed an almost irrational dislike of Oppenheimer. The FBI had been monitoring Oppy for many years, the result of his flirtations with many Communist Party members as part of his support for union activities in California, often using illegal (and therefore inadmissible) wiretaps.

Strauss, with the assistance of the FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, gained access to these and used them to build a case for the removal of Oppenheimer’s security clearance, a move which Strauss hoped would end his government career, and perhaps even render him unemployable. The security review, pointedly referred to by its instigators as “not a trial” was a tetchy, biased, and bitter affair, with consequences for all participants. It comes late in the book but is the brilliant hub around which the rest of the text hangs. It is more redolent of a Soviet political trial, the attempted destruction of an “expert” for political purposes and foreshadows more recent extreme attitudes towards knowledge and rationality. The “review” resulted in the largely-symbolic removal of Oppenheimer’s clearance but contrary to its outcome, raised his public profile to what has been compared to the suppression of Galileo by The Inquisition for the promotion of heliocentrism. Only decades later did the idea of Atomic Weapons treaties gain ground in the face of the obvious madness of nuclear proliferation.

The book has a massive cast of heroes and villains. Einstein bumbles in and out of later chapters, the iconic figure of scientific authority. Richard Feynman clowns around in Los Alamos cameos (his own chatty memoirs provide a contrasting personal look at the building of the atomic bombs). Strauss, Teller and a host of oleaginous lawyers flesh out the darker side of the US establishment, though at the end of everything Oppenheimer himself is part of the establishment, a more honourable reflection of what the United States has claimed to be since the Declaration of Independence. In December 2022, the Biden administration voided the revoking of Oppy’s security clearance. Kai Bird, one of the authors of this Pulitzer-prize winning book said “History matters and what was done to Oppenheimer in 1954 was a travesty, a black mark on the honor of the nation”.

Oppy himself was a widely-read man of deep thinking and measured response. That he was so badly treated by his country is a tragedy. Shortly before the Trinity test, the first atomic explosion in history he made his hopes and feelings about the potential use clear using a quotation from Bhartṛhari's Śatakatraya:

        In battle, in the forest, at the precipice in the mountains,

        On the dark great sea, in the midst of javelins and arrows,

        In sleep, in confusion, in the depths of shame,

        The good deeds a man has done before defend him.

So read this book before the film and then let it go, enjoy the drama because a two hour movie cannot hope to sum up this complex and towering figure.