"Fuel to their Fire": On the Sante Fe Doctor Atomic

I.

I never stoop'd so low, as they
Which on an eye, cheek, lip, can prey ;
Seldom to them which soar no higher
Than virtue, or the mind to admire.
For sense and understanding may
Know what gives fuel to their fire ;

I dreamed I was at the center of the crucifixion. I dreamed I was at the center of the crucifixion, a secular crucifixion upon which hung all of humanity, in the crosshairs of time. I dreamed I was at the cross hairs of the end of time. I dreamed I was at the cross hairs of the end of time that would not end as it ended, as it ended, as it continued to end, as it approached midnight, as it approached two minutes to midnight and continued to ever, to never, not arrive, in an endless non-concluding, in an endless stretching toward the ever-approaching, the infinitely-receding event horizon of midnight. I dreamed.

John Adams' Doctor Atomic begins with--as in his other two great operas on contemporaneity, Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer--the chorus, singing and commenting, singing as commenting. This time, however, the chorus only arises after a long series of electronic vibrations, like painfully amplified giant insects menacing your ear, and statics, cracklings, hums, chuggings--a plane floats across the sky of your mind--and pops; a 40s pop tune flashing into phase then out again, as though Doctor Frankenstein were falling, flailing, through a storm of time as though he were Dorothy in the cyclone, watching wonders and nightmares go by, and wonder turning into nightmare; a symphonic pulse of dread erases all of that, and the kettle drum bangs out a pulse of time within that larger pulse, and within a tense shimmer of sound the chorus sings a scientific Credo, feel free to insert "We dreamed," wherever you see, "We believed":

We believed that
'Matter can be neither
created nor destroyed
but only altered in form.'
We believed that
'Energy can be neither
created nor destroyed
but only altered in form.'
But now we know
That energy
may become matter,
and now we know that
matter may become energy

I went to the New York premiere of Doctor Atomic, John Adams and Peter Sellars' opera about J. Robert Oppenheimer and the making of the atomic bomb, at The Metropolitan Opera in 2008. I did not enjoy it.

The Met, ever too careful, hired someone else to direct it besides the only choice, which to my mind was Peter Sellars, the librettist and original director. Sellars was not to direct an opera there until the Met finally and quite dilatorily allowed Adams' Nixon in China to play there in 2011--so long after playing its NYC premiere, just across the East River, at BAM, in 1987--with the British soprano, Janis Kelly, singing Pat Nixon, and absolutely killing it.

I went to the New York premiere of Doctor Atomic at The Metropolitan Opera. I did not enjoy it. But my friend, Dan, said--Dan, who also went to see it with his partner, now husband, Luke, both of whom enjoyed it more than I did--Dan said, at the time, being, with Luke, a veteran of the Santa Fe Opera, having lived in Santa Fe for several years before moving to New York, Dan said that Santa Fe absolutely had to do Doctor Atomic there, because Los Alamos--where Luke's father had worked-- was not only nearby, but is visible, always visible, through the back of the outdoor Santa Fe opera house. The pull of the place and one of the world's great opera houses surely could not be denied for long.

The three of us had left New York, when word came that the Santa Fe Opera would indeed be performing Doctor Atomic this summer, and we vowed we would go. And go we did. With our friend, Joe.

Go we did. And see it we did, on Thursday, 2 August 2018.

You must understand. The locus was a thing unto itself. The place was the thing. The place was the thing unto a vision of the thing that the thing was about. Let me try again.

The place had a view upon the thing and the view made of the place the thing itself. The thing, the occurrence, which is the, was the, thing was actually some hours away by car, but the place of the planning of the thing, was within view of the place of performance, and that city of suicides, that place of planning, which was in direct view, its lights twinkling in the distance, in the background of the performance of the opera house, which was, which is, the twinkling distance of every performance at the opera house, is Los Alamos. And while the Trinity Site, the place called Ground Zero, is some hours beyond that town of planning, science, radiation, poison, chromium, pollution, and suicides, since all metaphor and simile are only a species of metonym, each place, the place of planning in view of the place of opera, and vice versa, and the unseen place of testing, the unseen place of explosion, of sea glass in the desert, of unknowable, unpredictable, unkind winds, and all the places downwind from that place, metonymically collapse into the same place. When you are watching Doctor Atomic at the Santa Fe Opera House, you are in many ways more than one, in Los Alamos, at Ground Zero, and every place that was ever downwind or water from that thought, from that bright, brilliant, deadly, human idea. Its hell-bright flash will light up your mind and leave only your shadow behind on the wall, just near, where you no longer stood. Isn't that an odd sentence. Time is confusing--time is confused--in the nuclear age. Space is, too. Time-space. Space-time.


II.

My love, though silly, is more brave ;
For may I miss, whene'er I crave,
If I know yet what I would have.

I dreamed I was at the center of the crucifixion. I dreamed I was at the crosshairs of time. Four women, dressed in the colors of bloods, or of sunsets, or of explosions, danced throughout my dream. I took them to be the four cardinal points, or, more likely, the winds that blow cardinally from those places, incarnated, incarnadined, reddened by the future, by time, weighted and exploded and bloodied; watching, pulling near, regularly, their arms enfolding each other, facing each other, and then floating away, and spinning and dancing and watching. Because, you see, the winds and the weather, were key to that night, when we exploded the first atomic bomb.

Watching them, I could only think of Walter Benjamin's Angel of History, itself a meditation on Klee's famous painting, that might be as famous as it has become because of Benjamin's words on this funny scroll-haired figure, an image Benjamin owned, but is now in the collection of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. Benjamin writes in what we call in English his Theses on History:

Es gibt ein Bild von Klee, das Angelus Novus heißt. Ein Engel ist darauf dargestellt, der aussieht, als wäre er im Begriff, sich von etwas zu entfernen, worauf er starrt. Seine Augen sind aufgerissen, sein Mund steht offen und seine Flügel sind ausgespannt. Der Engel der Geschichte muß so aussehen. Er hat das Antlitz der Vergangenheit zugewendet. Wo eine Kette von Begebenheiten vor uns erscheint, da sieht er eine einzige Katastrophe, die unablässig Trümmer auf Trümmer häuft und sie ihm vor die Füße schleudert. Er möchte wohl verweilen, die Toten wecken und das Zerschlagene zusammenfügen. Aber ein Sturm weht vom Paradiese her, der sich in seinen Flügeln verfangen hat und so stark ist, daß der Engel sie nicht mehr schließen kann. Dieser Sturm treibt ihn unaufhaltsam in die Zukunft, der er den Rücken kehrt, während der Trümmerhaufen vor ihm zum Himmel wächst. Das, was wir den Fortschritt nennen, ist dieser Sturm.

There is a picture by Klee, called Angelus Novus. An angel is depicted there that looks like it is about to move away from something it is staring at. Its eyes are wide open, its mouth is open, and its wings are open. The Angel of History must look like this. It has turned its face to the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, it sees a single catastrophe, which constantly piled up rubble on rubble and threw it at its feet. It would like to linger, wake the dead, and put together the broken one. But a storm blows from Paradise, which has caught in its wings and is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives it inexorably into the future, to which it turns its back, while the heap of rubble in front of it grows to heaven. What we call progress is this storm. [Translation, mine]

I have always found it difficult to interpret this image and square it with Benjamin's description, ever since I first saw it some twenty-nine years ago. It is a perverse image, is it not? A strange smile plays on the lips of this creature, this creation of God. But what Walter Benjamin has to say of this image, and its relationship to that hoary, hopeful, misplaced optimism we call "Progress," has, I feel, everything to do with the storm unleased upon the stage and the planet by Doctor Atomic, Doctor Faustus, Doctor Frankenstein, Doctor Einstein, Doctor Bohr, and Doctor Oppenheimer. But it is the winds of Progress about which I would like to speak.

III.

If that be simply perfectest,
Which can by no way be express'd
But negatives, my love is so.

Luke, Joe, and I ducked into a talk given by Peter Sellars before the opera began. He spoke of a few things. He spoke of how General Groves refused to listen to the meteorological group of the Project--in a certain manner of speaking, the heroes of the piece--who said that the winds were so erratic, on that night of the explosion of the first atomic bomb, that it could not be predicted whether they would blow in a safe direction away from the blast site, or toward populated regions of New Mexico. Not just toward the lands of native peoples--who were not considered, of course, negligible, but less than negligible--but toward towns and cities where white people lived. The general decided it was worth it to take the chance, and so, as it came to pass, the winds did blow in such a direction that many cities and towns, many, many individuals were exposed to the fallout from the first atomic explosion. They are known now, as the "downwinders," and Groves' decision had devastating consequences from the people living then, and their children, and their grandchildren, such that some of them are working through their third or fourth cancers. Making such a local production at Santa Fe, Sellars insured that when the character of Groves makes that decision in the opera, he is surrounded by wounded downwinders and the children and granchildren of downwinders, onstage.

Before the opera began, Luke and I, thirsty after a pre-performance talk and the task of finding our seats noted both the impending start time of the opera and the gathering of clouds not just on the horizon, but closer, still, decided to make a last ditch run for the bar, as winds began to buffet the house, open as it is to the air on three sides. The wind and the rain parted our hair on the other side as we made our way to the house right plaza and bar at the Santa Fe Opera House, which had suddenly become a drama of its own. I thought, as we stood in the short line, to order a drink, the ill-named, "Manhattan Project" Manhattan, of the time, for which I wasn't present--this being my first time to this house--when Luke and Dan witnessed, because of an atmospheric effect, a storm, a swarm of bats flooding the air inside the house, at a key moment during the statue sequence of Don Giovonni. What we were about to experience was nothing so simple and beautiful as that moment.

As we, literally, ran back to our seats, our hair, now, being parterd on the other, other side, the wind and the rain picked up and continued, as we took our seats. It increased as the opera began, and for at least half of the first act, the rain, the lightning, and thunder, truly, dramatized itself across the landscape around us, and onto the stage. At one point, we could see stagehands sweeping the pools of rain off the back of the stage, to the extraordinary, the frightening flashing of lightning on both sides. The wind kicked the spray of the water everywhere, till I could feel droplets upon my face. We couldn't even hear the singers on stage anymore and had to truly resort to the untercaptions on the backs of the seats in front of us. It was glorious! And in my mind's ear, I could hear Peter Sellars cackling madly through all of it, as nature proved the opera's point, first-hand.


IV.

To all, which all love, I say no.
If any who deciphers best,
What we know not ourselves can know,
Let him teach me that nothing. This
As yet my ease and comfort is,
Though I speed not, I cannot miss.

The last aria of the first act--yes, in showbiz terms, the first act closer!--gives us Oppenheimer, immediately after some strange, comic business between him and General Groves about Groves' diet, is an aria that pulls Oppenheimer out of time. The time is out of joint in Doctor Atomic, throughout. And the real Oppenheimer was enthusiastic about his creation, up to, including, and after his famous realization at the bomb's explosion, straight out of Spiritus Mundi, straight from the Gita, that he had become Destroyer of Worlds:

I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.

Personally, I have not had the privilege--or the doom--of thinking that. But as the blood of the bomb flows in both directions, as the realization, momentary, and thrilling, though it may have been at the time of his sighting of the horrible fireball of the Trinity Project, is yet to happen in this opera, and in this opera, will never happen, because it ends precisely before its detonation, Adams and Sellars give us, at the end of act one, a suddenly shattered Oppenheimer, as though suddenly possessed by his future self--remember, Doctor Frankenstein is falling through time, like the Angel of History--his future self, the self seen, for example, in Heinar Kipphardt's In der Sache J. Robert Oppenheimer, the original documentary drama of the atomic age, a drama which uses only the actual words spoken by the actual people. In Adams and Sellars' conception, Oppenheimer suddenly sings the most difficult, beautiful, sexy, and exciting of John Donne's Holy Sonnets, the very poem, which, though it never uses the word "trinity" was a favorite poem of the highly literate J. Robert Oppenheimer, and was the source for his specific name for his project, The Trinity Project. Oppenheimer's enormous hubris and unconscious ambivalence about the project is writ large in every line of this maddening, disturbing poem, in which the speaker tells his Lord, in a series of extraordinary contradictions, reversals, and paradoxes, that he never can be free without His enthrallment, nor ever chaste, without His ravishing--His raping--him. It is all--and yet it is also the not all, pas-tout--sex and eroticism and violence and ambiguity and sorrow. This is how we end act one.

(Text taken from John Donne's Holy Sonnet )
Batter my heart,
three person'd God; for, you
As yet but knock, breathe, knock,
breathe, knock, breathe
Shine, and seek to mend;
Batter my heart, three person'd God;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow
me, and bend
your force, to break,
blow, break, blow,
break, blow burn
and make me new.
Batter my heart, three person'd God; for, you
As yet but knock, breathe, knock,
breathe, knock, breathe
Shine, and seek to mend;
Batter my heart, three person'd God;
That I may rise, and stand,
o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break,
blow, break, blow, break,
blow burn and make me new.
I, like an usurpt town, to another due,
Labor to'admit you, but oh, to no end,
Reason your viceroy in me,
me should defend, but is captiv'd,
and proves weak or untrue,
Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov'd fain
But am betroth'd unto your enemy,
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

It is worth seeing Sellars first conception of this great aria, with the very expressive, wonderful tenor, Gerald Finley, creating the role. I call it the "film noir" version of Doctor Atomic, with fedoras, and mysteries: the femme fatale is the bomb itself, as we see here, with Oppenheimer's ambivalence. The subtitles are in Dutch.

It is not apropos of nothing, but apropos of nothing, it is worth hearing Adams' other setting of Donne, Negative Love.

I never stoop'd so low, as they
Which on an eye, cheeke, lip, can prey,
Seldom to them, which soare no higher
Than vertue or the minde to'admire,
For sense, and understanding may
Know, what gives fuell to their fire:
My love, though silly, is more brave,
For may I misse, when ere I crave,
If I know yet, what I would have.

If that be simply perfectest
Which can by no way be exprest
But Negatives, my love is so.
To All, which all love, I say no.
If any who deciphers best,
What we know not, our selves, can know,
Let him teach mee that nothing; This
As yet my ease, and comfort is,
Though I speed not, I cannot misse.

V.

On July 16, 1945 near Alamagordo, New Mexico at the "Trinity Site," the United States detonated an 18.6 kiloton bomb. The amount of energy released was equivalent to the conversion of 0.9 gram of matter into energy. One gram is roughly the mass of a standard paperclip.

Truman learned after Nagasaki that Hiroshima was not just a military target--he had been told that it was a military base, not a city teeming with civilians (nor, I am sure, that a POW camp, with American soldiers living in it, was nearby and also destroyed by the atomic blast)--and that a third target was planned. He was so angry that he had been lied to by the US military that he pulled the plug on any further attacks or tests, and ensured that a civilian component was required for any more atomic explosions to occur, to wit: the military had the bombs, but only the civilian scientists had access to the required enriched uranium.

The last sung business of the opera is given to Oppenheimer, who, in a direct reference to the closing of act one, mentions a god, an affair, and a battered heart, a heart which will be much more battered as the years progress, as the opera, ever gestures, ever bloodied, forward and backward

Lord, these affairs are hard on the heart.

(Nothing moves and nothing is heard, only a rhythmic
countdown over the loudspeaker. At 45 seconds, an
engineer presses the timer switch. The tours begin
firing with haunting precision. "One, zero." A
mournful silence and the beginning of a new era)

 Time is marked, again, still, in so many ways: strings. You cannot escape time.

Alex Ross in his review of the first production in 2005, writes of going to the Trinity site, and the place they called "Ground Zero," the term more familiar in these latter days as the waste dump of wreckage and unidentifiable human remains of what had been the World Trade Center. He says:

The terrain beneath the bomb—Ground Zero, it was called—also underwent a transformation, which scientists are still trying to understand. When Trinity personnel came back to inspect the site, they found a green, glassy substance covering the ground. The latest hypothesis is that this artificial mineral, which was named trinitite, formed when soil, water, and organic matter were lifted off the ground and fused in the heat of the blast. Over the years, tourists have carried away much of the trinitite in their pockets—the site is open to visitors twice a year—and most of the rest was buried beneath the soil. Looking down at the ground, you would never know that anything out of the ordinary had happened here.

The final words of the opera are recorded and in Japanese:

My husband is missing. My children need water. Do you have any water? Do you have any water? Do you have any water? Do you have any water? 

From May 9, 2020

We are all joined to each other in this pandemic, you fools.

It is not that "one death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic," as Stalin is supposed to have once said, in his infinite wisdom (a god-like wisdom that seems even more applicable today, in our current political situation, than ever before, which is better suited to Stalin, than ever before), but that every death is a tragedy implying, or rather, insisting upon one to four more tragic deaths, on an exponential level--yes, and they infected two friends, and so on, and so on, and so on....

The current administration fumblingly, bumblingly believes it can outpace this pandemic, because it believes that, statistically, "white people don't get it." The only thing that really makes sense out of that statement is that white people don't get that they can get it, the virus, and its accompanying disease, COVID-19, which, amazingly, expresses itself differently according to population, age, and preexisting condition.

Look to our brothers and sisters in Europe, you fools. Can you not see that its expression in Italy and the UK--alone!--shows its virulence among, so-called, white people? The fact that our most vulnerable people--black and brown and native and immigrant people, who, whether you like it or not, are attached to all of us as by an iron umbilicus, who are our brothers and sisters, whether you like it or not, whose every last fucking death or sickness is a tragedy to us, whether you like it or not--whose death and sickness is really the canary in the coal mine, means that this virus has spread to every last corner of our country, whether you like it or not.

We can't play this game of letting people of color, who just so happen to provide the essential work in the fields and factories of this nation, die or sicken because we both think their lives don't matter and that this virus doesn't apply to us. This is one of the things, before this most obvious time, that was meant when someone tried to tell you that Black Lives (Actually) Matter, you fool, you ignoramus, you stupid, stupid monster--yes, monster!--you lazy Nazi, who allowed Nazis to appear in our streets, with their guns and their swastika flags, and said nothing: this makes of you a Nazi, too, you, you fool, who said nothing and stood by, until they, or the virus, came for you. 

And can we tell the difference anymore between a government who does not close but opens the way for a virus to come for all of us--as it surely is already doing--and the virus itself?

I weep, daily, for my nation, and the fools whose every life is a gift and every death--each and every one--is an unbearable and preventable tragedy.

If you think this virus isn't coming for you and your family, you, or I, will be proven wrong, very soon.