....then all bets are off.

Well, here I am again, left with a sort of diary attempt of which I have been totally neglectful. But I'm going to try not to despair or get down on myself. This blog is really for myself above all else- I think in all likelihood no one is reading this but me.

So rather than do a long recap, I'll just start where I am. By the title of this entry, one can see that I have already got my tickets to this year's LebowskiFest in Louisville, KY. I've wanted to attend a Lebowski fest for YEARS and now is the time. It's really happening in 2006. I'm so excited I can barely stand it. I'm bulking up for trivia contests and trying to think of a really good costume. Last Halloween I went everywhere as Uli Kunkel's girlfriend- Amy Mann's character, the nihilist who gave up her toe. I may resurrect that outfit. I wonder if I could dress up my dog as a marmot. I wonder if my dog would forgive me for that. hmmm.

My days lately have been filled with reading of all sorts. I'm reading some Foucault that's proving helpful for my work, and helpful for thinking. I feel when I read him that I am reading about my work, about other fields, and even about myself. His writing style is hypnotic and almost, well, I guess sexy. Here's one example that I copied in my notebook...

"What in fact, are medicine, grammar, or political economy? Are they merely a retrospective regrouping by which the contemporary sciences deceive themselves as to their own past? Are they forms that have become established once and for all and have gone on developing through time? Do they conceal other unities?"

and another...

"The analysis of thought is always allegorical in relation to the discourse that it employs. Its question is unfailingly: what was being said in what was said?"

I'd like to write about what I think of these passages, and how remarkably beautifully I think they are written and translated. But, right now I'm just that asshole who's quoting Foucault. If I write more about this then I'll be an asshole with a blog who quotes Foucault and bullshits about Foucault in her spare time. And I guess I've found out I'm somehow ready to be the former, but definitely not the latter. At least, not now.

I've also been caught up deeply in some nonfiction reading (which, I'm kind of embarrassed to say isn't usual for me) after finishing Lydia Millet's Oh Pure and Radiant Heart. Now, I have no idea if there is something just kind of kooky and off about me- which is totally possible. But, I read this book in two days and went to bed on the third day. I didn't get out of bed until the fifth day. And then, I only did so because I wanted to venture out and see about getting "American Prometheus" and see if Netflix had delivered a documentary I requested from the comfort of my bedroom called The Day After Trinity. A week and a half after finishing this book I had returned no phone calls, no emails, and hadn't ever really gotten properly dressed.

So what was all this about with me? I'm still not sure. I became, after reading this book, gripped by the idea that by looking into the heart of the atom, we as a civilization had perhaps glimpsed god. Whatever god metaphorically or really might be. I myself am not religious so I don't venture an opinion one way or another. And it reminded me so much of the myth of Cupid and Psyche, at least, the way it was retold in Till We Have Faces. As though it had been something too powerful and too terrible to have seen.

Do not mistake me in my clumsy attempt to explain my bizarre reaction to this book. I don't mean to say that I literally think that scientists saw the face of a human looking god in the atom- like those people who see the virgin Mary in taco shells. It just seems to me that the atom is life, the basic building block of life. And to be "atom-busters" as some of them called themselves, would seem to be an immense act of god playing.

Of course, there are sub atomic particles, we know that now. And I'm know that the outcry of forbidden and terrible knowledge has gone out concerning scientific advancement before. It does now and will on into the future. It just seems so strange that we as a people have done this. That we have seen into the heart of god, that we are like Persephone and have eaten this pomegranate seed, and so have brought the marriage of hell and life on earth in closer proximity to one another.

I tried to talk to a friend of mine about this when he questioned me about being incommunicado for so long. He seemed so confused and couldn't stop telling me that nuclear war wasn't going to happen, and so forth. I couldn't seem to find the right words to make him understand that I wasn't upset about that. I was upset that this knowledge was real. That we had the knowledge to, quickly, in a matter of minutes, unmake ourselves and all life that shares this place with us. The existence of this knowledge makes me feel sad, as though there is no wonder left in the world. There is no mystery, no magic. It almost feels like we know everything after this. Well, not everything, but certainly most everything that is useful for knowing and living boils down to the making and destruction of things. And now we have seen that in one small bit of matter, we can do both on a planetary scale.

My state of mind over Lydia Millet's book was probably not aided much by the fact that I head recently finished Douglas Coupland's Girlfriend in a Comastyle="font-style:italic;">. While I wasn't really overwhelmed by that book, it had some interesting parts, and some interesting ideas. I wrote it off at the time as sort of a "morality tale," "scary future for us all..." blah blah blah type of book. But then after reading Millet, I returned to it in my mind, remembering the latter portion of the book when all the characters are left living in the world after everyone else has fallen asleep and died- all simultaneously. The basic comment the book attempts to make at the end here is that we as a species have created world in which, if there was some kind of quasi religious/magical apocalypse tomorrow, the earth itself could not recover from our presence. Our nuclear plants and strip mines and toxic waste would still be here
without us to regulate and guard them, in which case if there were suddenly no humans, the planet could not restore these things back to a natural state. There would be radiation everywhere, poisons in the sky. All of this leaves me with a horribly foreboding feeling of: what have we done?

In The Day After Trinity, we hear Oppenheimer speak his famous quote from the Bhagavad Gita in which he references Vishnu, saying, "I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." It amazed and disturbed me that so many of the American scientists who worked at Los Alamos considered themselves highly erudite. Oppenheimer in particular, felt he was a moral man, a man of science but also of philosophy. All of these men seemed to have relationships to the bomb and process of making it that are precarious at times, but based in a deep conviction that this was for a good. Many said later they did not dream it would ever be used and were shocked by Truman's decision to drop it, not once even but twice.

However, it is strange to note that after VE day, when the threat of Heisenberg and the Nazi attempts to make a bomb were over, the scientists felt no need to halt their work. The world, they seemed to have felt, would be better, safer with this knowledge and this object in it. Political debating aside and historical revisionism aside, I am just left with a sense of unease deep within myself about the fact that we now live with this in our world as a matter of fact, of history. One man at Los Alamos spoke in this documentary about the day after VE day. He mentioned that the work of the project had reached a kind of rhythm, as though the pursuit of this knowledge had become so essential, with such heavy investments that there was hardly a thought of stopping. Wanting to know and how to do can be a desire that becomes almost lustful, I think. And finally knowing and being able to do is so terribly sexy, maddeningly elusive, and almost feverish in its closeness that it becomes more about a completion of self than a prized addition to the existing credentials of human knowledge.

The fact that we live in a world that is "post-atomic," as it is called is not news. It isn't as though I have just discovered these historical facts and am shocked by them. It's just that for some reason I can't exactly say, I'm caught by them and ensnared in a way that I cannot untangle. I suppose I shouldn't be- there are many other things in need of course correction in our world. So much healing that needs to be done with all the poverty, hate, and war that goes on around us.

But, as always, this is my blog, my secret blog, and I can grouse about anything that I wish. And as all this has me stuck I thought I'd try and let it out here. It's strange to think that men once thought that the way towards peace was to make war somehow harder. As though the existence of the bomb would shock humans to their senses, causing us to see that if we could use this too impersonal and casual tool of massive destruction against one another, this would make the prospect of war seem further from us.

Sometimes when I think on those that have gone before me, those geniuses of science who really seemed to believe this, I get a sad and ironic smile on my face. Because I remember when I was a small child, my brothers used to whack me during our rough and tumble games with their nerf bats. I cried and cried to my father, whose solution was to give us all Louisville sluggers. This he felt, would even the playing field and make our little game of bat-whack so painful for all that we would certainly abandon it. Several hours and many ghastly bruises later, a makeshift game of baseball had gone awry in our yard. Tempers, so volitile amongst scrappy siblings, had flared. My father realized that his solution was perhaps naive and had to suspend unmonitored baseball play privileges for us for the rest of the summer. Somehow, the principle here in my own personal history and that of a much larger event do not seem wholly unrelated.