“The land lone and leveled”: J. Newsom and J. Oppenheimer
Peeling Back the Layers in Joanna Newsom’s Divers, Part 3
Thanks for joining me again as we look at the layers and layers and layers in Divers. We’ll stick with “Sapokanikan” for a bit more, while there are still things to say.
If you’ve come across this without reading Part 1 and Part 2, I’d recommend you start with those!
Reflecting and Refracting
When Dave Eggers asked Joanna Newsom about “Sapokanikan” and the process of writing it, she explained:
I do strongly believe in the magic of words… I felt like that song really wanted to exist, and I was trying to collect everything that it needed to exist. And it took me a couple years, actually, that particular one did.
The power of words and JN’s masterful writing leaves me (nearly) speechless. Above and beyond the powerful message of the song, of memory and forgetting, and the unequal way in which that plays out across history and in our present day. Above and beyond that — keep in mind that people have been listening and exploring the song for 8 years now, and still coming across revelations like the allusions to XRF and lead white snow. And then imagine what “a hunter, a hundred years from now” might decipher! It’s all about new ways of listening, new ways of seeing.
And X-ray fluorescence itself is a new way of seeing. If we reflect on the processes and evolution of working with palimpsests and overpainting, how scholars studied them with lenses (magnifying glasses), then chemical treatments, then ultraviolet, and X-ray and infrared, then XRF… each act of looking brings with it new observations. It’s heartening to see the progress of paleography and archeology and art history develop methods to study artifacts in a way that respects them, rather than damage. I wonder if or how that ties into the broader themes of the song?
We could stop there. We’ve seen the layers. We’ve seen the “scholar[s] surmise”, while leaving the woman buried under the Patch of Grass.
Why would we look harder at how the scholars are seeing?
But…if you’ve read some of my other writing about Divers, you’ll know that I’ve mentioned a few times the way that optics weaves into the album. The most readily visible example comes with “A Pin-Light Bent” and the references to the camera obscura used in painting (especially by “Dutch Masters”). So the inner workings of the optical devices matter. And you’ll also recall that we’ve run across many, many examples of spirals and cyclical imagery throughout the work. So we’re highly attuned to anything with a spiral or circle.
And in our explorations here, we’ve run into X-ray fluorescence a few times. Unlike the dentist’s office X-ray machines, though, the kind of machine that can perform XRF imaging isn’t as ubiquitous. Instead, it’s powered by what’s called a synchrotron, which is specialized research equipment available only at certain institutions. Synchrotrons are particle accelerators. As in, sub-atomic particles like electrons, protons, and quarks.
If you’ve seen the Christopher Nolan film Oppenheimer, you may remember Dr. Ernest Lawrence, the Berkeley professor who started the Radiation Laboratory there. That lab became what is today known as Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which has its own synchrotron, called Advanced Light Source (ALS) — a photo of it appears above.
In 1939, Dr. Lawrence was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for inventing and creating the predecessor to the synchrotron. He was thinking about particle acceleration, which at the time was being pioneered in linear fashion (for example, if you’re familiar with Stanford University’s Linear Accelerator, SLAC). The issue, Lawrence foresaw, was that to get particles to go fast enough, you’d need a really really long straight line.
His solution — hold on to your hats, Divers fans — was to accelerate in a spiral! He called it the “cyclotron” (“cycle” and “electron”).
Dr. Lawrence found a way to compress the space needed, using vacuums and magnets to bend the arc of the electrons’ path. The basic premise continues today, except that synchrotrons accelerate in circles, not ever-widening spirals. In an album that wrestles with linearity and loops in time, it feels all too fitting to find these devices playing an important role.
For a little more background and visuals on synchrotrons, I’d suggest this introductory clip. SLAC is where Dr. Bergmann and team worked on the Archimedes Palimpsest (and it gets a shoutout around 5:43):
As we learn in the video, the byproduct of accelerating in a circle, synchrotron radiation is what’s “released when particles don’t travel in a straight line”. It’s this radiation which is channeled into “beamlines” around the ring and used for XRF imaging. DESY, the synchrotron in Hamburg, Germany is where Van Gogh’s Patch of Grass was scanned. And the Australian Synchrotron near Melbourne is where Streeton’s effaced self-portrait was scrutinized.
My mind drifts back to the Radiation Lab at Berkeley. The photograph below was taken in 1938, before Dr. Lawrence received his Nobel, and before the Manhattan Project. Lawrence sits in the front row, fourth from the left, with his team around him. Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer sits on the top of the huge magnet yoke, pipe in hand.
The National Park Service describes it this way:
In 1929 at the University of California — Berkeley, Lawrence invented what would become one of the most important contributions to the success of the Manhattan Project, the cyclotron. The cyclotron accelerated nuclear particles to a high velocity without using high voltage; these particles bombarded atoms of several different elements, often forming new elements.
If you watched the Nolan film, you may recall the marble bowls. The bigger bowl represented the uranium refined in Oak Ridge, Tennessee’s Y-12 plant. “Cyclotrons […] were used at Y-12 to separate lighter uranium 235 from heavier uranium 238. This separated uranium was used as fuel for Little Boy, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima” on August 6, 1945 — killing an estimated 140,000 people.
All exeunt! All go out!
[…]
The city is gone.
Look, and despair.
Look, and despair.
The Modern Prometheus
As I mentioned in prior writing, “Ozymandias” poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote Prometheus Unbound. His wife, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, wrote The Modern Prometheus — better known by its other title, Frankenstein. The passage from her book is fitting here as well, which describes the scientist’s reaction when he beholds his creation:
I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.
Newsom alludes to Prometheus and the other fallen Titans, as I’ve noted elsewhere, in “Waltz of the 101st Lightborne”:
making Time [Kronos] just another poor tenant:
bearing weight [Atlas], taking fire [Prometheus], trading smokes [my best guess is their hot-headed brother, Menoitios]
(The fall of the Titans is roughly the ancient Greek equivalent of the fall of Satan and the cursed angels. Of course this is not the only reading of those lines, but just one layering of allusion to consider.)
In their 2006 biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, which inspired the Nolan film, Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin write:
He was America’s Prometheus, “the father of the atomic bomb,” who had led the effort to wrest from nature the awesome fire of the sun for his country […] Like that rebellious Greek god Prometheus — who stole fire from Zeus and bestowed it upon humankind, Oppenheimer gave us atomic fire. But then, when he tried to control it, when he sought to make us aware of its terrible dangers, the powers-that-be, like Zeus, rose up in anger to punish him.
And indeed, Oppenheimer’s horror at what he had created is reminiscent of Dr. Frankenstein’s “breathless horror and disgust”. Anyway, I’m not trying to make this into a Joannenheimer thing…
I always thought the codename “Manhattan Project” was chosen at random, to throw people off the trail. It turns out that, in a way, it was — but not for the reasons I presumed. It wasn’t random, but it was meant to be so run-of-the-mill that it’d be easily overlooked. In 2007, a book about the project came out and was featured in a NY Times article that explained the origin of the name:
The first proposed name for the project, Dr. Norris said, was the Laboratory for the Development of Substitute Materials. But General Groves feared that would draw undo attention.
Instead, General Groves called for the bureaucratically dull approach of adopting the standard Corps procedure for naming new regional organizations. That method simply noted the unit’s geographical area, as in the Pittsburgh Engineer District.
So the top-secret endeavor to build the atom bomb got the most boring of cover names: the Manhattan Engineer District, in time shortened to the Manhattan Project.
It was called the Manhattan Project because it was started in Manhattan. The uranium was stored in warehouses there. People commuted on trains to the “office” to work on it. And now we’re right back where we started — in Sapokanikan.
Do you remember the name of the first atomic bomb, made with the help of the cyclotron, which fell out of a plane?
and called a ‘boy’
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