Confronting the shadow

When the lights go down: A photo of a 1919 total solar eclipse, from the Eddington expedition. (Photo: by F. W. Dyson, A. S. Eddington, and C. Davidson, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Original image here.)

We knew, our group, standing at the water’s edge that day and looking out: We knew that something would be coming for us out of the west. Our most learned seers had warned of it for some time. Most of us couldn’t have told you how they knew, not fully, but we knew that they did. A few dozen of us had come to meet it, having decided it was better to face the shadow creature head-on. The air was hot, this being the middle of summer, so all of us were lightly dressed; little would hinder us if we panicked and broke and ran. It was midday, so the sun hung directly overhead, clear in the bright blue bowl of sky.

We were as prepared as we would ever be. Nothing to do but watch and wait. We checked the time, or looked at one another, with our instruments and protective devices at the ready. Some of us ventured a step or two into the fringe of surf at the water’s edge, just to be able to say we had touched the Pacific Ocean. Then we resumed our stances and looked back out to sea. Suddenly, there it was, the shadow, monstrously big, sweeping across the water. A vast cone of sky grew dark and drew near; the air turned cool; birds ceased their chatter. The shadow surrounded us. Above us, something was eating the sun.

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So began my experience of the eclipse of July 11, 1991, which I witnessed from a spot on the Pacific coast of Mexico, somewhere to the west of Guadalajara. That account is tinged with the influence of Ursula K. Le Guin’s fantasy novel A Wizard of Earthsea, in which a young man decides to confront a shadow creature that’s been pursuing him and ventures beyond the land’s end to do it. (J. K. Rowling appears to have borrowed a trick or two from the same book.) But that’s basically how it started.

It’s a mad mad mad mad nuclear world

Atomic residue: the cover of a 2011 book.

I found an atomic bomb in my pajamas this morning. What it was doing in my pajamas I’ll never know…

In 1961, two H-bombs fell out of a B-52 over North Carolina; one, which had mostly activated itself, came to rest against a tree, but the other buried itself and had to be dug up. A service member carried the plutonium core out of the hole by hand (and died decades later of a radiation-related illness), while other parts were left below ground and are still there. One of the H-bombs that got loose over Spain in 1966 ended up in the Mediterranean Sea and was found only after months of effort. When a B-52 crashed in Greenland in 1968, the plane itself and its four H-bombs broke into pieces. The nuclear-fuel component of one bomb was never found. One day in Arkansas in 1980, a workman dropped a wrench, which caused a missile to explode, which sent its thermonuclear warhead flying. It was found, as I recall, in someone’s backyard. Why does this keep happening?…

Notes on sinking

Would you take a dive in this? A handful of people did, in the 1930s. (Photo: By Mike Cole. Licensed under CC BY 2.0.)

Going down and going up have always been dangerous. Humanity has learned this only by doing it. Going into caves, or climbing mountains, or holding one’s breath and diving, or finding ways to ascend into the sky: these all have something to do with approaching death, which we tend to think of either as entering the earth or entering the heavens. No doubt that’s part of the appeal. We’re not only curious about what’s down there, or up there; we want to see if we can get away with going there.

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The Wicked Witch of the West doesn’t say, “I’m sinking!” but she could. It’s what we see her doing. She’s going down, literally as well as figuratively.

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Intrepid aquanauts do it on purpose. Maybe with varying degrees of individual volition, but as a group, people board a submarine or a submersible with the intention of going down. They choose to sink. No doubt they expect to come back up. But that doesn’t always happen, and they know it.

On Maggie Q and the costs of an action career

Maggie Q, pausing to reflect in The Protégé. (Image: © Raul Jichici 2020.)

Recently I watched a 2021 movie called The Protégé, which features Maggie Q, and which left me thinking about the parts of her career that I’ve seen. It’s possible to read the film as a reminder of some of her work in action films and thrillers, even as a reflection on it.

Mars on the Mind

Mars is an insistent planet. Many ancient civilizations took it to represent the god of war. Gustav Holst, following their lead, characterized it with swirling currents of discontent and alarming rhythms, threatening to swell out of the orchestra and take over the auditorium. Most of the night sky has been blotted out to the view of city dwellers, but it’s still possible to witness Mars on its wandering course; I’ve seen it often in recent months, glowing red like a warning. It seems to demand to be remembered.

Whether humans will ever go there remains to be seen. Surely we will, but whether anyone can live there is another matter. Elon Musk thinks we can; no doubt some Twitter users would like to see him become the first colonist. Science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson used to believe colonizing it was possible too, and he wrote about it at length in a trilogy, which began coming out in 1992.

Red Bull finds a handsome gang of plotters and schemers in ‘Arden of Faversham’

In big trouble now: Joshua David Robinson as Lord Mayor of Faversham, Tony Roach as Mosby, Emma Geer as Susan, and Cara Ricketts as Alice, in Red Bull Theater’s production of Arden of Faversham. (Image: Carol Rosegg)

Crime stories, whether true or not, exert a seemingly eternal magnetic pull, maybe because they’re all true in their way. A character in a recent episode of The Last of Us discussed people who have a “violent heart” (he sounded like a preacher in putting it that way because he was one), and though he didn’t say so, that lurks in all of us; we may not feel it or act on it, but we all know it’s there. Medea’s gruesome deeds may once have been the actions of an actual person, as her husband’s certainly have been. Mack the Knife in The Threepenny Opera is based on Macheath in The Beggar’s Opera, who was probably modeled on a real highwayman. Medea’s doings rise to the level of myth, Mackie’s to song, but sometimes the crimes of the heart (Beth Henley’s phrase) take on a tragicomic tone, part murderous and part ridiculous, as in a Quentin Tarantino film. Exhibit A, for the moment, is the gang of lovers, climbers, and plotters in Arden of Faversham, now being staged by Red Bull Theater in New York, who are nothing if not Tarantino-esque.

Seeing Hopper

Anyone who lives in a city is accustomed to seeing other people—usually lots of them. Remarkably, Edward Hopper lived and worked in New York and painted moments in which the settings are sparsely populated, if at all. And the people in his images are often absorbed in an inner world. They’re both part of and apart from the scene in which we see them.

The problem with welcome news about AI in China

I’m wary of anything I read that gives people news they might like to hear. Russia is bungling its war in Ukraine? Maybe so, but it hasn’t withdrawn yet. China is falling behind in artificial intelligence R&D? Maybe so, but if I remember correctly the current version of a Chinese large language model (LLM) called Wu Dao is bilingual, which isn’t true of any Western LLMs I know of. A New York Times business article that’s the latest to prompt my doubts, which aimed to explain (according to its headline) “Why China Didn’t Invent ChatGPT,” was most notable for this spot of humor, which pertains to government control and censorship:

The trouble with football

Just after the first of the year, an NFL player named Damar Hamlin literally died on the field—he had a cardiac arrest as a result of a blow to the chest—and was resuscitated. That was still in the back of my mind when I noticed among my PDFs a New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell about football. I had saved it but for more than 10 years avoided it, fearing it would tell me something I didn’t want to know. I was right. It’s profoundly disturbing.

Looking backward: A 2015 view of the Wright brothers and Elon Musk

(Photo illustration by me, from two public-domain Wikimedia images.)

A September 2015 London Review of Books account of two biographies, which was linked in a recent LRB email, and which I finished reading yesterday, is illuminating and a little surprising. It addresses a book by David McCullough about Wilbur and Orville Wright and one by Ashlee Vance about Elon Musk. Both books had been published in England in May 2015, but that coincidence isn’t the reason John Lanchester and the LRB chose to consider them together. Lanchester reports that “when​ David McCullough’s book came out, it went straight to the top of the US bestseller list, taking up a position right next to Ashlee Vance’s biography of Elon Musk,” and he makes something of that.

A bestseller list is not a Rorschach test, but it can tell us something about the subjects currently on a national mind. The juxtaposition of the Wrights’ story with Musk’s suggests that America is thinking about innovation and new technologies, and perhaps that it deeply wants to believe in the new thing, to believe that the new inventions will be as consequential as the old ones proved to be.