Saw Dr. Atomic screened in a movie theater in Woodland Hills this morning as the matinee was being performed live at the Met. The ending, so softly humanizing. Rather than startle you with the impact of the inevitable explosion this entire opera is leading up to, it brings you inside Oppenheimer’s intellectual and emotional dreamscapes.
As the team at Los Alamos gets closer and closer to the actual test, the dreamscapes bleed together. Something terrifying and inevitable is moving towards them which they have no more control over than they do the desert thunderstorm.
I’m going to try and assemble some of this, to try and give a sense. Of course, I didn’t get the full experience myself because I saw it in a movie theater and not at the Met. Hopefully, at some point, Dr. Atomic and I will find ourselves in the same city at the same time. In the meantime, I’ll post photos and text since I can’t say much beyond what the opera itself says.
Much of the text from the opera was adapted from declassified U.S. government documents and communications among the scientists, government officials, and military personnel who were involved in the project. Other borrowed texts include poetry by Baudelaire, John Donne, and Muriel Rukeyser, the Bhagavad Gita, and a traditional Tewa Indian song. Marvin Cohen, head of the American Physical Society, has criticized some parts of the libretto for not being strictly scientifically correct, in particular the opening lines (below). [1]
The opening chorus is an incomplete excerpt from the 1945 Smyth Report:
“Matter can be neither created nor destroyed but only altered in form.
Energy can be neither created nor destroyed but only altered in form.”
Act I concludes with an aria sung by Oppenheimer with text from Donne’s Holy Sonnet XIV:
Batter my heart, three person’d God; for, you
As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow mee, and bend
Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new.
I, like an usurpt towne, to’another due,
Labour to’admit you, but Oh, to no end,
Reason yhour viceroy in mee, mee should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weake or untrue.
Yet dearely’I love you, and would be loved faine,
But am betroth’d unto your enemie:
Divorce mee, untie, or breake that knot againe;
Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I
Except you’enthrall mee, never shall be free,
Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee.
At the sight of this, your Shape stupendous,
Full of mouths and eyes, feet, thighs and bellies,
Terrible with fangs, O master,
All the worlds are fear-struck, even just as I am.
When I see you, Vishnu, omnipresent,
Shouldering the sky, in hues of rainbow,
With your mouths agape and flame-eyes staring-
All my peace is gone; my heart is troubled.
Act II is peppered with a repeated refrain from Pasqualita, the Oppenheimer’s Tewa Indian housemaid. The text comes from a traditional Tewa song:
In the north the cloud-flower blossoms
And now the lightning flashes
And now the thunder clashes
And now the rain comes down! A-a-aha, a-a-aha, my little one.
In the west the cloud-flower blossoms
And now the lightning flashes
And now the thunder clashes
And now the rain comes down! A-a-aha, a-a-aha, my little one.
And now the rain comes down! A-a-aha, a-a-aha, my little one.
One of the only scenes of actual connection (though still full of loneliness and longing) is Baudelaire’s “A Hemisphere in Your Hair” is used verbatim in the scene w/ Kitty Oppenheimer:
A Hemisphere in Your Hair
Long, long let me breathe the fragrance of your hair. Let me plunge my face into it like a thirsty man into the water of a spring, and let me wave it like a scented handkerchief to stir memories in the air.
If only you knew all that I see! all that I feel! all that I hear in your hair! My soul voyages on its perfume as other men’s souls on music.
Your hair holds a whole dream of masts and sails; it holds seas whose monsoons waft me toward lovely climes where space is bluer and more profound, where fruits and leaves and human skin perfume the air.
In the ocean of your hair I see a harbor teeming with melancholic songs, with lusty men of every nation, and ships of every shape, whose elegant and intricate structures stand out against the enormous sky, home of eternal heat.
In the caresses of your hair I know again the languors of long hours lying on a couch in a fair ship’s cabin, cradles by the harbor’s imperceptible swell, between pots of flowers and cooling water jars.
On the burning hearth of your hair I breathe in the fragrance of tobacco tinged with opium and sugar; in the night of your hair I see the sheen of the tropic’s blue infinity’ on the shores of your hair I get drunk with the smell of musk and tar and the oil of coconuts.
Long, long, let me bite your black and heavy tresses. When I gnaw your elastic and rebellious hair I seem to be eating memories.
The best You Tube clip I could find was from the Amsterdam performance so the subtitles are in Dutch. The stage at the Met was more impressive (in my opinion) in the vertical dynamics. Is nevertheless worth checking out this clip, to get a sense..
Muscle memory kicks in. Just keep practicing. Eventually, you are ready to light. And the sound, ah, the sound. Fire whizzing past your ear, the power of your own inertia. The light, the light, the light! The 
glow inside lasts for days. In fact, once you’ve done this, you’re never the same again. My friend Charity taught me everything I know about Firedancing. She lives in Tuscon now but had a transfer in LA, we only had about an hour by the time we reached the Santa Monica Pier. 
One moment we’re trying to figure out whether or not we had enough Fiji water in the bottle to wet the safety towel and the next moment, we’re collapsed on the sand laughing. OMG, the world’s largest water supply is right in front of us!! I run to into this receding tide. My legs keep running, running, running. The Pacific’s night tide’s edge is just so far back. My toes sinking into in the cold wet seaweed and sand. I drench the towel in salt water. Jumping up, utter delight, I run back. We’re dipping the kevlar into the lamp oil now. Circling, figure eights all around. And oh, the sound! As I spin poi, Charity
stands by w/ wet towel, in case of mishap. As she spins poi, I do the same. Two guys in uniform approaching. Were we too close to the Santa Monica Pier’s Ferris Wheel? How could we possible be a threat to anyone? Here were are, dancing with fire in the middle of this ginormous kittly litter box!! “What’s going on?” We tell them the truth; that we didn’t know whether or not it was illegal to spin poi on the beach and that Charity actually has a liscence to do this (which she does, insurance as well!) The two uniformed guys are laughing. “We’re EMTs” they explain to us, pointing to their white rectangular ambulance parked way, way, back.” We show them the wet towel to legitimate that we treat our craft with respect. Standby, one another, ready, in a heartbeat, to smother flames, if necessary. “No worries” they assure us. “Just stopped by to watch the show.” Was just one of those nights where even the smallest minute detail just clicks into place. The world around morphs into timelessness macro mode of it’s own accord and everything, everything, everything, just seems to make sense.
Just finished reading it. This book; it’s so unbelievably sad and beautiful and, whoa. I mean, literally just finished with it. Trying to drive West on Wilshire with my eyes watering, nose getting all sniffley. In the midst of all this election, hype, who in the world is there to commiserate with over the tragic life of a fictional heroine who embodies the most extreme manifestations of loyalty and sacrifice. I’ll say it before; am saying it again. 
He gives insights into parts of the world otherwise inaccessible through sophisticated mellowdramatic storylines, caricature. Hope, grief, hardship and regret. Still reeling from the experience of having just read this. And in case you’re thinking this comparison between Dickens and Hosseini is a bit much, try this. Compare the excecution scenes between 
Okay, so here’s what’s been going on. Haven’t been blogging much cause —yikes— this WordPress server is such a mess, I just lost everything I wrote in its entirety. Plus, I’m not able to upload photos for some reason. Okay, basic premise is that I don’t really have time to write a blog post now anyway cause I’m finishing a screenplay. And then I go ahead and blog anyway. I blog about the Coriolis effect and how understanding how it works differently in the Northern/Southern hemispheres of Earth is like watching a production of a Shakespeare play you’ve already seen before during a completely diff phase of your life than the phase you were in when you saw it the previous time. And although I don’t go into detail on the Coriolis effect, I offer the opportunity to link to an explanation of by clicking on the swirlie spinning earth at the bottom of this post. I am actually finally managing to figure out HTML! Okay, well, actually it’s not really swirlie or spinning, since I haven’t figured out flash yet. Amazing what a looped arrow can do for innuendo, tho. Please forgive the wikipedia link, since they’re not exactly the most reliable entity. On the other hand, it was the most comprehensive explanation I found and contains plethoras of links to other sites on the topic. So I figure this way you can choose the links that best suits you, your learning style and attention span. Oh, and I’m not ready to post an explaination of the screenplay, yet. I can, however, assure you it has nothing to do with the Coriolis effect!
