Oppenheimer is Watching Me Sightline Series, University of Iowa Press, 2007
Excerpt
Fast forward to November, 1963. Oppenheimer sits back in his brown leather chair. We are now in the mind of the father of the A-bomb—it’s a quantum stretch, I know, but indulge me. Oppenheimer is looking out his office window in Fuld Hall. He can see the woods behind the Institute. In two weeks he will fly to Washington to receive the Fermi award from Lyndon Johnson. In one week, Kennedy will be shot. But right now it has begun to snow.
He closes his eyes. One more time Oppenheimer travels in his mind to northern New Mexico. He drives beyond the guard station and up Route 4 to the high country, 8,500 feet above sea level. He stops beside the road and gazes out across the Valle Grande, two-hundred square miles of giant caldera, a hollowed-out plain where elk and sheep roam through wildflowers and aspen forests. Oppenheimer used to keep his hair long and curly, but his head is shaved now like a monk’s.
Below the eastern ridge of the Jemez Mountains, erosion has carved a series of deep vertical canyons into the Pajarito Plateau. Composed of pyroclastic deposits, the soft pumice canyon walls are marked by gashes, hollows, and grooves. Above, the mesas are covered by piñon, juniper, yucca, and the ruins of prehistoric Pueblo Indian culture. Cliff dwellings, pottery shards, petroglyphs, the remains of Kivas, burial grounds, ceremonial objects—it is a topography permeated by an old and powerful history.
Oppenheimer has always passed by these ruins. It is only now, in my imagination, that he visits them. In Princeton snow is mounting outside his window. The flakes are wet and heavy. He should call Kitty. He checks his watch. Oppenheimer closes his eyes and returns to New Mexico, driving past the yellow no-trespassing signs along the south mesa, down the winding road, past Technical Area-33.
As a boy, Oppenheimer was irrepressibly arrogant. “Ask me a question in Latin,” he told a friend, “and I will answer you in Greek.” Teaching physics in Berkeley, he studied Sanskrit so as to read the ancient Hindu text, the Bhagavad Gita. Oppenheimer had a quick and subtle mind that was particularly drawn to the oracular and the abstruse. At Göttingen he spent two hours a day laboring over Dante in Italian, while studying Schroedinger psi-functions and continuous spectra. “Why do you waste your time on such trash,” Paul Dirac complained. “What makes you think you can you do both poetry and physics?”
It’s time to move on, I whisper in Oppenheimer’s ear. Pressing on, he continues down Route 4, stopping at a Tewa site, the ruins of an ancient Pueblo village. The Tsankawi pueblo sits atop an island mesa overlooking the Rio Grande valley to the north, the Sangre de Cristo Mountains to the east, and the Jemez range to the west. The soft volcanic-rock trail up the mesa has been worn down a foot-and-a-half by the treading of human feet. Countless petroglyphs, pecked into soft canyon walls and large basalt boulders, are close by—signs left thousands of years ago by nomads roaming up and down the Rio Grande.
Oppenheimer walks up the smoothly furrowed trail, smoking a cigarette, studying his shadow. To a distant observer, the physicist might seem otherworldly. Tall, pale, and stooped, Oppenheimer appears to be fading. He scans the face of rocks for carvings. He has come, at my urging, looking for ancient runes. Oppenheimer is feeling more and more weightless and quicker on his feet in the stark light. Uniform motion, not rest, is the natural state of matter. He has always been restless, even now, and he stops only to inspect the markings on the stone. Beautiful to see, they are faint shapes from nature. He studies them, tracing the outlines of a hand. The carvings include ceremonial figures, some wearing bear claws—all with their hands up, waving at him. How wonderful, he thinks. They are saluting.
The petroglyphs include a curious detail. On the left is a bird-like creature, with four legs and a plant form growing from its head. It straddles a large fissure that runs the length of the cliff face. Below the feet of the creature, and beneath the crack, are two large arrows—vectors really or maybe rods—pointing towards the split rock. It looks to Oppenheimer like a diagram of sorts, a sketch of pre-atomic fission. Oppenheimer gazes out past the mesa, trying to follow the flux of random thoughts running through his mind, his porkpie hat askew and the ever-present cigarette dangling from his mouth. What does he almost understand?
Reviews
“Jeff Porter has elegantly created a new and imaginative Oppenheimer that brings fresh insights to a life and time that is endlessly fascinating."—Martin J. Sherwin, co-author (with Kai Bird), American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for biography
“This is a stunning new narrative which sets the personal and autobiographical in high relief against the backdrop of the cold war. It is a brilliant book, intricately conceived and executed. It reminded me of DeLillo’s Underworld as well as Auster’s The Invention of Solitude.”—Joan Connor, Ohio University, author, The World before Mirrors and History Lessons
“With humor, psychological insight, and bold imaginative leaps, Jeff Porter memorably evokes the experience of growing up during the cold war with its penumbra of political paranoia, nuclear menace, and radiation fears. Personal memories, family history, classical mythology, quantum physics, and public events flow together in a brilliantly illuminating way. Oppenheimer Is Watching Me gripped me at once, and I read it with mounting admiration and engagement. This memoir is valuable not only for the way it bears witness to a fast-receding era but also as a commentary on the terrors of our own day and the toll they are taking on our spirit.”—Paul S. Boyer, author,
By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age
“This is an inventive book, and an original one. A seamless blend of personal and public history, Oppenheimer Is Watching Me reports on many things: pole vaulting, baseball, Love Canal, Los Alamos and the dark halls of Washington, quarks, neutrons, jazz clubs, Pontiacs, fall-out shelters, cabbages and kings. Jeff Porter writes with equal wit and grace about the Manhattan Project and his family in Tonawanda, about Francis Gary Powers, Fidel Castro, and his Sicilian grandfather. There’s much that’s melancholic, too, a fear and trembling unto death—but somehow the whole is more bracing than bleak, the song of a survivor, and all of it vividly seen.”—Nicholas Delbanco, author, Spring and Fall and Anywhere out of the World
