Original Sin
Sins have consequences. They have
We are damned. It cannot be unwritten. We damned ourselves by a single gesture.
Round, like the apple. But it wasn't really an apple, was it? That notion came later. The book just says "fruit." A woman, of course, there in the text. Out here, it was a man. Damned us in a single moment.
Damned by a single gesture. They found the fundamental unit of all life, of Life itself. Round, but not like an apple. Not Adam. Atom. In their relentless will to never stop - and understand: never stop - penetrating everything with the metaphysical Eye|I, that relentless will to visibility, they looked and looked until they finally found the fundamental unit of all life, of Life itself. And their immediate response, their immediate impulse, upon seeing for the first time the fundamental unit of all life, of Life itself, was
Let's break this.
We want to smash it. Let's find a way to break it apart. We want to invent a hammer that will crush and break open this indivisible unit at the end of our long search. We want to
break it.
And so they did, making a lie of its name, átomos which means uncuttable, which means indivisible.
There can be nothing allowed to be indivisible; that which is indivisible makes men feel impotent. And so the scientists found a way to cut it, to break it. They found a way to slice apart the fundamental unit of all life. Made of its name a fatal lie. A damning lie.
*
They clamor, they hunger, they strive for this: "To know the mind of God." Theory of everything, their illness.
Seeking to know the mind of god, they broke open the fundamental unit of life.
Quite failing to see that the only godness extant in this universe is precisely that integrity.
*
When you slice open the fundamental unit of all life, tremendous energy is released. So much energy, in fact, that what is leftover lasts for millions of years. Did you think I was being metaphorical? Some for decades; some for tens of thousands of years; some for hundreds of thousands of years; and some for
millions of years.
You have created hundreds of thousands of tons of radioactive waste that will remain deadly for millions of years. Our species has been upon the earth for barely 200,000 years. In just 50 years, homo sapiens, the wise, has built a line of death into the future that is ten times longer than its entire past. And you're creating more every day. Every year. Every decade. Soon, millions of tons for millions of years. The relationship of the western psyche to temporality is something I will not bother with, here, now; here is not its milieu, now I am tired. Suffice to say you are not exactly "winning the future."
*
It is 20 April, 2010.
Explosion. Flame. Death gushes out, rushes out. They don't know what to do; there was no Plan.
In a desperate attempt to stem the flow, workers have begun adding shredded tires and golf balls to the mud they are trying to plug the hole with.
It is 20 April, 2011.
Explosion. Flame. Death gushes out, rushes out. They don't know what to do; there was no Plan.
With 19,000 tons of water measuring an estimated 700 times the legal limit for radioactivity already leaked, workers scrambled to try to seal the crack with sawdust and shredded newspapers.
We don't need Plans. We are invincible. We can shove hubris into the ruptures.
Happy Anniversary.
*
Radioactive iodine 9.5 million times the safe threshold, and three million terabecquerels- oh, but you don't know what those are, do you? And cesium137 and millisieverts and so many curious syllables, and so when you are told It's alright, it's just equivalent to the radiation you'd receive on a long-haul flight, you nod. In a sense, it is true; in much the same way it is true that if I hand you two glasses which each contain six ounces of a fluid to drink, you will consume an equivalent amount of each fluid. Perhaps one is milk. Perhaps one is arsenic. Don't worry, the amount is the same.
Radiation holds an interesting and complex place in the modern psyche. I'm not going to talk about that here, now. Because I am tired, here, now. And milieus, you know. But I will note that the whole universe is essentially one big dance of radiations - there are ever so many types - some of them as tender as butterfly kisses; some of them so fatal to flesh that even one single second of exposure means certain death for any living creature.
It is likely that radiation is what made us: A wave, traveling through just the right chemical combination of molecules at just the right moment, induced a mutation. A butterfly kiss that opened a sleepy eyelid.
It is increasingly likely that radiation is what will unmake us: Quite different waves, traveling through the end result of that primordial flicker - us. A quiet knife of invisible flame that will close that eyelid forever.
You don't know how many kinds of radiation there are, or their names, or their temperaments. But you do know, in your gut, where silent fear lives and chews, what radiation causes. You fear it so much that you don't even like to say its name.
You fear it so much that you are every day of your life supporting a system that will almost certainly cause it to spring up in your flesh.
Wait, what?
*
He who lives by the sword
Cancer cells are the perfect capitalist subjects, they are exactly what you wished for: Industrious to the point of mania, they work without stopping, ever stopping.
Cancer is the perfect disease of capitalism, for it is nothing more nor less than simply this: Growth, unchecked. Growth, eternal.
It is exactly what you wished for.
*
O tempora! O mores!
Every malcontent since the beginning of human civilization has laid claim to the right to definitively declare his or her time the worst of times.
Those born in the nuclear age live with the knowledge - suppressed, desperately repressed, but never quiescent - that at any moment, at any second, it is now possible (that it is unlikely is quite immaterial) for the entire planet to be destroyed in under 90 seconds.
It seems we are the winners of that long contest. Congratulations.
*
A month after a devastating earthquake sent a wall of water across the Japanese landscape, the global terrain of the atomic power industry has been forever altered.
Except, of course, that it hasn't. This has changed nothing. Just as Chernobyl changed nothing. There was no reduction in nuclear power proliferation, there were no meaningful overhauls of contingency and safety regulations; there will be none now. What will happen is the same thing that always happens: The same small group of people will make the same demands of the NRC, and the public, and governmental agencies, which will be ignored. The focus will switch to other news, and everything will slip seamlessly back into its track, forever unalterable.
We expect a number of impacts from the public and political backlash against nuclear, which could mean the focus switches to renewables.
Except, of course, that it will not. To think that there will be meaningful outcry? Disaster in and disaster out, there is no backlash. The record is scratched, the needle keeps skipping; we are stuck here, in the same moment, over and over and over. That is the power of disavowal. My people speculate: What would it take to wake them? Perhaps you are beyond waking; perhaps the terrain that has been forever altered is you.
*
Survival
Can men be taught to love instead of break? Can man be taught humility? Can he be untaught the belief that he is limitless, that limitlessness is his entitlement, his birthright? I am asked how we can stop all this madness, I am asked, What Can We Do? You will not like my answer:
We were damned by the gesture, and only at that same site can we redeem ourselves.
Elsewhere, a few half-hearted calls for "practical" solutions: limitations on the number of new reactors already poised to soar into production over the next forty years; several billion in new funding to research ways to make all that immortal nuclear waste "less hazardous" - yet more science sent in to try to solve the problems that science caused. (There was an old lady who swallowed a fly.)
But those aren't, actually, solutions. My call is impractical precisely because it is an actual solution - and I say it only because it is true, and truth is all I have left:
We were damned by the gesture, and only at that same site can we redeem ourselves. By this I mean: We have to stop doing it. Entirely. We have to stop splitting atoms. We have to give up nuclear fission as a power source, as soon as possible, and permanently. Not simply for material reasons - that it can never be made a "clean" or safe process - but, in some ways more importantly, for ontopolitical ones: Because the world is made from, is a contiguous manifestation of, Being.
Despite the insistent and myriad psychic diremptions which convince you that your actions have no consequences, and that actions are unrelated to being, and above all, that there is no such thing, really, as unconscious strata, as parts of yourself guiding your behavior in ways you are unaware, as parts of you that aren't you but something else, they are, and it is. There is nothing - nothing - that is not ideologically inflected. And those movements, those hidden contours of Being have fallout. The unconscious epistemological assumptions that underlie the gesture of splitting the atom are as literally fatal to the lifeworld as any radioactive isotope.
We have, then, to take a step back. To consider, for the first time in our history, that there are some things we simply ought not do. That ours is not dominion over everything. Stop. Step back. Impossible, of course. Ludicrous! It is a baldly outrageous suggestion. Go back?! The only heresy left. Progress is forward, More, Onward. Progress. Progress. My god, woman. You can't be serious? No one, but no one, would suggest abandoning this technology that we've developed. That would be madness.
It is. It is a mad suggestion, ludicrous, I admit that right up front. It's absurd. But. Throw trillions of dollars at the nuclear problem. Throw every scientist you have at it. The outcome will, ultimately, continue to be death, will continue to be destruction, because of that truth which cannot be broken, cannot be divided, and remains, for that reason and others, the most reviled thorn in the side of the western psyche, the pea beneath its princess's many mattresses, and what will eventually be writ our tombstone if we continue to ignore it:
Right action can never come from wrong Being.
