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μεταμορφώσεις


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The Signal

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The nod of the head : the go-ahead. The no turning back. The serious eyes convey the seriousness of the moment : life gambling itself for the sake, so it believes, of ultimately saving itself. // Note, for example, the bulb and the glowing end of what looks like a pull-cord : evocative of fundamental particles floating in a near vacuum (so to speak). // The orange ambience rouses feelings of fire : of jeopardy. When they flip the switch, who truly knows what is going to happen? Does Oppenheimer?

 

 

 

 

Edited by Jeff Bernstein
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Farewell . . .                      

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                                Farewell, happy fields,
Where joy for ever dwells! Hail, horrors! hail,
Infernal world!

Milton, Paradise Lost (1.249–251)

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POWER
We have come to the earth’s remotest ground,
To the Scythian tract, inaccessible waste.
And now, Hephaestus, you must take care to
Observe the commands the Father gave you,
And bind fast upon these high jagged rocks                    
This criminal, he who does what he likes,
In bonds of adamantine chains unbreakable.
For he has stolen your own prized possession,
Blazing fire, origin of all arts,
And has bestowed it upon mortal men.                    
Such is the error for which he must pay
Penalty to the gods, so that he may learn
To respect the supremacy of Zeus,
And cease his benevolence towards mankind.

Κράτος
Χθονὸς μὲν ἐς τηλουρὸν ἥκομεν πέδον,
Σκύθην ἐς οἷμον, ἄβατον εἰς ἐρημίαν.
Ἥφαιστε, σοὶ δὲ χρὴ μέλειν ἐπιστολὰς
ἅς σοι πατὴρ ἐφεῖτο, τόνδε πρὸς πέτραις
ὑψηλοκρήμνοις τὸν λεωργὸν ὀχμάσαι
ἀδαμαντίνων δεσμῶν ἐν ἀρρήκτοις πέδαις.
τὸ σὸν γὰρ ἄνθος, παντέχνου πυρὸς σέλας,
θνητοῖσι κλέψας ὤπασεν. τοιᾶσδέ τοι
ἁμαρτίας σφε δεῖ θεοῖς δοῦναι δίκην,
ὡς ἂν διδαχθῇ τὴν Διὸς τυραννίδα
στέργειν, φιλανθρώπου δὲ παύεσθαι τρόπου.

Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound (1–11)

 

 

 

 

Edited by Jeff Bernstein
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Where to run?

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In Dunkirk, Up corresponded with Virtue and Down corresponded with Darkness. In Oppenheimer, however, there seems "no direction home". No matter the direction, up or down, there is no escape from the consequences of the knife switch, which activates the Demon Core. . . .

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High contrast of light and dark. Is it curious that the agent of annihilation is bathed in a white glow, which otherwise is often used by Nolan to express virtue? We are in a world where meaning is breaking down, where the old ways are deteriorating. Just look at this contraption. Weirdly, for all of its up-to-the-minute technology, this knife switch and its associated elements look aged; this weathering seems an optical effect from the coating of dust or whatnot over the equipment. The retro look of this initiator is somewhat perversely humorous : this old-school device, looking simplistic, if not prehistoric, in its design, just happens to contain the power to destroy the world. (Top Tip : Don't judge a book by its cover.) The arm is reaching down into the darkness, into the furnace of light below, to touch it, and bring it up to the surface.

 

 

 

Edited by Jeff Bernstein
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Then it happens.

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Out of a sheer coincidence of events, a phase transition. Activity blossoms in pools of water. Saline empires three hundred feet deep act as miraculous alembics: it is a worldwide phenomenon of spontaneous generation. Chemical films acquire anatomy. Complex multicellular organisms develop, a population explosion of morphological oddities. Diverse communities teem and shimmy in the distorted water-light, miscellaneous animals scavenging among the wavering polyps of soft corals, aware. This is 570 million years ago: the evolvement of knowledge-bearing life, oversensitive and underwhelming. Creatures smaller than a thumb, their bodies built of repeated segments, tagmae fused together, successive mirror images, joined one by one into exoskeletons of bilateral symmetry. It is a menagerie of fluid-filled, gelatinous creatures armored in hard parts, spiny shells, sclerites, bracts; with biramous limbs bristly with setae; their insides laced with microscopic strips of muscle; some furnished, significantly, with notochords. A fluke perhaps, but they exist, these replicators encoded with instructions for self-preservation, determined by and beholden to the physics of water, each body a habitat of genes; shimmying along the aquatic floor among the bunched sponges, or swimming, cysts with telsons undulating through the murk. It is a weird infestation of inch-long curiosities thriving in the burbling cavity, entities looking like intricately embellished earthworms and wood-lice; five-eyed carnivores chasing and swallowing prey whole, hapless trilobites ingested into narrow alimentary canals; and here are things less identifiable, improbable forms, hallucinogenic one-off experiments feeding on sponges, juices, soft tissues, each other. A few of these early creatures were caught in a mud slide and ended up frozen in rock, as part (fossil) and counterpart (stony impression): dried out fragments of an ancient prodigal world, a zoo of quashed possibilities.

Out of the Cambrian explosion of twenty-five-odd body plans, only four survived and endured to develop stereotypically into the majority of the animals of the present. Evolution is attenuation, a decimation by lottery, a whittling-down of possibilities.  

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Messages on the air.

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This tower, no matter how many times your author defines it as the Alamogordo Tower at the Trinity Site, reminds him of messages transacted. . . . the "call from afar to afar". . . .

 

Trinity? As in :

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BOTTICELLI, Sandro, Holy Trinity (1493)

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