Sketches of What Made the 50's

Albert Einstein’s Spaceman in an Elevator


In 1955 Einstein died without ever finding his man in an elevator. It is a search that may well extend into the next millennium. If a man in an elevator couldn’t feel his own weight in space, Einstein pondered, then what does he feel when the elevator is accelerating through space? Something like weight, but not quite. It has something to do with vibrating superstrings, physicists say. At about the same time as Einstein’s death, the artist Jasper Johns does something interesting. He paints the man in the elevator. Well, okay, not exactly. Actually, Johns started painting images of the American flag, then later he painted images of numbers, and targets, but the idea is the same as Einstein’s elevator man: that it’s just an idea and there it is, gravity or whatever. It doesn’t have any real form.


Hey, Charles Lindbergh Was a Nazi

Sometimes I get sick. The higher I go the more dizzying the view is out of glass elevators. But some people are amazing because they just aren’t bothered by heights. Either they never look out the window to see where they are, or maybe they don’t see anything when they do look. I’m not sure why, but it makes me think of Charles Lindbergh. He’s famous because of this, for flying the Spirit of St. Louis across the Atlantic Ocean, from New York to Paris in 1927. He’s remembered as a daring aviator and an American hero. But people have forgotten, even after WWII, that this hero was a white supremacist and advocator of Nazism. Some people can go higher than others. And when he landed in Paris, it really wasn’t Lindbergh the world cheered for, it was for what he did. That’s always the case, I suppose. So there’s no real form there either. But the other weird thing is that perhaps the most important fact about contemporary times after the Second World War is that they were always going to be different soon. In the 50’s, they could have shot off in any direction. Anyone who could do it flew that plane in some way or another.

Beethoven and Politics

Beethoven was actually afraid of heights. He was the kind of man who would move between five different apartments, each one with a piano in it, shifting every time any one of his friends discovered in which apartment he was staying. For him, music was everything. I mean so much everything that the only thing that stopped him from creating more of it was death. And in his later years, when he composed, he would press his stone-deaf head up against his piano and write music by the feel of its vibrations. It was the reverse of poetry, if you think about it. I mean, if poetry strives toward being music, for Beethoven there was no music, only the poetry of vibrating springs, which I guess gave him music again. Well, whatever it was, it was what he believed in, and this thing he believed in vibrated through his skull. But it wasn’t tangible.


EE Cummings and Death

In about 1950, Cummings wrote this poem:

dying is fine)but Death
?o
baby
i
wouldn’t like
Death if Death
were
good….

because dying is natural….

Death
is strictly
scientific
& artificial &
evil & legal)

We fear death, yet we long for slumber and beautiful dreams. Death is a strange thing. And it is probably the most patient thing, too. As Cummings mentions, excluding what we don’t know about the rest of the universe and existence, dying is natural but death is an exclusively human experience. This is because we know that we will die. And aren’t death and dying clean two different things? Dying, well, we don’t really care about that until it’s accelerated by disease or circumstance. Dying starts at conception, and we call it life. It’s great. But death, that’s the one thing that separates humans from other animals. Since we know we will die, we make a big deal out of it while dying. That’s why we make so much art, have so many religions, make so many artifacts that possess the durability that we just don’t have. And when the H-bomb was tested in ’52, the crowning achievement of men like Einstein looking for men in space elevators, a new idea presented itself: if every human died, then wouldn’t that mean that death would die?


Jackson Pollock and DNA


So you have to envy Pollock in a way. He probably never died, if it was an instant thing, but then again I don’t know the details of his accident. But while he was dying, that is while he was alive, he may have exposed a fundamental contradiction between the legacy of our genes and our experiences in the world. You see, when the structure of DNA was discovered in ’53, biologists thought up another weird idea. Biological bodies were never meant to survive. Only the DNA strings within us all will persist through time. They hold together the information of millions of years of dying. When we die, their code goes on in some other biological body. And superstrings are thought to hold the universe together in the same way too. They call it superstring gravity theory, a cosmic blueprint of everything vibrating in some ambiguous, separate, curved space. Pollock had been painting an ambiguous place, too, and he filled it with seemingly endless calligraphy, making an archeology of time, dripping strings of paint with gravity pulling it down into a layered landscape. Is there a connection?



Hell, I doubt it. But anything could have made sense in the 50’s, in some strange way, if you wanted it to. All those witty ads and Hollywood movies, always looking for something else, even the absurdity of life within the anguish of death—it’s like catching yourself breathe while dead. Right after WWII and into Korea, that was America, left standing to watch the rise of a nuclear age as well as a Cold War. So I suppose anything could make sense in a decade when the most tangible thing in the western world was a man hurdling through space in an elevator. Sure, there were the shutter of an invisible Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall in ’61, but they aren’t poetry, no matter how much it shook anyone’s skull.





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