slow burn
Heat makes things weird. Things are, of course, already weird. But each time the temperature pushes into the thirties everything seems to tighten and reverberate at a higher frequency. The city feels like tempered glass, expanding and contracting under thermal pressure; at any point it seems it could combust and shatter, leaving just a mess of shards.
For days the city thrums and simmers, and each day the promise of a storm is deferred. Breathless, we sit and sweat in pools of shade waiting for the heat to break, for the sky to rip open.
Being suspended at boiling point like this seems too appropriate, a cruel joke, as the last five months have persistently felt like waiting for a lightning storm – a dramatic break in the weather. It seems foolish now to recall the notion – apparently commonly-held in March – that lockdown might finish with a bang, that there would be a clean ending. That things would return to ‘normal’ in a flash.
Yet, despite knowing better, I cannot stop myself from feeling adrift, waiting for a sudden shift, some kind of burst, which would clearly demarcate the boundaries of this. How to give form to something so formless, so slippery?
Perhaps I have been trained to imagine crisis as a kind of transcendental shock, a traumatic break that dramatically ruptures the very fabric of existence itself – something immediate, decisive and visible. Perhaps it is somehow easier that way. Perhaps disaster movies prove that catharsis can only come from clearly identifying the catastrophe, and from the certainty that it has been contained. When, in fact, disaster can also bleed and seep into the everyday like a badly dressed wound. It can develop slowly and have no clear endpoint, like a weird disease.
The weird, Mark Fisher writes, is a particular kind of perturbation. The marker of the weird is invasion or disturbance by that which does not belong; it is the irruption into this world of something from outside. Fisher suggests it involves a sensation of wrongness: a weird entity or object is so strange that it makes us feel that it should not exist. But, of course, by its very existence it proves that the weird thing is not wrong, after all: it is our conceptions that must be inadequate. The weird unsettles and ruptures boundaries; it transgresses thresholds; it makes you question what lies outside imagined limits, and where you begin and end.
The weird de-naturalises all worlds, Fisher writes, by exposing their instability, their openness to the outside. Like a virus it alters reality, revealing it be more complex and vulnerable than previously thought.
H.P Lovecraft described the weird as a certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces.
I keep waiting for something to break, afraid that that something will be me.
I watch Beirut’s port explode from a variety of angles. The initial blast, the crackling of fire, a billowing plume of smoke, a series of flashes, and then the sudden, overwhelming explosion. I watch the huge column of dark red smoke ascend and the white dome-shaped cloud that surges out from it. I watch it over and over again.
A CCTV video of an office shows computer monitors and a pot plant shaking on a desk. Dust falls from the ceiling like snow. And then, chaos. Office chairs, desks and computer screens hurtle and crumple, apparently as light and pliable as paper, balled up and chucked across a room. Rapidly, the screen goes blank, a wall of smoke.
One video shows the explosion from seven different angles. Each time: a billowing plume of smoke, and then the sudden, overwhelming blast. And then, chaos. Glass shatters, cameras drop, and smoke consumes screens. It all happens in seconds. It’s so fast it’s hard to work out what happened, the sequence of events. It seems to demand replay.
The explosion was like fifteen years of war in fifteen seconds, says Lebanon's team at the United Nations, comparing its impact to the devastation caused by the country's civil war that lasted from 1975 to 1990.
The dark smoke wavers between the colour of autumn leaves and the colour of dried blood. From every angle, the explosion looks like a mushroom cloud; it is a mushroom cloud. Despite the Lebanese media quickly reporting that the devastating blast occurred at a fireworks factory, initially, many people on Twitter declared that the blast simply had to be nuclear. How else to understand something so shattering than to give it the form that has haunted the cultural imagination for over seventy years?
Perhaps, if we have been trained to imagine crisis as a kind of transcendental shock, a traumatic break that dramatically ruptures the very fabric of existence itself, it is atomic thinking. And by that, of course, I mean detonations, things being split in two – before, and after. When, of course, what that should also mean is the creep of radiation poisoning, or the 24,000-year half-life of plutonim-239. A crisis that seeps, a crisis in slow motion. Many people, when discussing the 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate left to fester for six years in one of Beirut’s port warehouses described it as a time bomb.
It is 25 July 1946, and the United States is testing a bomb. A fleet of abandoned naval ships float in disrepair in a coral reef in the Marshall Islands, Bikini Atoll. Attached to one of them, suspended ninety feet below the surface of the water, is a nuclear weapon with a yield equivalent to around 23,000 tons of TNT – the same as the atom bomb the United States dropped on Nagasaki.
Things happened so fast in the next five seconds that few eyewitnesses could afterwards recall the full scope and sequence of the phenomena, wrote the physicist WA Shurcliff in the official report of Operation Crossroads.
Perhaps the Americans anticipated the disorientating effect the bomb would have, realising in advance that they could not trust eyewitness accounts to grasp the scale of the event, the full scope. More than seven hundred cameras and approximately five hundred camera operators were at the test site. Sixty-four aircraft flew overhead, carrying 328 still and motion picture cameras. Some of the movie cameras had been developed by the US Department of Defense and could shoot at the incredible speed of 8,000 frames a second. According to Jonathan Weisgall, nearly half the world’s supply of film was at Bikini for the tests, and photographers prepared specialized equipment that would take 1 million pictures in the first few seconds after the… explosion. It has been described as the most photographed moment in history.
The mushroom cloud spread to a width of over two miles, and a bank of vaporized water climbed to 2000 feet high.
Attempting to explain the trouble he and others had had grasping and describing the explosion they’d witnessed, Shurcliff suggests it revealed the inadequacy of language itself. The explosion phenomena abounded in absolutely unprecedented inventions in solid geometry … No adequate vocabulary existed.
The first detonation of a nuclear device had taken place a year before, in the Jornada del Muerto desert, New Mexico. The region was given its name by the Spanish conquistadors who attempted to cross the territory in the 1660s. It’s variously translated as Dead Man’s Route, Dead Man’s Walk, Journey of the Dead Man, or simply Journey of Death.
At the moment of seeing the first nuclear explosion, one man exclaimed My God, it’s beautiful. Another responded, No, it’s terrible.
Thirty years after Operation Crossroads, the artist Bruce Conner made a devastatingly beautiful and terrifying film using the original footage of the bomb test, called simply Crossroads. Conner’s film presents the test in its original film speed and from various angles, so that the viewer can experience the bomb detonate fifteen times over the course of thirty-six minutes. Mark Guiducci describes the viewer’s experience as an almost mesmerising sense of doom.
We see the explosion from ships, drone planes, and from high-altitude cameras. We see it from cameras mounted behind lead and concrete shielding on a specially constructed tower. In the last shot of the first part of the film, extreme slow motion makes the expanding mushroom cloud appear nearly motionless.
At first, the sound seems to be a live recording – sea birds, airplane engines, white noise like the sea’s waves, a shock wave and the blast of the explosion itself. But soon the sound and image get out of sync, veering together then splitting away from each other. A weird effect is triggered, the viewer is disorientated as the realisation sets in that the sound is intruding from the outside – all produced on a synthesizer. In the second half the soundtrack changes, as Terry Riley’s minimalist composition drifts over the footage like smoke. Thomas Dane suggests Riley’s soundtrack might be thought of as “slow motion music” gradually changing shape and texture like an exfoliating mushroom cloud. Time itself contracts and expands.
Dozens of pigs, sheep, goats, rats and guinea pigs had been placed on the vessels to study the effects of radioactivity. The pigs were put there because their mass, skin and hair provided an approximate substitute for human beings. They all died instantly.
Language has its limits, Adrian Searle writes. Words fail, and feel almost entirely inadequate when faced with such enormity.
When words fail, touch can become a language. In March 1981, David Wojnarowicz was twenty-six and filled with a sense of anxiousness and weariness, wondering about a great deal of things. He lies on his bed and talks into a microphone, trying to figure out what my life is and where I’ve been going.
I’ve been thinking about myself and my values and my actions and what my life seems to be composed of at this moment in time, he says. The fact that I’m twenty-six and I’m doing what I’m doing, wondering if any of it’s meaningful, if it’s futile. If it’s futile like the way people have done things before each world war. Thinking about war itself, thinking of the effect of evil on people.
But, most of all, he says, he’s thinking about this guy, and whether or not we’re going to have a relationship, or have a chance to explore senses of each other.
Anxiety and fatigue become intimate. War and evil and David’s life and its uncertain direction are subsumed in a desire for connection and recognition; where I’ve been going bleeds into where we’ve been going. Would exploring senses of each other make life more meaningful? Is a relationship even possible if everything is futile?
David and Bill - this guy David wants to get to know … or get close to or whatever – talk about futility. Bill talks about wishing to erase the futility of things in life, the sense of futility that invades things.
And Iasked him, David says into his recorder a few days later, just after 3am, why he felt the futility, or where he thought it comes from, and he said, “The atomic bomb” - something hovering over our heads since birth.
William C. Wees writes about Bruce Conner’s Crossroads in relation to what he calls the nuclear sublime. He notes that Edmund Burke describes a sublime affect as that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on the object which employs it.
The enormity of feeling brings reasoning processes to a standstill. One might call it a state of hyper-affect, Wees writes.
Words fail, the ever-hovering bomb drains them of their worth. Instead of speaking, David puts his hands on the base of Bill’s skull, and rubs slowly around his ears, behind his ears, down across his forehead, and over the bridge of his nose, and under his eyes. He puts his hands through his hair, through the folds of it.
Desire can also be atomic – world and word shattering. When I begin liking them, I suddenly become concerned about the effect of my words, David says. In past situations, in lying down in bed with them - with one person or another - I’ve put all the desire and all the feeling that I have in my contact with them, in my touch with them. And in conversation I hold back more and more.
Does language, in its imposition of precise definitions, necessarily close things down? Is touch more open? Is it weirder? Communicating - making contact with another person – requires crossing a threshold, it requires letting something and someone outside, in. Fisher stresses that the weird cannot only repel, it must also compel our attention. Encounters with the weird unknown do not simply evoke dread, but also fascination. Discussing Lovecraft’s weird fictions, Fisher suggests fascination in Lovecraft is a form of Lacanian jouissance: an enjoyment that entails the inextricability of pleasure and pain.
That is to say, Fisher continues, it transforms an ordinary object causing displeasure into a Thing which is both terrible and alluring, which can no longer be libidinally classified as either positive or negative. The Thing overwhelms, it cannot be contained, but it fascinates.
Desire can also be a curious mix of fascination and a certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces – an astonishment amounting almost to terror. It involves an irruption into this world of something from outside; it leaves you exposed.
My God, it’s beautiful.
No, it’s terrible.
In his essay, William C. Wees notes that awe is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as dread mixed with veneration, reverential or respectful fear and the feeling of solemn and reverential wonder tinged with latent fear, inspired by what is terribly sublime and majestic in nature. The dictionary uses the examples of thunder, or a storm at sea, but couldn’t you also be awestruck by his ears … his forehead … his nose … his eyes?
I always seem to have this hope that they’ll understand what I’m feeling through the way that I touch them or the way that I move with them when I’m lying down with them, David says. I hope they’ll understand that I’m holding back in my conversation, but it’s something that I just can’t expect people to understand or feel or respond to.
And yet, under hovering and invasive atomic thinking, David briefly finds a way to recover from a state of hyper-affect. I just held him for a while - getting as much peace, and feeling the warmth from it, as he did. In the face of annihilating futility, futile gestures can bring some kind of relief. There was no equal or unequal in it, it was just a gesture I was capable of making and I made it.
But what if touch is fraught? If contact carries risk? What if contact is the crisis?
Eleven years after David holds Bill under the bomb, he will be dead from AIDs. Hardly anyone knows yet that another bomb is coming, David Velasco writes, maybe already lit inside them, that will wipe out David and many of his friends and lovers. Just as David’s thoughts of total war and evil slide into thoughts of individual desire, hovering dread of global annihilation mutates into an intimate terror of personal extinction.
During public health crises, sites of contact and connection become sites of danger; the body itself becomes a site of danger. What kind of gestures can be made when both words and touch can so easily fail, slip quickly from beauty into terror?
With a constant awareness of risk, impermanence and vulnerability, the desire for contact intensifies, becoming inexorably coupled to feeling alive. Maybe I just want to shove my face underneath his shirt and kiss his chest, or plunge my head through his chest and kiss his heart, David says after discovering his HIV status. Maybe just kiss his heart.
And what then? Velasco, wary of origin stories or myths of an outside or desires to break through the skin wonders what happens when you reach his heart? Thinking you can even get to the heart is also atom-bomb thinking.
My God, it’s beautiful.
No, it’s terrible.
It’s too hot to sleep, too hot to stay still. Cycling very fast is the only way to relieve the pressure, the air hitting my face and chest almost like a cool breeze. I speed down Rye Lane and a topless man dashes into the road in front of me and collapses. He lies on his back by the gutter and laughs, his hands twitching at his sides. The skin of his chest looks as pale and soft as a steamed bun, as if a single touch would leave a lasting indentation.
His laughter tails me. I cycle through a haze of exhaust fumes, which seem to stick to my damp skin and seep inside my pores.
David thinks there’s something beyond completely pre-invented existence, where everything is regulated and cannibalised into banal parody, something he calls imagination. He suggests imagination is the key to breaking through pre-invented existence: that in imagination, we can break the images of borders – we can break through the borders of countries, we can break through existing structures of government, or we can break through whatever systems of control are on our shoulders.
In his work, David says, he breaks borders by playing with the compression of time.
Presented in two unequal halves, Bruce Conner’s film allows the detonation of the bomb to be witnessed both as, in Adrian Searle’s words, a sudden, wrenching unleashing of power… and as a slow eclipse of the world.
After witnessing the first atomic test, William Lawrence wrote that in that moment hung eternity. Time stood still.
I don’t pay attention to, or I ignore, the borders of time in my work. Time is a continuous element. … Something that happens two thousand years ago has as much meaning as something happens ten minutes ago or something that happens in the future, David says.
Perhaps this is the right kind of atomic thinking, time bomb thinking.
And Fisher asks, is there not an intrinsically weird dimension to the time travel story?
A weird effect is triggered, he continues, when the time travel story involves time paradox(es). These paradoxes plunge us into what Douglas Hofstader calls strange loops or tangled hierarchies, in which the distinction between cause and effect is disturbed, is fatally disrupted.
Yeah, I’m alive, but, you know, I could be dead another year from now or two years from now, David says. And it’s weird to read David’s words, spoken into a microphone in February 1989, because he will be dead three years from now.
And I won’t see this road, and I won’t see this sunlight, and I won’t see the fast trucks driving by. Illness is also a strange loop. Carrying an intimate and terrifying awareness of death, of impermanence, David’s experience of life, like so many others during the AIDs crisis, is fatally disrupted.
And time just moves so slow, and time moves so fast – and then time stands still for some, and time just speeds up for others. For me, at this moment I’m in quite a dislocation of time, from both outside of time and inside of time at the same time. And all the world looks pretty great.
David describes his illness as a small fiction that I’m carrying, a fiction he creates so that I can continue on and I feel excited about certain things and feel drives toward certain things.
But these drives are also paradoxes. Sometimes David goes into overdrive, suddenly feeling a compulsiveness toward hundreds of different activities. Yet, being split in this way is immobilising, it’s like taking a walk and every three seconds changing direction.
So that I really end up nowhere, or I end up walking in place, or I end up treading water.
The fiction he creates fails; his ability to create a personal narrative fails. How to move forward? Trapped at an impasse – unable to continue on – David says he just feels this weird fatigue.
And I’m realising it’s fear, or fear of death.
And I feel like I’m breaking. … I feel like I want to step into a river and let the water wash right through my stomach and take it away. Whether it’s anxiety or whether it’s real, physical aspects of disease, I want, I want to be washed. Or I want to be like a sieve with water moving through it, taking away the particles, the things that are keeping me in this treading position.
It’s at this point on the tape he says that, maybe, he just wants to shove his face under his shirt, kiss his heart.
The line between beauty and terror is as thin as that between love and hate. Does David want to kiss his heart, or break it? His speech becomes a strange loop, cycling around the desire to become a destructive force, to become as devastating as the atom bomb, as the virus invading his veins: I keep dreaming of breaking things, I keep having these leanings toward smashing everything. … I smash the chairs and the tables, I smash the windows, I smash the walls.
Yet, David loops back. He’s not talking about physical damage, but attempting to find words for something more elusive. It’s always about freedom, and also about contact. I want to free up by cracking open something else, cracking open - reaching into the inside of me or the inside of somebody else.
David wants to trouble the threshold between inside and outside, between the body and the what lies beyond it. I want to live inside dreams, he says. I want to live inside myths. But that’s too transcendental, too disembodied. I want to fuck some guy, David says. I want to take his clothes off slow and unbutton his sleeves and pull the shirt from around his body. I want to pull the shirt off, I want to pull the pants apart, I want to lift the undershirt up, I want to bury my face against that cloth.
I want to lose myself; I want to lose myself in landscapes or movement. I want to fuck somebody, I want to take off somebody’s clothes, I want to lie down in sand, I want to lie down in dirt, I want to lie down with this other person, David says.
Another loop. Isn’t about sex. It’s about something else.
Just trying to find some simple gesture of language to reach and touch somebody, to reach and touch myself and know that I’m fucking living and that I’m alive and that I’m not in a dead world going on a dead-end road.
It’s like feeling the trappings of everything in society, David says. It’s almost laughable, it’s so absurd.
A topless man dashes into the road and collapses. Lying in the gutter he laughs, his hands twitching at his sides.
It’s wanting to experience some gesture of freedom that feels total. David wants to be atomic, to be an explosion, a sublime hyper-affect. If I could take a shotgun and blow holes through every window in the house and sit down afterward and laugh, maybe that approximates what I’m feeling. He wants to break some windows, turn the apartment upside down, or move in time and space in a way that would make everything physically extremely light or transparent.
Describing the first nuclear explosion, William Laurence wrote, When the flash came it lighted up the sky and ocean with the light of many suns, a light not of the earth.
The fall of the water, the expanding, towering uprush, the fillets, the side jets, the base surge and the fallout.
If I could shake the walls until they fell outwards and the roof just disappeared, David says. If I could pick up these streets in my hands and bend them into different shapes. … if I can knock down the existing world like a set of dominoes.
At the time of the first atomic test, the project’s director, J. Robert Oppenheimer, simply said, it worked. Yet, he later alleged it brought to mind a passage in the Bhagavad-Gita: I am become Death / The shatterer of worlds.
Dust falls from the ceiling like snow. And then, chaos. Office chairs and desks crumple like paper. A wall of smoke the colour of blood.
And then, on one of David’s final tapes, the yearning for extremity recedes, replaced by a real gentle moment. Sitting alone in an open landscape, David says: I’m here by myself and I don’t mind. I kind of wish it could just stay like this for maybe a few years, or I just never moved out of this spot.
Is David experiencing a sublime affect – that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended? Is this the enormity of feeling bringing reasoning processes to a standstill? Or is this a kind of stillness that compresses and expands time, breaking through pre-invented existence? In this gentle moment, is David treading water, or being washed?
Years after David holds Bill under the weight of atomic thinking, and years after HIV lights a time bomb inside his body, what persists is a desire to be at peace with another body, to share a moment of companionship, reciprocity, care and protection.
I could just watch the light stay like this, David says. And maybe somebody coming along and just putting their arms around me for a few minutes.
Is the gesture of freedom which David seeks and attempts to grasp ultimately contained in this simple gesture? This small, imagined intimacy? Perhaps, if thinking you can even get to the heart is also atom-bomb thinking, one antidote is abandoning notions of rupture. To reach out without wanting to tear through the surface; to reach and touch somebody, to reach and touch myself without breaking, or cracking open; stopping at the skin. Perhaps it’s in slowing down, and attending to the futile, ordinary gestures of the everyday. Perhaps it’s just being held for a while; somewhere between a few years and a few minutes.
In Love’s Work, Gillian Rose writes to grow in love-ability is to accept the boundaries of oneself and others, while remaining vulnerable, woundable, around the bounds.
Acknowledgement of conditionality is the only unconditionality of human love, Rose suggests.
In the absence of stability, Lauren Berlant suggests there is still the possibility of solidarity, the experience of being in the impasse together, waiting for the other shoe to drop, and also, allowing for some healing and resting, waiting for it not to drop.
In that moment hung eternity, William Lawrence wrote. Time stood still.