A Convergence
of Convergences:
A Contest.
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For more information
about this contest,
click here.
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Addendum
to "Laughing, Clapping ..." and,
More Specifically,
to the Stalinist-
Applause Anecdote.
By Lawrence Weschler
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The other evening—only a few weeks after I posted the "Laughing, Clapping ..." convergence a few entries back, with its invocation of Solzhenitsyn's account of that chilling incident, in the midst of Stalin's Great Terror, when a provincial Russian audience, at the mere mention of the Great Leader's name, whipped itself into a lather of frenzied applause, one from which it presently proved incapable of escaping (each rally participant terrified that he or she might be seen to be the first to stop applauding)—I had occasion myself to witness that scene's uncanny obverse.
Long story, but I had been granted the privilege of attending the Chicago Lyric Opera's premiere of Peter Sellars's staging of John Adams's Doctor Atomic, with its stunning evocation of the anguished passion of J. Robert Oppenheimer in the hours leading up to the Trinity test at the birth of the nuclear age—and, without going into a long summary of the opera's plot or Adams's bracing musical conception, suffice it to say that, as the story wends relentlessly toward its horrible climax, the bomb itself (which has loomed above the players, like a giant Medusa's head, through most of the piece)
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FIGURE 1. The bomb sphere looming over the singers.
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FIGURES 2–3. The bomb sphere shadowed behind the drape.
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presently gets lifted out of sight up into the theater's rafters (as the real thing was lifted atop its testing tower on the occasion of the actual test), and now, as the countdown enters its final minutes (minutes that seem to stretch and buckle under the pressure of Adams's throbbing score), the entire cast and chorus, gathered on the raked stage (one minute and counting, 30 seconds, 20 seconds, 10), fall to their knees and then onto their bellies, sprawled out prone facing toward the audience, their heads tucked under their arms, ducking, waiting, waiting, the music throbbing, throbbing to its basso-crescendo (not an explosion, exactly; in fact, not an explosion at all; rather, simply the hugeness of what is happening becoming more and more palpably real), at which point, as their bodies start being bathed in this unholy light, they lift their heads in awe. We do not see what they are seeing;
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FIGURES 4–8. The split seconds after the explosion.
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we only see them, staring out at us, awestruck, stunned to knowledge;
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FIGURE 9. The cast, prone, staring out in the red light.
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the music swells, then finally subsides (by way of a falling trill: a crackly distant woman's radio voice, in Japanese); subsiding to silence, the piece ends ...
And here is where things got truly strange: because, as the stage darkened, we in the audience could still make out the players up there, prone, staring out at us, and the silence was complete, total, all-enveloping, and it continued on like that, the utter stillness of this terrible dawning awareness, complete pin-drop silence, with us staring at them and them staring at us, it was time to applaud and nobody was applauding, us staring at them and them staring at us, seconds passing in the thickening gloam, minutes—two, three, maybe four, maybe even five (time was, in any case, continuing on like that, all taffy-contorted)—this incredible hush, no one daring to be the first to applaud, until, finally, a drizzly squall of clapping gusted over the auditorium, the spell was broken, and the place burst into full ovation.
Like I say, an uncanny obverse echo to the scene in Stalin's Russia—impressing Stalin, of course, having been, as the opera's libretto makes clear, the true motive behind both that Trinity explosion and the two Japanese devastations that quickly followed.
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P.S. With regard to the Medusa's head of the Trinity bomb, I am not unaware of that image's rhyme with Chris Burden's astonishing suspended dystopian planetoid of a sculpture from a few seasons back, now in MoMA's collection:
FIGURE 10. Chris Burden, Medusa's Head (1990)
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OTHER WINNERS.
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1. Evolving, Evolved by Charlie Hopper
2. Primal Forces, Basic Colors by Andy Hunter
3. The End of the Beginning by Holly Dunsworth
Intermezzo by Lawrence Weschler
4. This Is Not an Ad by Jimmy Chen
5. Catskills Vagina by Dan Clem
6. The Antipodes by Chris Zic
7. Self-Made Constriction by Sam Gaskin
8. We Are the Son by Danny Erker
9. Painfully Unaware by Dan Park
10. Gutshot by Jason Torchinsky
Weschler's Second Interlude
11. Love and War by Kim Wood
12. Inside and Out There by Lena Webb
13. The March by Emily Marvosh
14. Feminine Divine Triptych by Margit Christenson
15. Time's Deliberate Convergence by Steve Denyszyn
16. A Rousseau/Hirshfield Convergence by Adam Webb
Beirut/Warsaw by Lawrence Weschler
17. Clothesline Raising Over Carlisle, Indiana by Charlie Hopper
Carnival of Convergences
Weschler's Fourth Interlude
Aftersquib to the Foregoing
18. Pelvises All the Way Down by John Peter Rickgauer
19. Ovary Night? by Maya Muñoz
20. Christ in Space by Jonathan Shipley
A Pair of Convergences Off of Tina Barney
Another Carnival of Convergences
21. Moral Confusion: Iraq, Munich, and Vietnam by Donald Rumsfeld
22. Seeing the Tree for the Forest by Walter Murch
An Addendum to the Foregoing, and a Visitor Challenge
23, 24, and 25. Far Out by Michael Benson, Brian Christian, and Walter Murch
26. Jewish Bunk Beds by Monica S. Bland
Those Damn Swedish Trees, Take 3: Convergence of the Blogs
27. Degenerate Boogie-Woogie by Lisa Lee
Carnival of Convergences No. 3
28. Sand and Moon by Alison Cornyn
Actaeon: An Ovidian Impromptu by Lawrence Weschler
29 and 30. Hoods and Veils by Vero Testa and Lauren Redniss
The Onion/Bickle Convergence by Lawrence Weschler
31. The Lone Figure Against the Armored Swarm by Michele Siegel
32. Muscle and Flow by Benjamin R. Cohen
An Addendum to the Foregoing: Cities, Brains, Orchestras by Lawrence Weschler
Saint and Princess by Lawrence Weschler
Beauty Queen and Baghdad Hummer by Lawrence Weschler
Carnival of Convergences No. 4
Laughing, Clapping, Constantly Forgetting: A Trill of Readerly Associations by Lawrence Weschler
33. Lithographica by R.A. Villanueva
34. Papal Fire (Papa Lux) by Nick Feia
Addendum to "Laughing, Clapping ..." and, More Specifically, to the Stalinist-Applause Anecdote by Lawrence Weschler
35. Disseminations: Internet, Dandelions, Flight Paths by Sarah Daegling
36. Black and White and in Color by Walter Murch
Carnival of Convergences No. 5
Lee Friedlander's Visionary Trees: An Addendum to the Last Chapters of Everything That Rises by Lawrence Weschler
37. Shipwrecked Desperation by Charles Mudede via Matt Haber
38. Life Forms by Ariel Winter
Cameras, Action! From Disney World to St. Peter's Square, the Mediative Flight From the Immediate by Lawrence Weschler
Carnival of Convergences No. 6
Convergent Postscripts by Lawrence Weschler
From Da Vinci to Duchamp, by Way of Russia by Lawrence Weschler
Venus on a Vespa, Berger on My Mind by Lawrence Weschler
MORE ABOUT EVERYTHING THAT RISES
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