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Reaping the Whirlwind, An
Interview with
Kendall Johnson and John
Brantingham
By
Kate Flannery
July 16, 2018 marks another anniversary of the first
atomic bomb test, which took place about 230 miles south of Los Alamos, New
Mexico. Not everyone will be celebrating the event. Kendall Johnson, a seasoned psychotherapist, artist and
writer, and John Brantingham, a poet laureate and professor of literature, are
two of those who think it would be better to consider thoughtfully what was
really accomplished on that day in 1945.
Robert Oppenheimer, often referred to as “the father of
the atomic bomb” and head of The Los Alamos Laboratory at the time, said later
that watching the first explosion and now-iconic mushroom cloud brought to mind
words from the Bhagavad Gita, part of
Hindu scripture: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” He soon
became a fierce advocate for the control of nuclear weapons.
73 years after that first test, Johnson and Brantingham
have come together to produce an extraordinary volume, A Sublime and Tragic Dance, published by Cholla Needles
Arts & Literary Libary. It lays out in searing, artistic detail the whirlwind that we began to reap in 1945. One only needs to read recent headlines to
understand that the whirlwind is still with us. In poetry and in paintings, A Sublime and Tragic Dance gives us a
renewed and vivid awareness of the destructive force released in 1945 as a
result of Oppenheimer’s and others’ work on The Manhattan Project.
The following conversation highlights some of the
thinking of Kendall Johnson and John Brantingham regarding this book and its
timely subject.
Kate Flannery: The story of how you two met and started
working together on this project is an interesting one: a mixture of chance, shared energies, and
shared concerns. How did this all begin, and will you continue to collaborate
in the future?
Ken Johnson: I first met John on one evening in January,
2017. I was at the dA Center for the Arts in Pomona to sit an exhibit of my
works on Vietnam. My exhibit included writing fragments that accompanied the
works. I went downstairs to the gallery and found it filled with poets--a group
from the San Gabriel Valley Literary Festival--who were having their monthly
poetry reading. John was their leader.
John asked me to join in their session and read my exhibit’s writing fragments.
He also asked me to join them afterwards for beer at a nearby Vietnamese
restaurant. By the time we were finished I was hooked. A week later we met
again and the subject of J. Robert Oppenheimer came up.
We both found
Oppenheimer fascinating as a character; we also saw his work as terrible and sublime
in both vision and scope. As we talked, we looked over some of my paintings and
decided to work together on a project focusing on Oppenheimer and his work. We
laid out a series from my collection and the conversation began. One of John’s
favorite poetry forms is ekphrastic poetry, so the project seemed a natural
one. At first I was going to provide only the images and he the ekphrastic
poetry. But as things progressed I became involved in the writing aspect of the
work, and so our project morphed into a new collaboration, ultimately resulting
in this book. Hopefully this will be
only the first of more collaborations to come.
John Brantingham: Yeah, it was incredible to be allowed to look
at all of Ken’s paintings in his studio. I was given a view of the artist that
few people have. From that, I saw the complexity of his mind and how that could
add a layer to my understanding of a topic such as Oppenheimer. I love to work
in collaboration with other people, because that collaboration inevitably leads
me to new perspectives on the subject matter. In essence, I’m not caught up in
whatever shortcomings I have. Working with Ken has been great, because we have
similar opinions and ideas but come from completely different experiences.
Working with someone who is a visual artist gave me a way of rethinking the
topic.
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| Robert Oppenheimer |
KF: What drew each of you to
want to study and write about Robert Oppenheimer? What was it in his character
or his soul that made you want to dig more deeply into his story?
KJ: I find
Oppie (a nickname he received when at University of Leiden to study with a
colleague of Einstein) the prototypical Modern Man--cut off from his own world
and having difficulty understanding the effects of his actions on others. He grew up in the privileged upper middle
class of New York City; he was coddled as a child, attended exclusive private
schools, and allowed to remain aloof from children his own age. His parents
allowed him his eccentricities and encouraged his quirks which only led to more
isolation. In college he had great
difficulties socially, although his brilliance was apparent. Graduate school
was worse. It wasn’t until post-doctoral
study in Germany that he began to collaborate with others in any meaningful
way, and then it was with the superstars of his day. The Manhattan Project was his chance for
ultimate professional affirmation. In a
sense, I think it represented a kind of atonement for his previous isolation, a
reconciliation with others. And yet at some point he chose to go
ahead with a project which he knew would be used against civilians and was
morally problematic. It was a character-defining
situation and he swallowed his qualms. I
figure it was for the glory.
JB: My reaction is similar to Ken’s in a lot of ways. Discussion of
Oppenheimer is often complex, which I find refreshing. His biographers have had
a hard time deciding who he is, and I think that’s appropriate. I haven’t come
to any clear decision about who he was either. Too often we oversimplify people
and what their lives mean. People are neither wholly good nor evil. They are
people. Of course, I can point to rare individuals and say, yes, that person
was evil, but on the whole there is a mix. Oppenheimer invented what may prove
to be the world killer, and the motivations behind what he did probably include
ego, a will to power, fear, a genuine desire to protect troops, a need to stop
Nazism, and probably a hundred other things. I agree completely about what Ken
says about the glory and about his qualms. It is those qualms that fascinate
me.
Another reason I wanted to write about him is that the nuclear
dread that has been napping inside of me since the late eighties is now waking
up due to recent political events, and I wanted to confront it: understand it and understand how I am going
to live in this new reality. I had a severe case of that dread growing up. If I
am going to die in a flame that devours my civilization, I want to understand
how we got to that place at least. Is that too dramatic? Possibly it is.
KJ: John speaks of dread. I grew up during the ’50s,
before our country had become anesthetized to the idea of nuclear warfare. Our
political concerns in the ’60s and ’70s became more current as time went on, and
the trope of “nuclear fear” fell out of fashion in favor of clamor in the
streets. Then after the ’70s, it became a matter of societal memory loss. But
now it’s back. Not that it ever really went away, of course, but media and
public attention are now shifting back to the dangers of nucelar war. John is
smarter and more aware than most, so he grew up with nuclear dread when it played
a subdominant cultural melody. That
dread has recently been reawakened. With me it was terrifying then in the ’50s,
and it always has been.
KF: It was Oppenheimer who
chose the codename, “Trinity,” for the first test of an atomic bomb. “Trinity”
was a reference to one of John Donne’s “holy sonnets” which begins, “Batter my
heart, three person’d God….” The poet goes on to call upon god to transform
him, by violent means, toward goodness. What do you think about Oppenheimer’s
choice of this name for such a momentous and horrendous event in our
history?
JB: I think he often used the
religious in such a way to suggest that he was in some way god-like. In his
famous quotation from the Bhagavad-Gita,
“Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” I think he was taking on the
mantle not of the prince, but of Vishnu, the god. In John Donne’s “Trinity,” it
is God who is doing the battering. In the Trinity Test, it was Oppenheimer. One
way of understanding this is that Oppenheimer was wrestling with what it means
to take on god-like powers. Another way of understanding it is that he was
glorying in taking on those powers. However you understand it, he spent his
life fascinated by the elemental and mythic powers of the universe. While
living in the desert, he would ride his horse out into lightning storms for the
pleasure of feeling the power of the sky. He studied ancient scriptures. I
think these forces led him to his deep understanding of physics.
KJ: I agree. I also think the Oppenheimer tale is
a target-rich environment if you’re looking for contradiction and confusion.
Mysteries abound. In many ways he had the character of a mystic, and when you
think about the rudiments of particle theory, how could he not? If matter
consists of emptiness and a few specks of energy, where does pain come from? Or
joy? The world that he inhabited was the epitome of instability. Yet something cohered it all for him. He had
some vision that pulled order out of apparent chaos, some lodestone more than
simple trust in a hypothetical natural law. Some might call that god. I hunger,
we all hunger for such a vision. We all
seek something that makes it all make sense. Whatever his understanding of physics,
he nevertheless swam in a mythopoetic sea. I think he used that language when
it captured the multiplicity of the moment.
KF: As you worked together and
learned more about Oppenheimer, what do you consider to be the important things
that you discovered about him as a human being and as a scientist, a man of
reason?
JB: I was struck by how
unreasonable he was. It’s said that he attempted murder twice in his life
although he was never charged with a crime. Once, in a moment of symbolic evil
he poisoned an apple. I was surprised by these kinds of acts, because I had
grown up with an image of him as a staid and reasonable person, doing things
out of a conception of the world that required a view to the greater good. In
the end, I came to the belief that the man was a mixture of motivations. But that’s what it means to be a human. In
the end, I saw him through the lens of humanity instead of in the oversimplified
way we like to see people of the past.
KJ: Yeah, I agree. The
man embodied more contradiction than ten of the best of us. He was complex and
very vulnerable. He could take the lead in a massive, groundbreaking project,
knocking heads with military and security people, and then be crushed when he
was later discredited. He could see the world as described by Hindu
prophets—all fire and change—and yet be baffled by people who saw things
differently. He could develop a weapon that killed two hundred thousand souls
in two strikes and yet find a bigger version of that weapon to be an
abomination.
KF: As you put this volume together, choosing
which art and which poems to use, what direction did you want the art and the
poetry to take? How did you decide what you wanted in the flow of the work?
KJ: The artwork was complete when we began but existed
largely as separate pieces rather than a series. John was especially helpful in
seeing the continuity and development of theme as he and I ordered the series.
Once that initial ordering was complete the meanings latent in each began to
speak to us. Then John began writing. I became so excited by his work that I
was soon contributing poetry to our common folder.
JB: I love working in collaboration. The first word was always Ken’s,
because we were working from his paintings. However, after I started writing,
and he started responding we began to have a real conversation about the nature
of the man and our world. We talked one-on-one and through our art. We talked
online and read similar books. I watched a lot of documentaries and found an
old Person to Person program where
Edward R. Murrow interviewed Oppenheimer. Ken and I went over all of this until
we found that we had the beginnings of an understanding of him. You can never
completely understand anyone, even yourself, but this collaboration led us more
deeply into ourselves.
KF: Ekphrastic poetry has been described as
“poetry confronting art.” Your book seems to be more than that. The poetry and
the art seem to complement each other rather than to confront. If I’m correct
in this, did you have this in mind when you began working together or did it
evolve over time?
KJ: The words “confronting” vs “complementing”
are interesting choices. Ekphrastic poetry is often written following a visit
to a museum or studio, where the writer is challenged by the work to rethink
things and make poetic sense of it. John
is a specialist in ekphrasis and has written books about the process. I’ve been
working on a couple of projects using writing as a way of deepening the
viewer’s experience. I’ve admonished viewers not to assume that the artwork
illustrates the writing, nor that the writing explains the artwork, but
both—together—point beyond themselves. I think this cuts closer to the bone of
this book, that our writing and the art pieces all speak together about a multifaceted
character in a complex era: Oppenheimer and the decision to engage in nuclear
warfare.
JB: Yeah, I’ve always viewed ekphrasis as part of
a cultural conversation. The arts in general are a conversation we’ve been
having for thousands of years, but ekphrasis is a direct discussion. Ken’s
absolutely right. It’s not about illustrating poetry or explaining art. It’s a
discussion, so this is as much responding to Ken’s poetry as it is about the
art. I think I’m correct in saying that Ken is an abstract expressionist so he
is often painting the emotion as opposed to illustrating the event. If I’m
wrong about that, Ken, please correct me. So we’re often writing about these
concepts on an emotional or even spiritual level rather than discussing events.
After all, we have books and essays to do that.
KJ: For the most part, John is right in
characterizing my painting as abstract expressionist in that the feeling is
more important than figure or concept. I’d like to sharpen that a bit. As I
work on a piece, a dialogue begins between me and the piece I’m working on. I
push it—the materials—about, but the result speaks back, leading me off in new
directions. While some artists start with a clear vision of the finished
product, I learn and am transformed by my process. Sometimes I end up 180
degrees from where I started, and that is usually a good thing. It tends to be
more, however, than simply emotion. Often I find I have been working on the
background, context, implications and metaphysics behind the emotion, much less
than the figure.
That said, many of my paintings have been about one or
two main themes: nuclear war and Vietnam. John helped me put the former into a
better articulated series. I’m also finding that including the poetry—his and
my own—helps delve into the content with greater depth and clarity.
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| rarehistoricalphotos.com |
KF: July 16th is the anniversary of the first
atomic bomb test near Los Alamos, New Mexico. How do you believe we should be
thinking about that day in 1945?
KJ: July 16th is the day we saw the
culmination of the great race to build the bomb and were shown the
consequences. It was a revelation. We saw the power we had harnessed. We also
saw what we needed in order to make the decision about using it. August 6th and
August 9th were the apocalypse. We knowingly used “fat boy” and “little man”
(the nicknames given to the two bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki) to
purposely incinerate and irradiate the better part of two large cities and
their mostly civilian human population. The intentional firebombing of German
and Japanese cities in the last part of the war showed that we as human beings
are already fallen. July 16th revealed our capacity.
JB: I
think that nuclear weapons were inevitable, given our human curiosity. Their
use, however, was not inevitable, and I think we need to use days like July 16th,
as well as August 6th and 9th, the days when the atomic
bombs were first dropped on human populations, for moments of reflection. I am
constantly amazed by people’s capacity for evil. I’m sometimes amazed by my own
capacity for it. In reflection, I see that I gain nothing from it, and it makes
everything, including my own life, much worse. Why do it then? Why purposely
engage in something that is evil? We as humans have great power, and I believe
that everyone is capable of ultimate evil. It seems to me that the only way to
prevent a tragedy in our world, where those two things merge, is through
reflection.
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KF: That’s a good lead-in to my
last question. Just two years before his death this year, renowned
physicist,
Stephen Hawking, echoed Oppenheimer’s sentiments about the development of
nuclear weapons. Hawking added a slightly more optimistic twist: “Most of the
threats we face come from the progress we've made in science and
technology," he said. "We are not going to stop making progress, or
reverse it, so we must recognise the dangers and control them. I'm an optimist,
and I believe we can." Do you agree?
JB: I think one thing we need
to do in order to recognize and control those dangers is to stop seeing
ourselves as a world of nations; we need to see ourselves as a world of people.
Nationhood and the need to have power within and among nations is one thing
that’s likely to lead to our destruction. Nine nations have nuclear weapons. All
it will take to lead to a tragedy, the likes of which we have never seen, is
for one leader of those nation to put the concept of nationhood, his or her own
ego, or some kind of related, concocted philosophy before common sense and
humanity.
KJ: Absolutely! Technology has developed life-saving drugs, ways to increase farm yield and decrease starvation, along with various forms of clean energy. On the other hand, nuclear threat, development of the machine gun, “star wars” technology, threats of Artificial Intelligence Technology going awry all show us the emergence of a new world that may not bode well for us. There is clear evidence that electronic toys, entertainment, and communication systems are changing our neural DNA and desensitizing us to the consequences of our actions. Hawking is right: the forces of marketing and economics are not going to make technology go away, and it’s up to us to control them and to control ourselves. Unfortunately, we don’t have a July 16th revelatory moment to make that as clear as it was in 1945.
All original artwork by Kendall Johnson is included in the book.
Click here to purchase A Sublime and Tragic Dance on Amazon.com
Click here to purchase A Sublime and Tragic Dance on Amazon.com
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