The biblical creation process is a story about fission, too, or at least a version of it. The first man, Adam, originally contained both masculine and feminine forces, united by the inevitable seam of cosmic threads. Adam was in this way completely androgynous, but then, according to the myth, they were unhappy with their own bisexuality, and as preparation for the universe, they cast out their feminine parts to become purely masculine. Only then could divine power shine from his eyes – from those reformed, straight eyes.
For scientists and philosophers, the atom bomb had the potential to become something more than a total meltdown of atoms and a catastrophe for mankind. Trinity and its successors could be conclusive evidence of a divine power, impelled by the pure masculine symbolism of a process that split its own components, casting off the waste to create the most powerful force of energy humanity had ever seen. Perhaps that’s why the research programme behind Trinity, Little Boy and Fat Man was named the Manhattan project. Casting off the feminine parts made it possible to rise, surging with inhumane power up toward the sky, like a skyscraper, with an architecture that united Christianity, capitalism and patriarchy in a holy trinity, horny for God.
I identify with the feminine parts, those left scattered around Adam’s body, the trash left behind by mankind’s fusion with God. The atomic waste is invisible; it has long since been dumped and buried underground, beneath towns and neighbourhoods populated by minorities and poor people. But out here in the desert, another kind of masculine waste glitters in the dry sunlight. The area is populated by oil field and military workers, and they’ve scattered their empty beer cans, used condoms, junk food containers and petrol cans across the landscape. It’s a modern version of the ram heads in Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings. In front of her never-ending New Mexico landscape, she displays the universe’s sacred waste: the skeletons float in the air, in front of mountains, sand and sky. They glisten; they are made of the salt of the earth and the sugar of witchcraft.
What a disappointment it must have been for God’s scientific apprentices when they discovered the even more powerful fusion technology. In 1952 Operation Ivy detonated the fusion bomb Ivy Mike, equivalent to ten megatons of TNT, and even at that point the men of the establishment had begun to pull out of the American nuclear project. These bombs are a dead end, they thought; the potential destruction is too great. They hadn’t said that about Little Boy or Fat Man. But the fusion bomb really could blow the world as we know it to pieces. This process fuses atoms instead of splitting them; it brings isolated parts together into new forms that previously couldn’t exist. I imagine the fusion bomb as a recording of Adam’s gender-splitting process, the whole of genesis, in reverse, a restoring of the masculine and feminine into one condition, an impossible dimension, a join-the-dots feast. A perfect blasphemous construction built in the name of piety. Ivy is both a boy’s and a girl’s name. Has someone made a superhero figure of Ivy?
Here in the malpaís, the scorched sand belt right next to Trinity’s melted circle, I feel the presence of the atoms as they always are, inside us, always moving. They own us, contain us and disintegrate us. When I rub my hands together, the atoms are closer to each other; perhaps a few even fuse between my wrists, heated by the desert sun. What I’m feeling is the atoms’ potential. I’m standing on the black belt, wondering if there were witches among the atom researchers in the ’40s and ’50s. Because if you learned to fuse atoms, you would also be able to see that the melting process doesn’t just unify two parts; there’s also a third, meddling component, an unnecessary addition, dust in the plug, a part that contributes to chaos, the original chaos. Atom, atom, and? Masculine, feminine, and?
When the hydrogen bomb Tsar Bomba was detonated in 1961, the whole world’s elite trembled, not just because it was the most destructive weapon ever created, but because a bigger potential for and? had never been observed. The potential and the transgression found in the atoms could be transferred to philosophy, music, literature, film. That very same year, Věra Chytilová directed her first film, Agnès Varda made Cléo from 5 to 7, and Meredith Monk had her first solo performance. Shortly after, Roland Barthes began to write The Death of the Author, Luce Irigaray finished her master’s degree in psychology, and Jacques Derrida began to jot down ideas for the lecture he would give at John Hopkins University in 1966.
After stopping in the Valley of Fires, I travel as close to the Trinity Site as I can get. There are no official signs or buildings in the area, just the odd roadside bench, boarded-off gravel roads and a single cardboard placard with something or other about the crater on it, probably hung there by an individual conspiracy theorist. The road into the crater is closed permanently, like most country roads in America that aren’t freeways or highways. When the map application shows me I’m nearby, I stop to look around at a garish rest stop, but all I can see is reddish brown desert hills, bone-dry shrubs and a run-over UFO badge on the ground. The next day, at the National Museum of Nuclear Science in Albuquerque, I see bits of the glass that the desert sand was melted into during the bomb detonation. The matter is called trinitite, green like kryptonite, inside a dusty display case. A Geiger counter is exhibited above it as a demonstration. It crackles as it registers the atom’s processes. The sound of radio-activity. Trinitite is still too fresh to touch, too pure and masculine. Or is it we who are too frail, and allow ourselves to be radiated,
