Alyssa Quinn
Metaphor: the truth in an erroneous naming.
—Thalia Field
As with any metaphorical system, mathematics becomes a myth . . . if its metaphoricity is forgotten.
—David E. Leary
The becquerel, the curie, the rutherford, the sievert, the roentgen, the gray, the rad. The cloud chamber, the electroscope, the dosimeter, the Geiger-Müller tube, the scintillation counter, the drift chamber, the Cherenkov detector, the calorimeter, the time projection chamber. The device, the unit. The measurement, the measuring.
There are waves that will kill you. There are forms of light that will strip you from yourself. I am haunted by a question: what is radioactivity? What is it? What is it truly?
A mass spectrometer spits out a reading like a city skyline. Like pins in a lock. In the great vault of the machine the rock itself is all but forgotten. Spectrometer comes from spectrum comes from spectral. Light sliding over me in sheets and I open my hand as if to catch it. What, truly, is a wave. What electromagnetism. Measurement is always a ghost. Etymology, the belief in ghosts.
I find a website selling jars of air. Air of Chernobyl, air of Pripyat, air of the Red Forest. They promise notes of concrete and rose, pine needle and basement damp. A video shows men and women winding the open jars through the air, clamping lids on to catch.
A taste of metal in the mouth.
What, truly, is contagion. Two unlike things becoming like. Between April 26 and May 6, 1986, a radioactive cloud spread across Europe. Imagine: children playing in ash as if it's snow. Imagine simulating the movement of dust. Wind and heat and the pressure of atmosphere. Fallout: so called because it falls out of the sky. And what more can be said?
Imagine the babushka who refused to leave. The air has no teeth, the air is not the muzzle of a gun. She plants carrots, potatoes in a poison soil. Gathers chestnuts. Chops wood. Milks her cow and drinks deep. Perhaps you fear what you cannot see, but you do not fear what you cannot imagine.
And imagination is what it is about. The long minutes, hours the engineers stood staring at each other because it was unimaginable. Firefighters who arrived and kicked chunks of graphite with their feet. They felt that the graphite was hot. They knew the meaning of nothing. The boys who climbed to the roof and were never seen again. The mothers who were pregnant and then one day were not. Families shuttled from their homes, guns to their heads. How did the parents explain to their children? They knew the meaning of nothing.
One writer says the goal of the essay is understanding. Another says the essay is the child of uncertainty. I want to understand. I want to get to the bottom of things.
In a museum in Kiev, men with gas masks swing from the ceiling. LED reds and greens, rubber dummies with unpainted eyes. The ceiling is checkered, the floor is checkered, there is barbed wire and aluminum tubing and an ornate golden frame though which a dummy reaches, gloved, suited, masked. A fetal pig with six limbs, tree growing from a baby's crib. Helicopter rotor, painted angels. Photographs—photographs—empty frames. What do you put in a museum whose artifacts cannot be touched, cannot even be approached?
Imagine a girl, nearly woman, standing on a bridge and watching the blue glow far off, a play of light so beautiful she would like to swallow it, take it inside her, up deep into the core of her, let it ignite her, make her other than she is. The light is a byproduct. Radioluminescence. Sea blue or green, the kind of color you want to dip your fingers in. What about toxicity is delicious? What about contagion feels like intimacy? In the 1920s, radium dissolved in water sold for $15 an ounce. Customers drank it to boost their metabolism, cure their impotence. We cannot quite believe something so luminous could be lethal.
I built my cloud chamber in February. Dry ice in a bowl, waves of sublimating gas. Almost forgot the experiment and simply watched this lessening, this strange magic. An object vanishing into air. The unseen presence around me, ghost of the once-solid ice.
A plastic deli jar, a sponge soaked with isopropyl. I turned off the lights and shot a flashlight beam through the container. A cloud chamber works like this: after the chamber fills with vapor, alpha and beta particles, the natural products of background radiation, ionize the gas molecules—collide with them and knock electrons right off. The resulting ions become condensation nuclei, or cloud seeds—tiny kernels around which condensation collects. These trails of condensation fall briefly through the chamber, like the wakes of tiny planes. In this way, you can see ionizing radiation at work.
But not exactly. You are not seeing the radiation, the alpha and beta particles themselves. You are not even seeing the ionized gas molecules. You are seeing only the alcohol vapor, condensed to brief opacity. You are seeing the outline of the effect of radiation. The outline of the effect.
My chamber filled with LED but the light revealed nothing. I crouched by the table for ages, squinting, searching. The invisible remained invisible. I tossed the dry ice in the yard and in the morning it was gone.
I browse websites for yellowcake. Eight hundred dollars for an ounce of powder. Or, cheaper, a nub of uranium ore on Amazon—only $39.95. Customers post photos of Geiger counter readings: 1,682 cpm, 1,866 cpm, over 2,000 cpm. The higher the count the happier they are.
Why is the air blue? Why the taste of metal? Why does the piglet have six legs and why is the baby born unbreathing? Why must we leave? Why is his skin sloughing from his bones? How is the milk poisoned if still so sweet? Why can't I touch? Yes, but why?
The simulationist says, Simulation will be the epistemological engine of our time. In silico is to simulation as in vitro is to experimentation. Knowledge from silicon. The simulationist says, In a strict sense however, simulation results are not 'new', since they are only hidden in the micro-specifications from which they were generated. The cloud over Europe shifts, mottled, amorphous, on a computer screen. The simulationist watches the spread, bright colors on a black map. Simulation is often cheaper, safer, and faster than experimentation. Space and time turn malleable. Months into seconds. Toxicity into pixels. The simulationist feels she has all of Europe in the room. The plume in her palm. Plays the simulation again, faster, again, faster. The unfurling and collapse. Whims of wind coded and displayed. The simulationist says, It was a good model as it provided great predictive capabilities, yet it was not true. Inputs become outputs and you think you have something you didn't before.
Tourists take trips through the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. A day tour for around a hundred dollars. A five-day trip for $885. The tour guide tells them not to touch but they do. Door handles, window sills, a rocking horse, a chair. They are aware of their alien presence here, but it's that alienness they are paying to shed. Think if they leave enough skin cells behind they will be a part of this place. What risk there is is small enough. But perhaps it's not in spite of, but because of the danger that they touch. Why the appeal of the forbidden? Untouchable is listed as a synonym for sacred. Relics may be the physical remains of saints or the belongings of saints. Acts 19:11-12: And God wrought special miracles by the hands of Paul: So that from his body were brought unto the sick handkerchiefs or aprons, and the diseases departed from them, and the evil spirits went out of them. An item may become a relic merely by touching another relic. What is contagion. Don't touch, the tour guide warns. But when his back is turned, they do.
There is no core. It exploded. The core exploded. No, you're mistaken. Does he need a doctor? He's in shock. Get him out of here. Get the backup pumps running. We need water moving through the core. I don't think there is a core. It's gone. The core? Are you suggesting the core—? Is the core—? It exploded. It exploded. The core exploded. I looked right into it. I looked into the core.
The mystery of equivalence: turn a thing into its equal and the result is knowledge. Measurement is always metaphor. The chill in the air called by the height of mercury. The span of a window named in a length of tape.
Chemistry and alchemy and what is even the difference? Each concerned with the transformation of matter. A near heretical ambition. An inevitable impulse. To the ancients, change made magic of the world: so how could they not play? Stones that burned, hissed into air, rainbowed with new color. Mercury sulfur aluminum iron. Cinnabar acids salts. Such glitter, such crumble, bubble, flare. Did their small fires feel like prayer?
And their language like a code: Let the red dragon devour the white eagle. The cold dragon creeps in and out of the caves. The basilisk ascends over many fish. The jargon, the cryptic symbols, were designed to exclude the uninitiated. And so they spoke in metaphor, to guard the secrets of change.
You wake in the Zone with amnesia. What must if feel like to be without memory? Your body is nothing but a hand before your face. There's a target on a map toward which you move but you cannot find what you are meant to find. The air crackles, shimmers. Your Geiger counter beeps, the beeps accelerate to a scream. There are dogs with visible ribs, wild boars, mutant pigs. They come at you shrieking. The air at any moment might lift you and spin. Your organs at any time might open with holes. Nets of meat. The sky here hangs close to the ground. Sunless, grey, every flick of light signifies a threat. Or a dream. Over a ridge, an abandoned train car, rusted, wrapped with weeds, and around it a ring of effervescent air. On top of the train car is a backpack, glowing, golden, irradiated. You die many times attempting to reach it.
It comes down to collision. This untouchable, ungraspable thing, in the end, is all about contact. Unstable nuclei shed their excess energy by way of particle emission. These particles are discharged with enough energy to knock electrons of other atoms off their orbits. How miraculous such touch can occur.
A crane operator in a lead-lined cabin. A radio crackles with directions and blindly he obeys. Can see nothing of his work but builds coffins in his mind. That's what they call the structure: sarcophagus. From sarx meaning flesh and phagein meaning to eat. Flesh-eater. This because the ancient Greeks believed the limestone used for tombs helped corpses decompose.
The sarcophagus cannot eat decay, but the fungi that appear on its surface do. Discovered in 1991, these fungi convert gamma radiation into chemical energy. The pathway by which this transformation takes place is still unknown, but radiotrophy, as concept, as word, delights. Why? Perhaps because we can begin to narrativize: wolves, badgers, roe deer, red deer, wild boars, brown bears, weasels, beavers, kestrel, moose, eagles, harriers, owls, storks. Returned to the Zone and thriving. The story we can tell is this: that the earth will survive our aftermath. Chernobyl now a symbol for the resilience of the land, for Life will find a way, and It's not about us, and Nature always wins. Now it's just a ghost town, now it's just a paradise.
Or perhaps because radiotrophy has been our desire all along. Instructions on a radioactive water crock: Drink freely when thirsty and upon arising and retiring. Average six or more glasses daily. I want to pair luminous with lick, gulp with glow. A brochure for the Nowata Radium Sanitarium Company: Providence gave to the hungry, manna; and for the thirsty, the rod was rent, and life was saved; and in no less miraculous manner the dying multitudes of earth are welcomed to Nowata—the Mecca of DeLeon. The goal of alchemy is the Elixir of Life. Something ingestible and bright, to make you other than you are.
Whatever the fungi signify, we can agree that they do signify. I watch television shows, play video games, scour tourist agency websites, watch drone footage, read product reviews. Representations pile up around me and a friend asks: But what about all the suffering?
The tourists touch and the guides know they do. Make a pretense of forbidding it. What reasons do they have for being here? The travel agency's ad: People crave strong new sensations, and these are in short supply in a world so much explored and readily accessible. Life gets boring, and people want a frisson of something eternal. They spot a fox in the conifers, feed it beef jerky from their hands. They want to touch what is untouchable, visualize the invisible. Their faces in the photos are solemn and unsmiling, as if to say, I have felt the bitter weight of this place. But have they? They upbraid themselves again and again for being unable to feel what they wish to feel. Rub their palms on the flaking paint, red mottles of rust, draw blood on cracked glass. How close to the reactor can we get? The tour guides carry dosimeters—yes, to reassure the tourists the levels are not too high, but also—to make manifest. To render the invisible into spectacle.
A partial list of measuring devices: the clap-o-meter, to measure levels of applause; the disdrometer, to measure the size, speed, and velocity of raindrops; the fathometer to measure ocean depth; the lactometer, to measure the specific density of milk; the orchidometer, to measure testicle size in humans; the zymometer, to measure the fermentation efficiency of yeast.
Fungi are frequently used as indicator species. That is, a species that can reveal information about its environment. Climate, air quality, toxicity levels. Lethargic tadpoles a sign of pesticides. Otter corpses a metonym for mercury. And now the melanin in mushrooms, a clue to radioactive air. Measurements taken in flesh and scale, bodies as thermometers.
Induced radioactivity was discovered by Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie in 1934. They realized radioactivity could be caught like a germ—that a previously stable substance could be made radioactive if it came in contact with radioactive particles, and would remain so even after the removal of those particles.
The Joliot-Curies achieved the alchemical dream: the transformation of one substance into another. Boron into radioactive nitrogen, magnesium into radioactive aluminum, aluminum into radioactive phosphorus. In his 1935 paper, “Chemical Evidence of the Transmutation of Elements,” Frédéric predicted that scientists would soon achieve chemical transmutations of an explosive type. . . . If such transmutations do succeed in spreading in matter, the enormous liberation of usable energy can be imagined. But, unfortunately, if the contagion spreads to all the elements of our planet, the consequences of unloosing such a cataclysm can only be viewed with apprehension.
Gorbachev's 1986 speech to the people of Ukraine: The accident at Chernobyl showed again what an abyss will open if nuclear war befalls mankind. For inherent in the nuclear arsenals stockpiled are thousands upon thousands of disasters . . .
Frédéric Joliot-Curie, upon viewing a cloud chamber: Is it not the most beautiful phenomenon in the world?
If contagion is two unlike things becoming like, then metaphor is a kind of contagion, and measurement too. Turning one thing into another. Taking a thing away from itself being our only way of knowing it.
Imagine the Ukrainian youth. Chernobyl is to them a less-than-memory, a ghost forever around the corner, a word on your tongue you can almost pronounce. For their parents, grandparents, it is an open wound. They talk of it often. They never talk of it. Their parents are dead, their parents are dying of cancer, their parents wonder still what evil sleeps in their cells. On summer nights the Ukrainian youth pack cans of food, vodka, slip under barbed wire curtains, break into the Zone. Go where the tourists never go. Dosimeters silent so as not to alert the police—besides, they do not trust the dosimeters. They do not trust anything.
The boys meet in a Pripyat apartment. Ninth floor, up arthritic stairs. Take shots of vodka. If their fathers knew they came here—their fathers who spent weeks extinguishing fires, shoveling debris from the radioactive roof, their fathers who died in skin that looked nothing like their own.
One of the boys eats apples in the Zone. One drinks water from the Pripyat River. The apples are large and sweet. The water earthy, cold.
It's a fatalism brings them here. They were the children who mistook ash for snow, or the babies who gestated in Chernobyl's wake. No one knows what the effects truly are—all these years later, a strange rash, a swatch of lost hair, carry with them a sense of dread. Their bodies are not their own, their histories not their own, their futures not their own. So they come here, cup hands in the toxic river and dip their heads to drink. Dawn finds them at Reactor 4. The gold dome of the sun breaks over the sarcophagus. Rises blazing beside the smokestack's spire.
Alchemists sought also the prima materia. A pure and perfect first matter from which all other substances are derived. The beginning, the source, the place of god, the stuff of souls. The mystic Arthur Edward Waite wrote that the prima materia, above all, is concealed by a multitude of symbols, false and allegorical descriptions, and evasive or deceptive names . . . all who have written on the art have concealed the true name of the prima materia. . . . Its discovery is generally declared to be impossible without a special illumination from God . . . He listed 135 names associated with the prima materia: the eagle stone, water of life, venom, poison, spirit, heaven, honey, moon, bride, spouse, mother, Eve, shade, dew, white smoke, heart of the sun, chaos, Venus, spittle of the moon, a syrup, the fig, magnet, boiling milk, lead, tin, nebula, chamber . . .
In the video game, your character writes diary entries in a fog of amnesia. Who am I? Damn it, it's all a haze now . . . Men in ski masks hunt the Zone for artifacts, mysterious items yielded by the toxic air. The artifacts sell for enormous sums. Your character writes: I had a strange dream. The colossal Chernobyl power plant emerges in the twilight. Everything looks peaceful. A lonely man appears. I see him from behind against the background of the plant. The wind starts to blow. In an interview, the game creator says, the most important thing is the mystical atmosphere. Being around abandoned, destroyed places while heading toward one big goal and true wish, the player starts to be in contact with something—something that is even hard to describe with words. To be in contact with something. To wade through fragments of dream and forgetting toward the irradiated shimmering objects, the brimming beautiful things you can grasp and hold and claim. To be in contact. To touch a world that resists all touch.
Dendrites in the brain look like a forest or nothing. A computer simulation charts their branching, their arborizations. The laws from which this simulation derives were posited by a Spanish neuroscientist, Santiago Ramon y Cajal, in 1894. He lectured via extended metaphor: The cerebral cortex is similar to a garden filled with trees, the pyramidal cells, which, thanks to an intelligent culture, can multiply their branches, sending their roots deeper and producing more and more varied and exquisite flowers and fruits. Cajal kept a dream diary with the goal of disproving Freud's theory that all dreams represent suppressed desires. Believed rather that dreams are a sequence of random images which the brain works to interpret. In his diary he records a recurring dream in which his brain becomes exposed to the air: I am missing my discarded skull. It is an operation that I consider to be ordinary and natural. Anguish in the end and I awaken. I want to try to touch, but I cannot get to anything before I awaken.
What, truly, is etymology? Measurement. Metaphor. In Plato's Cratylus, over half the dialogue consists of Socrates and Hermogenes investigating the nature of etymology. Socrates unravels the history of many words: month, star, moon, Agamemnon, Apollo, Zeus, wisdom, judgement, understanding, man, woman, god, harmful, hurtful, obligatory, pleasure, pain, desire, distress, truth, falsehood, being, name, and on and on and on. The argument advanced is that a name's true meaning is a matter of decoding, of excavation. Of getting to the bottom of things. Scholars are unsure how to treat Plato's etymologies. Are they satire? A long joke? To take etymology seriously is to believe in ghosts. But then, says Socrates, how ridiculous would be the effect of names on things, if they were exactly the same with them! For they would be the doubles of them, and no one would be able to determine which were the names and which were the realities. The mystery of equivalence.
Imagine you are there. I imagine I am there. I imagine I am not myself. The babushka who refused to leave. The girl on the bridge by the blue. The boy eating apples, dipping his head to drink. Imagine the men tasked with shooting the dogs and the dogs loping radioactive through the grass. The dogs with guts spilling, not yet still. The soldiers undone at these small deaths. Imagine the physicist who kicks a kitchen chair out from under him, swings down from the ceiling, swings. Or the baby born unbreathing. The baby born with twisted limbs. The baby born with two holes in his heart, a broken valve. The mothers screaming. Imagine the physicist, months before kicking the kitchen chair from under him, sketching math on a scrap of paper. In the sky a black artery beats. He is number-mad, he is sleepless and coughs blood, his mind at night won't empty of atoms, he looks out the tiny window of his trailer at the gaping smoking wreck, the men breathing air that will undo them, the rotten poison impossible air, and his mind has no words but still sounds like a question.
The becquerel is a unit measuring radioactivity, and it is named for Henri Becquerel, co-discoverer of radioactivity along with Marie and Pierre Curie. Becquerel discovered radioactivity by wrapping a photographic plate with very thick black paper, then placing a phosphorescent substance on the paper. When the photographic plate was developed, a silhouette of the phosphorescent substance appeared. If an object such as a coin or a small metal cross was placed between the substance and the paper, the object's shape would be revealed in negative. Becquerel surmised that the phosphorescent substance emitted rays that could pass through opaque materials—but he doubted himself for years. The present experiments, without being contrary to this hypothesis, do not warrant this conclusion. He could not imagine what he saw.
For all life is a dream and dreams themselves are only dreams.
Will I build another cloud chamber? I keep the supplies by my bed: cooler, alcohol, black cardstock, sponge.
There is plenty written about the science of ritual. But what about the ritual of science? My boyfriend, a biologist, once ran out of porcini mushrooms for a lab he taught and we had to drive around town to find more. When we dropped them off at the lab, everything was labeled. Everything in drawers and beakers and vials and everywhere boxes of blue nitrile gloves. So much there to touch. When I ask him about ritual he speaks of the fruit fly lab he worked in. Dissecting larvae under a microscope, he could see tiny sacs of cells, only beginning to bud. He could peel away the wing disk with tweezers. Lift it right out. He watched color markers appear in bands, indicating gene expression. Gene for a leg: on. Gene for a leg: off. This is what awe feels like. I remember my middle school chemistry teacher dimming the lights to show us his spectroscope. Vials of gas split white light into color: spectral lines. The lines were supposed to indicate the element in the vial. Hydrogen helium lithium oxygen. It didn’t matter. What mattered: the dark classroom, the hush and quiver: violet, orange, blue.
But what about all the suffering? The cancers, the suicides. I tried to write this as a story first, a story about people with trauma inscribed in their cells. I couldn't. Couldn't stop trying to understand the mechanism. What is it, really? What does it mean? If I could figure out how a lump of uranium cleaves cells like a knife, perhaps I could figure out why tourists paid hundreds to be apocalyptic pilgrims. If I could understand how electrons knocked into each other, perhaps I could understand making a game of decay. What I wanted was some detail to act as a handhold, but everything remained untouchable. A jar of air, a reading on a meter. Chernobyl is a name with many meanings. Here is one: imagination is all we have. Equivalence, intimacy, measurement, contagion—the only way to know a thing is to translate it into something else. Other people’s lives, like radioactivity, elude us. Perhaps language is to suffering as hertz are to the shock of light. As fungi are to the quality of air, as relic is to grace, cinnabar to immortality. We can never arrive—but we can get closer and closer, can circle and circle. Can draw near to the world as vehicle draws to tenor. Perhaps that is enough.
And what is photography. A record written in light. A sensitive surface, exposed to waves. Susan Sontag said, It means putting one's self into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge, and therefore like power. But I have gotten to the bottom of nothing. I sit for hours with photographs from the zone, curated for the peel of wallpaper, riot of ivy, splinter, dust, oxidized pots. The plaything without a face. The pastel slant of sun. What, truly, is this place.
We can know nothing directly. The cloud chamber does not show what it professes to show. Measurement is always a ghost. Still, after months, I draw the curtains, fill a bowl with dry ice, flood the chamber with light.
Notes
"simulation will be the epistemological engine of our time" comes from Ihde, D. 2006. "Models, Models Everywhere." In G. Kuppers J. Lenhard and T. Shinn, editors, Simulation: Pragmatic Construction of Reality. Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook, Vol. 25, pp. 79-86. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer.
"In a strict sense however, simulation results are not 'new', since they are only hidden in the micro-specifications from which they were generated" and "It was a good model as it provided great predictive capabilities, yet it was not true." come from A. Tolk et al., "Epistemology of modeling and simulation," 2013 Winter Simulations Conference (WSC), Washington, DC, 2013, pp. 1152-1166.
"There is no core. It exploded. The core exploded. No, you're mistaken. Does he need a doctor? He's in shock. Get him out of here. Get the backup pumps running. We need water moving through the core. I don't think there is a core. It's gone. The core? Are you suggesting the core—? Is the core—? It exploded. It exploded. The core exploded. I looked right into it. I looked into the core." All are lines from HBO's Chernobyl miniseries.
"Now it's just a ghost town, now it's just a paradise," is a combination of two separate Reddit comments.
"For all life is a dream, and dreams themselves are only dreams" is a quote by Pedro Calderon de la Barca.