Einstein On The Strip
25
computer glitches, near-misses, and cigars that almost exploded in everyone’s
face. This isn’t calculated to generate confidence in nuclear “fail-safe.” It’s also
a hellish way to observe your latest (but last) birthday! Yes, it takes the cake,
made of U-238, festooned with plutonium candles. [Like the one baked for Gen.
Leslie Groves, in 1945: a stunning display of hybris.] Now I know why Juergen
Gortz immortalized Einstein (if that’s not redundant) in the way he did. But
maybe there’s more to it than that. Maybe Einstein knew something about
cruelty, stupidity, and absurdity that no one, not even Erasmus or Cervantes or
Samuel Beckett, ever glimpsed or grasped. Maybe his response to the paparazzi
of his day was more than a jest or a gesture, bom of frustration if not indignation
at the invasion of privacy that all those flash-bulbs (themselves a token of
Einstein’s handiwork as a thinker) represented. For at that moment Einstein’s
visage became, not real, but a work of art—a refutation of every effort to expose
or unmask him, by (re)creating himself in his own image, and by acting (not
being) childish, mocking the very process by which his image as a Wise Man
was mass-produced, or commercially manufactured. Turning Otherness inside
out, like light that is ben Ё