Einstein On The Strip
27
What to him was the merely personal and transitory (as opposed to nature, fixed
and unchanging in its a priori essence) was more permanent than he ever
suspected: including his darkest secrets; strange, hidden, unfathomable being of
“the old one,” to whom you can only say, I am what am: tautologies, sacred
texts, logos, the alpha and omega, Scripture, poetic epiphanies, revelations,
OM . . . all that Beat stuff that came in with roadie Jack Kerouac and howlin’
Allen Ginsberg, as Einstein went out holy holyin’ with the onrushing tide,
leaving the universe exactly as he’d found it, yet entirely different from its
undisturbed, unalterable world-line. If eternal recurrence is our lot, then we
needn’t plunder the past and rob it of all meaning by praying for absolution in a
future life. The folk bard enchants us by sanctifying the quest for justice in a
dangerous underworld: “Einstein disguised as Robin Hood / With his memories
in his trunk / Passed this way an hour ago / With his friend a jealous monk”
(Bob Dylan, “Desolation Row,” 1965). But then, we’ve always courted chaos,
and married annihilation. Stripped of its skin, all pretense, peeled out of its
pastel desert, Vegas is a microcosm of life: it’s about survival, against all odds.
If apocalypse (or Armageddon) is nigh, why hell, let’s not be shy. Turn on that
neon sign, let there be light: the ultimate spectacle. Make it a zillion kilowatts of
blazing, high-voltage Hoover Dam, and damn the cost. Darkness at Noon,
Chimes at Midnight: so long as we can see ourselves as the Strip sees us, bared
souls, even as it empties wallets and crushes that oT American dream into a
nuke nightmare, leaving nuclear waste and wasted lives.
Now there’s something to ponder on our vacation in paradise, here in the
lost Eden (Mercury test site) we dare to call home (“Dina” Titus, Bombs in the
Backyard, rev. ed., 2001), an eternal silence of infinite spaces, filled with
nameless dread. It doesn’t matter whether we get to see the sun rise, so long as it
doesn’t set before we’re ready to leave home and take a trip, to go where no one
has gone before—to that undiscovered country that isn’t on any map, globe, or
star chart, to which all voyagers must journey alone, boats against the current,
borne back ceaselessly into the irreversible future, out of history, into history,
bearing the big burden of time, and doing it with grace. The earth is round, it
doesn’t revolve around us, so Copernicus is still around the comer, waiting for
us to catch up. Which we will, the moment enlightenment gets there, or
narcissism flees. Or as Mr. Roosevelt said, in a speech scheduled for delivery on
Jefferson Day, April 13, 1945, the day after his sudden demise (and almost 80
years to the day after Lincoln was murdered, five days after Appomattox, at the
conclusion of the Civil War):
Today, science has brought all the different quarters of the globe so close
together that it is impossible to isolate them one from another. Today we are
faced with the preeminent fact that, if civilization is to survive, we must
cultivate the science of human relationships—the ability of all peoples, of all
kinds, to live together and work together, in the same world, at peace. . . The
work, my friends, is peace. More than an end of this war—an end to the
beginnings of all wars. Yes, an end, forever, to this impractical, unrealistic