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contours provocations
journal - 2002-1001 - tue 2100 Deadly Teens; Light Factors; Wee Beasties I tossed and turned last night. And got up several times. And as is customary wound up on the couch watching a French flic on Sundance. A cunning teenage girl cons a naive boy into killing another youth. They go into the woods to bury the body and become lost. And end up at the shack of a woodsman. Who locks them up and rapes the boy. I was too tired to continue. One of those movies in which all the characters lack redeeming qualities. Sort of a Hansel and Gretel for the 21st century. And there was an odd moment when I got the impression that the boy was turned on by the rape. Sunday night I watched "Copenhagen" on PBS. "TV Guide" sez "Michael Frayn's Tony-winning dramatic speculation about a 1941 meeting between physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg." Bohr had left Germany at this point while Heisenberg stayed behind. I recently finished a book called "Heisenberg's War" in which the author, Thomas Powers, conjectures that Heisenberg made every attempt to discourage the Germans from attempting to build an atomic bomb. Too difficult. Too problematic. Would diminish other war efforts. If you've read anything about the a bomb, it is puzzling that Germany failed to develop the atomic bomb. Certainly the resources were there. As well as the brain power. It may very well be that Heisenberg and others played a very elaborate game of subterfuge and eventually were successful. Heisenberg is most well known for his uncertainty theorem in the sub-atomic world. But I'd never heard it described as it was in the dialogue. When you observe something, you're causing a photon of light to hit and reflect off that object. Does not that photon of light thus change the object. A fascinating statement. Because it also implies that anything is altered by our observation. An even more challenging idea. The action moves back and forth from 1941 to a period after the war in which Bohr and his wife and Heisenberg meet again. Near the end a curious paradox was introduced. Although Bohr was on the "good" side and worked on the Manhattan Project, he helped produce a weapon that murdered thousands, most of whom were civilians. Yet, Heisenberg was of the "evil" side, but did not produce such a weapon. A superb very thought-provoking production. And with camera work that reflected the drama. The three characters are having dinner. Instead of static shoots, the camera zeros in on each character and moves constantly around the character in an arc. I kept thinking of electrons. And there another scene in which the three act out the movement of that photon of light and the atom. This morning, on the way to my car, I stopped to place some trash in the garbage containers next to the store room. In the night a spider had built an intricate web from the wall to one of the garbage lids. I could not even see all the silky strands. I started to lift the lid but realized I'd destroy the web. So I left it alone. I'm always bewitched by those tiny living creatures that share the world with us. And I've never felt the need to destroy them. The other evening, I went to bed and opened up an old paperback copy of William Gibson's "Neuromancer." And on one of the pages I found a bug, a very tiny bug. A wee creature no bigger than a letter of print on the page. And I watched as the minature being moved along and across the page, almost as if hunting for a particular letter. When it reached the edge it vanished. I have no idea what the beastie was but it was almost endearing in its hunt. PAX!
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