A Sublime And Tragic Dance: Robert Oppenheimer & the Manhattan Project

It began when Ken gave me a tour of his backyard studio, twenty years of paintings collected and ordered in a converted garage, now a living catalogue of one artist’s mind. This was only the second time I’d talked to him, but there’s an intimacy in art. You’re given a view into the center of the artist’s consciousness. That day, I saw maybe one hundred pieces, and I knew that his ways of seeing, thinking, and worrying were close to mine.

We talked about the art and his impulses and soon enough our rambling conversation led us to Oppenheimer. We had both been thinking about the man for years. Ken had been painting visions out of the nightmare Oppie had created. I said something about how complex the man was. Ken responded with how he’d changed the world. I said the man had certainly shaped my childhood, my adulthood, the way I saw everything. We talked about evil and the limitation to the concept of evil. I found myself writing poems in conversation with Ken’s paintings. That was a little one sided, so Ken answered me with his poems. What we ended up with is this collection.

We have come to no hard conclusions about Oppenheimer. The man and his time are too complex, but we’ve followed some ideas for a while. I don’t know about Ken, but I have come to one crystalline conclusion about dropping another nuclear bomb, about making another one, about allowing them to come into any conversation where an explosion would replace diplomacy: for the love of God, don’t let’s start.

- John Brantingham