The Mariner
Heidegger’s essay “The Thing” startles me. He refers to the atomic bomb, and asks a strange question: “Is not this merging of everything into the distanceless more unearthly than everything bursting apart?
“Man stares at what the explosion of the atom bomb could bring with it. He does not see that the atom bomb and its explosion are the mere final emission of what has long since taken place, has already happened. Not to mention the single hydrogen bomb, whose triggering … might be enough to snuff out all life on Earth. What is this helpless anxiety still waiting for, if the terrible has already happened?”
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Once I heard my mother’s father tell my father he felt grateful to all the people working at Los Alamos. He said he was glad for the atomic bomb because it meant he didn’t have to invade Japan. He stood in his sailor blues and watched from the deck of a ship in the Bay of Tokyo the signing of the Japanese Instrument of Surrender.
My grandfather enlisted in the Navy as an Apprentice Seaman on May 12, 1944, at the Empire Building in Rockford, Illinois. He was twenty-four. He had married my grandmother — whom he had known since grade school — three years before. They had one child, my mother, who was a little over one-year old at the time. He joined the Navy before he could be drafted into the Army because he thought he had a better chance of surviving at sea. That’s the family story.
In the “Excerpts from Physical Exam recorded on the day of enlistment,” he answered “No” to the following questions:
Spells of unconsciousness?
Nervous trouble?
Convulsions?
Asthma?
Hay fever?
Enuresis?
He had never been treated in a hospital, asylum, or sanitarium. His complexion was ruddy, hair blond, eyes blue. He was six feet tall and one hundred ninety pounds. His appearance was “GOOD” and everything else about him “NORMAL.” His blood Kahn test (for syphilis) was negative. His chest x-ray was “essentially negative.”
I paused at this, and I wonder if he did also. What did “essentially” mean? What little whisper or glitch of no consequence existed inside his chest?
I received my grandfather’s war records in the mail from the National Archives. It cost seventy dollars and took several months. The brief letter accompanying the packet arrived with a coffee stain in the upper left corner. The letter states: “We regret if the photocopy is of poor quality; however, it is the best we can obtain.”
The official record of my grandfather’s war service has nothing to distinguish it. He received no medals. For nine months, he crisscrossed the U.S. from Illinois to Virginia to San Diego. He received recruit training, a basic course in engineering, and qualified as a motor machinist. He passed landing craft school, which equipped him to pilot small boats dropping off troops and authorized him to wear “amphibious force insignia.”
At each step, he received a rating card. His mark for “Conduct” was always 4.0. For his final ranking, the Executive Officer gave him a 3.7 for “Proficiency,” a 3.9 for “Mechanical Ability,” and a 3.5 in “Ability as Leader of Men.”
On January 25, 1945, he embarked for the Pacific aboard the USS Cullman. He spent the rest of the war on the water.
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The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was not a sailor, and he never saw an albatross. William Wordsworth claimed he gave his friend the idea for “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” after reading a journal of sailing around the world by Captain George Shelvocke. The captain recorded that one of his sailors shot a black albatross that for days had followed the ship.
When the sailor kills the bird in the poem, every vital force seems to fade. The winds stop, the ship stands still, the world falls silent. Only a bloody sun burns. The others hang the albatross around the sailor’s neck, but the real punishment is this: The mariner lives while everyone around him dies.
Each turned his face with a ghastly pang,
And cursed me with his eye.
The ship becomes a world of corpses. Even the sea rots. All that breathes is monstrous.
And a thousand thousand slimy things
Lived on; and so did I.
Coleridge published his poem about a hundred years before Heidegger was born. When Heidegger looked around at the mid- twentieth century, he described something like the mariner’s nightmare: corpses in a world of corpses. He believed that technology had distorted humanity’s relationship to all that exists, and reduced everything (objects, animals, people, even oneself) to raw material, a stockpile of useful traits: labor power, money value, explosive force. As a result, Heidegger thought, everything dies. That’s why he saw the hydrogen bomb as “mere,” only the logical extension of this state.
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In the car on the way home from my grandfather’s funeral, my aunt revealed the following: When she was a teenager, a man came to visit who had served in the Navy with my grandfather. The man said that my grandfather saved his life. They somehow got separated from their ship and marooned on an island. Two Japanese soldiers attacked. Armed with nothing but a knife, my grandfather killed them both.
Norm. My grandfather: Norman Isadore Olson. Son of Swedish immigrants. He worked his entire life after the war at Woodward Governor, a factory that made airplane parts. The governor regulates the speed and power of a motor. My grandmother once said that when he got back from the war he had nightmares, screams yanking them both from sinking sleep. She said this as if it were something dark, a secret. He told her only that it was hard to spend all day inside the factory after so long on the open water.
I asked him once to tell me about the war. He told me this: His bunkmate on the ship always ate his ice cream first because, as he would say, life is short.
What I remember: He was enormous, tall and broad, with a high forehead and a combed back sweep of grey hair. Blue eyes that sparkled. My grandparents lived far away in Rockford, Illinois, where my parents grew up, which my mom still called “home.” We saw them once a year. He may have represented for me a different possibility for being male, but I don’t think I understood him like that. He was just a grandfather. Sweet and gentle. I played with his hair and he chuckled and grinned at me. His breath smelled like coffee. Once, he snuck my sister and me out for an early morning boat ride and pancakes at the diner.
He liked most of all to sing: popular songs from his day and old spirituals like “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” and “Were You There (When They Crucified My Lord).”
Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble
He cut a few records with some buddies back in the ’40s. My uncle found them in the trunk of my grandfather’s old car. No one wanted them but me. They were scratched and brittle, pre-vinyl, the black shellac in places peeling off. I gave them to my sister, who is a musician, hoping she might find some way to translate them into a medium that would let us listen. At some point, she or my mother threw them out.
It has been nearly two decades since my aunt told her story, and it all happened in the haze of post-funeral. My mother doesn’t remember it, which makes me wonder if my aunt really did tell us. I’m afraid to ask her now, just like they were afraid to ask him then.
We won’t get them back. They are the silence we cannot break. My grandfather, gone where the dead go. Into ground, certainly. The records. I can picture them, grooved surfaces melting off beneath a mountain of junk at the Los Alamos County Dump.
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Mauve
In 1857, a “mauve madness” infected Paris, then spread to London. The Empress Eugénie started it. She thought the color matched her eyes, and rich women all over the world copied what the French Empress put on her body.
María Eugenia Ignacia Augustina emerged from her mother on May 28, 1826, during an earthquake in Granada, Spain. Her father was a Spanish count who worshiped Napoleon Bonaparte. He joined the French army to fight against Spanish patriots, then went to Paris and served as one of its last defenders against Prussia and its allies in1814. He was living in Spain under house arrest when Eugenia was born. Her mother, María Manuela Kirkpatrick, daughter of a Scottish merchant, took Eugenia and her sister, Paca, to Paris for school, to learn to be ladies.
In 1849, Louis-Napoleon, Bonaparte’s nephew, first caught sight of Eugenia at the presidential palace. Immediately he wanted her. She refused, but he persisted. For years, Eugenia evaded him, even leaving France for a while. For her this was a matter of survival. Giving Louis-Napoleon access to her body would doom her to a kind of nonexistence: a mistress, unmarriageable, at the margins of French society.
In 1852, Louis-Napoleon held a referendum open to all the men of France on restoring the French Empire. It passed with overwhelming support, and on December 2 Napoleon III declared himself Emperor. He insisted Eugenia and her mother spend the Christmas holiday celebrating with him. For two weeks, Napoleon III tried relentlessly to seduce Eugenia. His attendants called it “the siege.” The guests all watched and whispered. One wrote that a “frenzy of passion” had seized the Emperor, but Eugenia held him off. The gossipers said that when he begged for sex, she told him, “Yes, when I am Empress.”
It was a bold demand, because Eugenia, though rich and a countess, had no royal blood. Napoleon had already proposed, through official channels, to marry the seventeen-year-old princess Adelaide, a niece of Queen Victoria. But on January 29, 1853, Napoleon wed the Spanish countess.
The people of France hated her. They considered her a foreigner, a gold digger. They booed and threw things at her during the wedding procession. But Eugenia transformed instantly into Eugénie, Empress of the French. Like her father, Eugenia believed in the myth of the first Napoleon: that only a strong ruler could save the revolution and create a more equal society. She thought Napoleon III had the best chance to realize this vision.
Unlike her father, she could not be a soldier. Instead, she used her body as a means of displaying the power and wealth of the Second Empire. She appeared in an ever-changing array of gowns, hand-constructed of tulle, silk, and velvet. She draped herself in the crown jewels. One guest wrote that she appeared armored in diamonds and “glittered like a sun-goddess.”
The gowns formed Eugénie’s persona and shaped the character of the Empire. When the cage crinoline appeared in 1856, she turned it into a worldwide craze. The steel hoops made it possible to build a massive, bell-shaped skirt, expanding the canvas on which to display her opulence — a word that comes from work and means wealth extracted from labor. Napoleon teased her about her cage. She declared she couldn’t live without it. Like diamonds, it was armor.
The massive skirts that swirled around the Empress and her ladies appeared in a rainbow of colors produced in the same way they had been for hundreds of years: by laborious extraction from the bodies of plants and animals. Eugénie’s mauve came from a few species of lichen, and from a new product of the global economy: bird shit, mined from rich deposits in Peru, first for fertilizer, then for the purple color that had once been extracted from snails.
When William Perkin tried to convince European dyers to use his new lab-produced color, he changed its name to mauve to associate it with French high fashion. But such a thing as a synthetic dye did not yet exist, and most fabric dyers didn’t trust this new creation. Only one agreed to try it: Robert Pullar, who dyed silk for Queen Victoria. Perkin and Pullar worked together to refine the dying process for mass production. Queen Victoria wore Perkin’s mauve to the wedding of her daughter.
By 1860, demand surged around the world for mauve, driven by the Empress and the Queen. Perkin’s new factory at Greenford Green, west of London, was ready to supply the coal-tar dye, and he became a very rich man.
Soon after it went global, the fad for mauve was over. But now chemists understood the power of color. They created new shades, one after another. They gave the colors political titles to link them to the moment and make them popular: Magenta for the recent French victory at that town, and Bismarck brown, which came in a variety of shades based on macho Prussian moods: “content,” “enraged,” “ill,” and “icy.”
Perkin’s teacher, August von Hofmann, at first dismissed the new dye as frivolous; he saw no value in it. He underestimated desire, the frenzy of passion around the world for the glittering Empress in her cage of color. Perkin had found the first product with global demand to be made from coal tar. His discovery opened the way for drugs, fertilizers, and plastic — nearly every product now created for the global economy. Lust launched industrial chemistry.
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Plastic: An Autobiography by Allison Cobb was published on April 20, 2021 by Nightboat Books. From Booklist: “In this elegiac missive from the frontlines of our plastic-filled world, Cobb uses a variety of narrative forms to convey her deep despair over how plastic has overwhelmed our planet … There is elegance and power in Cobb’s truly unique environmental memoir.”