"And over goes the tiller once again"
A play I think about a lot is “Copenhagen,” by Michael Frayn. Apparently it has won some awards, including a Tony. Despite this, I don’t know if it’s a good play or even if I like it. There is certainly enough debate around its purported historical accuracy for an entire book to exist consisting solely of essays by historians responding to the play. I don’t know that much about the 1941 meeting between physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg that the play depicts, though that may come to change as I run out of other ways to fill my time. I have never seen a production of this play. I can’t emphasize, in fact, how little my attachment to this play has to do with cognition and how much it has to do with sheer visceral reaction.
Bohr A curious sort of diary memory is.
Heisenberg You open the pages, and all the neat headings and tidy jottings dissolve around you.
Bohr You step through the pages into the months and days themselves.
Margrethe The past becomes the present inside your head.
The three characters in the play all convene after their deaths to discuss the cause and meaning of that 1941 meeting, like a Greek chorus meditating on the function of memory, breaking an event down to its component parts and then further. It is possible that the characters are not even the people they are named after, but the impression they have left on the world, the groove they have worn in it with their lives, because even they don’t seem to know why they acted as they did.
It is a play about a rupture, a moment when the separation between present and past is keenly felt, when people feel themselves becoming different. There is Bohr and Heisenberg and Margrethe-that-were, the characters as they were in 1941, and then there is Bohr and Heisenberg and Margrethe-that-are, or rather that-are-in-death, trying to puzzle out who they must have been to act as they did, and who they are now that they cannot remember.
I have spent so much of my life trying to understand who I’ve been in moments before the present — who I was when I lived with my parents, when my entire personality was composed of survival instincts; who I was in those first early years when I lived on my own; who I was in the years after I stopped being quite so afraid, but before I transitioned. I wonder all the time whether part of me is still that lonely, frightened child, what kind of person I must have been to get through it, to move out, to survive overwhelming odds and abuse and rape and mental illness and transition, and whether I am living in a way that does justice to those people-I-was. There are so many ways in which we never know what anyone else is really thinking, or what they really mean, that it feels particularly lonely to realize those uncertainties also apply to one’s own personal teleology.
Every time I think about the experience of reading Copenhagen, I feel that same deep sorrow of the last good day. Here are three people trying to assemble the past through a game of call-and-repeat, summoning a fall evening that would change the course of their lives, though they had no way of knowing that until it was happening, and no way to control it once it had. This is how the world changes too, before you know it and too quickly to stop. We spend our entire lives caught in moments like these, shaped by them, trying to understand them and unable to ever fully succeed.
Here is a question that I’ve been thinking about ever since the first time I heard it posed, in whatever form: What remains when we are gone?
Bohr Before we can lay our hands on anything, our life’s over.
Heisenberg Before we can glimpse who or what we are, we’re gone and laid to dust.
Bohr Settled among all the dust we raised.
Margrethe And sooner or later there will come a time when all our children are laid to dust, and all our children’s children.
Bohr When no more decisions, great or small, are ever made again. When there’s no more uncertainty, because there’s no more knowledge.
Margrethe And when all our eyes are closed, when even the ghosts have gone, what will be left of our beloved world? Our ruined and dishonoured and beloved world?
It’s always a particularly intense question for me. What will remain? Earlier this year I read “Don’t Go Without Me,” a collection of comics by Rosemary Valero-O’Connell centered on the question of loss and memory. (If you can, I strongly recommend picking up a copy from Shortbox, an absolutely peerless independent comics publisher!) It asks, and both does and doesn’t answer, that same question. For myself, I hope the answer is “something better than I found.” I would like to leave faint but discernible footprints to say that somebody was here, despite the odds, and they loved this place very much, and tried very hard to help where they could.
Heisenberg But in the meanwhile, in this most precious meanwhile, there it is. The trees in Faelled Park. Gammertingen and Biberach and Mindelheim. Our children and our children’s children. Preserved, just possibly, by that one short moment in Copenhagen. By some event that will never quite be located or defined. By that final core of uncertainty at the heart of things.
As of 11:59PM tonight, Ohio is on lockdown.
—R.