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I
The word “happiness” appears eleven times in George Oppen’s published writing: once in “A Theological Definition,” “Route,” “Return,” and “Leviathan”; twice in “A Narrative”; and four times in “Of Being Numerous.”
Truth also is the pursuit of it:
Like happiness, and it will not stand.
The word “air” appears thirty-three times.
I should have written, not the rain
Of a nineteenth century day, but the motes
In the air, the dust
Here still.
II
The first person to study the “motes in the air, the dust,” was an Englishman named John Tyndall. He had been investigating ‘heat as motion’ when he noticed his lamp behaving “exactly as sun-beams are seen to do in the dusty air of London.” “Observe this apparently solid luminous cylinder, issuing from our electric lamp,” he wrote, “marking its track thus vividly upon the dust of our darkened room.” In that dark, dank air, the beam hardened, turning into some divine light, into a mark on the air, a brush stroke, and in its revelation offered something new to sight. “For fifteen years it had been my habit to make use of floating dust to reveal the paths of luminous beams through the air,” Tyndall wrote, “but until 1868 I did not intentionally reverse the process, and employ a luminous beam to reveal and examine the dust.”
In order to reverse the process, Tyndall conceived a device he called the “blue sky apparatus.” The first what, was a tube with openings on either end in which what discovered is what gives the sky its color, “and it can be made to display a color rivaling that of the purest Italian sky.”
The “purest Italian sky,” of course, was not a scientific measurement but an aesthetic category. In his free-time, Tyndall was an ardent naturalist. Among his publications number several mountaineering memoirs which recount his time in the Alps: his experience with the “unstained blue of heaven” and “the darkling blue of the zenith”; with “sky-gleams of the deepest blue” and what. It was there, he writes, that he discovered happiness: “The physical is the substratum of the spiritual, and this fact ought to give the food we eat and the air we breathe a transcendental significance.” (Hours, 303-4).
When Tyndall died in 1893, a memorial stone was erected in the Alps across from his prized glacier, Aletsch, beneath the “unstained blue of heaven.” He had been overdosed with Chloral hydrate by his wife, Louisa. “I measured a tablespoonful of magnesia, as I thought,” she told the coroner, “and added water... All he said was: ‘there is a curious sweet taste.’” The two spent the afternoon administering a mustard emetic and attempting water and coffee until John passed that evening. “I said John: ‘I have given you Chloral,”’ she reported, “and he said: ‘Yes, my poor darling, you have killed your John.’”
III
George and Mary Oppen met in college under what.
IV
John and Louisa Charlotte Tyndall.
V
John Tyndall and Louisa story.
Brecht one about him dying.
IX
Three years earlier, Brecht had written the same poem to Walter Benjamin in a letter: “I doubt if we’ll be able to play chess under the apple trees for many more summers,” it read.
“The actually forbidden word,” Oppen continues, “Brecht, of course, could not write.” It was not ‘trees’ but “something like aesthetic.”
X
After college, at a conference in Madrid, I took the long train out to the small coastal town where Walter Benjamin took his own life. It is a beach town. It was the off-season. I napped on the sun-warmed stones and paced the quiet beige streets, watching the pale gauze curtains blow in and out of the apartment windows. In the evenings ice-cream ran down my arm in front of Benjamin’s headstone, high on the hillside, where I sat watching the sun set over the white sailboats in the cove. In the morning, I set out into the mountains. I was aware of the perversity in the gesture but I did not mind. I became lost and covered in bug bites; I stranded myself in a cactus patch; I walked with three farm dogs almost the entire trail. I arrived in reverse, exhausted, coated in cuts and fleas, in Banyuls-sur-Mer, where I took a warm shower, ate a meal, and returned to the beach. My spanish was poor and my French was worse.
XI
While researching his Arcades Project in the bibliothèque, he wrote, “Happiness for us is thinkable only in the air that we have breathed, among the people who have lived with us.”
X
“Flowers stand for simple and undefined human happiness,” Oppen writes in his journal. He was responding to Brecht’s famous lines in “To Those Born After.”
What times are these, when
A conversation about trees is almost a crime
Because it entails a silence about so many misdeeds!
X.
Brecht had on the wind. Three years earlier he had written the same poem to Walter Benjamin in a letter: “I doubt if we’ll be able to play chess under the apple trees for many more summers,” it read. And then, “the tremors. That’s when I’ll make move.
But the entire context: nature, trees, the air, shudder.