The Cold War has been a blind spot in my brain since forever. I don’t know whether it was growing up in Australia, where we don’t have a (overtly visible) nuclear program or if it was just that grey area of recent history that didn’t seem really relevant to my world.
I generally understood it as the proxy wars sparked by nuclear weapon proliferation. Russia and America are involved (surprise). Maybe being born into a world where proliferation was the default made the nuclear threat a non-entity in my cultural cannon.
The Cold War officially ended in 1991. I was born a decade later. Even people 10 years older than me would have negligible memory of the existential terror of the period.
I spoke to my dad about it over breakfast one morning, which we do a few times a week, if we can. He picks me up at 7:30 (he makes sure I’m awake with a ritual ‘morning’, ‘morning’ text between us). The seat warmers are always on full blast and he usually says I look tired. I say thank you.
When we get out of the car to our usual cafe, he does this funny penguin-y dance, his arms stuck to his side with his head down. That’s my queue to give him a hug (I squeeze my arms as hard as i can).
We get the same thing most times. Scrambled eggs on sourdough toast. Toast on the side. A side of butter. Mushroom, Avocado and goats cheese to share. Although recently we’ve been experimenting with fried eggs. Depending on the season, ill either get an iced oat latte or a strong soy mocha. He will never get anything but a long mac.
Its mocha season now, and its a negotiation with the elements to sit somewhere simultaneously quiet, warm and comfortable enough for our combined neurosis. On this occasion, I had moved us from inside to outside (the sounds of the coffee machine, and all the people coming in an out, the temperature changes made it hard to concentrate). We moved, and the minute we sat, the awning above us squawked with the wind. I said we should move back inside. My dad’s head dropped into his hands.
He wouldn’t let us move again, he has this kind of “this is your decision, now live with it” thing. I think he actually said to me “see, the grass is not always greener on the other side”. I smiled and nodded. I’m pretty sure I’ve inherited his sensory processing issues, so really, I’m living with his decisions.
When I brought up the research I was doing into radiation his eyes lit up. He gets excited when I engage with math and science. I asked him what he remembered about the cold war era.
He had a similar answer to me: avoidance. He remembered being terrified as a young boy and shutting out any news of the conflict and developments. What he described didn’t seem like the sensationalised panic that spurred propaganda/ arms races in the nuclear superpowers. In our little-brother-state it was like a quiet doom that you didn’t want to look dead on.
I took a biology class for a few weeks of uni. The class focused on the mechanics/biology of the eye and how it contributes to perception.
peripheral vision = night vision
The focal point (fovea) is a very small, dense concentration of cone receptors that are great at perceiving detail in the daytime for one tiny portion of our field of vision.
Comparatively, our peripheral vision is made up of a fraction of these receptors plus rods. It’s our optical cortexes that piece together visual information to fill out peripheral details.
However, in the dark we’re better at perceiving light in our peripheral vision than in the focal point because of the lack of light spectrum that is available.
I think about when I was little on school camp, and we went to go see glow worms. When I was looking everywhere but right at them i could see them. It became a game we played where you’d point right at one at it would disappear as you looked at it.
Nuclear power feels the same. Somewhere I had the same avoidance my father had to the reality of it. It hung on my periphery, I worked around it (the fall of imperialist Russia, world war ii, the space race, the advent of the CIA/FBI, unit 731, the ANZUS treaty, the Arab spring, 9/11) touching so many points in the web that surrounded it. Everything in modern memory seems to come back to nuclear power. But I never looked directly at it.
Consideration of binaries come into play here. Light and the absence of light. Protons and electrons. Creation and destruction. I’m not sure exactly where it fits in the discourse, but im sure it has something to do with hubris.
Most of the information I ingest comes from podcasts. I was listening to one in particular about the Manhattan Project. Topical, i know, with the Oppenheimer movie coming out soon. The Barbie movie too, which surely has some connection to 50’s nuclear annihilation paranoia, bomb shelters, the rise of plastics, industrialisation and capitalism (thats a rant for after i see the movie).
the real trinity: amen. (the intertextuality is bonkers)
The first atomic bomb ever detonated was called Trinity, after a John Donne poem. I don’t like Trinity (too evangelist) but ‘A Valediction Forbidding Mourning’ I’ve loved for a while, although I strongly resent his use of the word ‘erect’.
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the other do.And though it in the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Donne, John. “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning.” published in Poems of John Donne, 1896, pp. 51-52
Like th’ other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.
It’s not really relevant but its my show, my content.
there will be a pt. ii to this because i digressed way more than i thought
CROSS SECTION 
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