Issue 2:2 | Non-Fiction | Marilou Awiakta

 

Baring the Atom’s Mother Heart

Marilou Awiakta

From Selu: Seeking the Corn Mother’s Wisdom (Fulcrum Press, 1993)

 

 

“What is the atom, Mother? Will it hurt us?”

 

I was nine years old. It was December 1945.  Four months earlier, in the heat of an August morning—Hiroshima.  Destruction. Death.  Power beyond belief, released from something invisible. Without knowing its name, I’d already felt the atom’s power in another form. Since 1943, my father had commuted eighteen miles from our apartment in Knoxville to the plant in Oak Ridge—the atomic frontier where the atom had been split, where it still was splitting. He left before dawn and came home long after dark. “What do you do, Daddy?”—“I can’t tell you, Marilou. It’s part of something for the war. I don’t know what they’re making out there or how my job fits into it.”

 

            “What’s inside the maze?”

 

            “Something important… and strange. I see long, heavy trucks coming in. What they’re bringing just seems to disappear. Somebody must know what happens to it, but nobody ever talks about it. One thing for sure—the government doesn’t spend millions of dollars for nothing. It’s something big. I can’t imagine what.”

 

            I couldn’t either. But I could feel its energy like a great hum.

 

            Then, suddenly, it had an image: the mushroom cloud. It had a name: the atom. And our family was then living in Oak Ridge. My father had given me the facts. I also needed an interpreter.

 

            “What is the atom, Mother? Will it hurt us?”

 

            “It can be used to hurt everybody, Marilou. It killed thousands of people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But the atom itself…? It’s invisible, the smallest bit of matter. And it’s in everything. Your hand, my dress, the milk you’re drinking—all of it is made with millions and millions of atoms and they’re all moving. But what the atom means…? I don’t think anyone knows yet. We have to have reverence for its nature and learn to live in harmony with it. Remember the burning man.”

 

            “I remember.” When I was six years old, his screams had brought my mother and me running to our front porch. Mother was eight months pregnant. What we saw made her hold me tight against her side. Across the street, in the small parking lot of dry cleaner’s, a man in flames ran, waving his arms. Another man chased him, carrying a garden hose turned on full force, and shouting, “Stop, stop!” The burning man stumbled and sank to his knees, shrieking, clawing the air, trying to climb out of his pain. When water hit his arms, flesh fell off in fiery chunks. As the flames went out, his cries ceased. He collapsed slowly into a charred and steaming heap.

 

            Silence. Burned flesh. Water trickling into the gutter…

 

            The memory flowed between Mother and me, and she said, as she had said that day, “Never tempt nature, Marilou. It’s the nature of fire to burn. And of cleaning fluid to flame near heat.  The man had been warned over and over not to work with the fluid, then stoke the furnace. But he kept doing it. Nothing happened. He thought he was in control. Then one day a spark… The atom is like the fire.”

 

            “So it will hurt us.”

 

            “That depends on us, Marilou.”

 

            I understood. Mother already had taught me that beyond surface differences, everything is in physical and spiritual connection—God, nature, humanity. All are one, a circle. It seemed natural for the atom to be part of this connection. At school, when I was introduced to Einstein’s theory of relativity—that energy and matter are one—I accepted the concept easily.

 

            Peacetime brought relaxation of some restrictions in Oak Ridge. I learned that my father was an accountant. The “long, heavy trucks” brought uranium ore to the graphite reactor, which was still guarded by a maze of fences. The reactor reduced the ore to a small amount of radioactive material. Safety required care and caution. Scientists called the reactor “The lady” and, in moments of high emotion, referred to her as “our beloved reactor.”

 

            “What does she look like, Daddy?”

 

            “They tell me she has a seven-foot shield of concrete around a graphite core, where the atom is split.” I asked the color of graphite. “Black,” he said. And I imagined a great, black queen, standing behind her shield, holding the splitting atom in the shelter of her arms.

 

            I also saw the immense nurturing potential of the atom. There was intensive research into fuels, fertilizers, mechanical and interpretative tools. Crops and animals were studied for the effects of radiation. Terminal cancer patients came from everywhere to the research hospital. I especially remember one newspaper picture of a man with incredibly thin hands reaching for the “atomic cocktail” (a container of radioactive isotopes). His face was lighted with hope.

 

            At school we had disaster drills in case of nuclear attack (or in case someone got careless around the reactor). Scientists explained the effects of an explosion—from “death light” to fallout. They also emphasized the peaceful potential of the atom and the importance of personal commitment in using it. Essentially, their message was the same as my mother’s. “If we treat the atom with reverence, all will be well.”

 

            But all is not well now with the atom. The arms race, the entry of Big Business into the nuclear industry, and accidents like Three Mile Island cause alarm. Along with me, women protest, organize anti-nuclear groups, speak out. But we must also take time to ponder woman’s affinities with the atom and to consider that our responsibilities for its use are more profound than we may have imagined.

 

            We should begin with the atom itself, which is approximately two trillion times smaller than the point of a pin. We will focus on the nature and movement of the atom, not on the intricacies of nuclear physics. To understand the atom, we must flow with its pattern, which is circular.

 

            During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, scientists theorized about the atom, isolated it, discovered the nucleus, with its neutrons, protons, electrons. The atom appeared to resemble a Chinese nesting ball—a particle within a particle. Scientists believed the descending order would lead to the ultimate particle—the final, tiny bead. Man would penetrate the secret of matter and dominate it. All life could then be controlled, like a machine.

 

            Around the turn of the century, however, a few scientists began to observe the atom asserting its nature, which was more flexible and unpredictable than had been thought. To explain it required a new logic, and, in 1905, Einstein published his theory of relativity. To describe the atom also required new use of language in science because our senses cannot experience the nuclear world except by analogy. The great Danish physicist, Niels Bohr, said, “When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and mental connections.”

 

            As research progressed, the word mystery began to appear in scientific writing, along with theories that matter might not end in a particle after all. Perhaps the universe resembled a great thought more than a great machine. The linear path was bending … and in the mid-1970s the path ended in an infinitesimal circle: the quark. A particle so small that even with the help of huge machines, humans can see only its trace, as we see the vapor trail of an airplane in the stratosphere. A particle ten to one hundred million times smaller than the atom. Within the quark, scientists now perceive matter refining beyond space-time into a kind of mathematical operation, as nebulous and real as an unspoken thought.  It is a mystery that no conceivable research is likely to dispel, the life force in process—nurturing, enabling, enduring, fierce.

 

            I call it the atom’s mother heart.

 

            Nuclear energy is the nurturing energy of the universe. Except for stellar explosions, this energy works not by fission (splitting) but by fusion—attraction and melding. With the relational process, the atom creates and transforms life. Women are part of this life force. One of our natural and chosen purposes is to create sustain life—biological, mental and spiritual.

 

            Women nurture and enable. Our “process” is to perceive relationships among elements, draw their energies to the center and fuse them into a whole. Thought is our essence; it is intrinsic for us, not an aberration of our nature, as Western tradition often asserts.

 

            Another commonality with the atom’s mother heart is ferocity. When the atom is split—when her whole is distributed—a chain reaction begins that will end in an explosion unless the reaction is contained, usually by a nuclear reactor. To be productive and safe, the atom must be restored to its harmonic, natural pattern. It has to be treated with respect. Similarly, to split woman from her thought, sexuality and spirit is unnatural. Explosions are inevitable unless wholeness is restored.

 

            In theory, nature has been linked  to woman for centuries—from the cosmic principle of the Great Mother-Goddess to the familiar metaphors of Mother Nature and Mother Earth. But to connect the life force with living woman is something only some ancient or so-called “primitive” cultures have been wise enough to do. The linear, Western, masculine mode of thought has been too intent on conquering nature to learn from her a basic truth: To separate the gender that bears life from the power to sustain it is as destructive as to tempt nature herself.

 

            This obvious truth is ignored because to accept it would acknowledge woman’s power, upset the concept of woman as sentimental—passive, all-giving, all-suffering—and disturb public and private patterns. But the atom’s mother heart makes it impossible to ignore this truth any longer. She is the interpreter of new images and mental connections not only for humanity, but most particularly for women, who have profound responsibilities in solving the nuclear dilemma. We can do much to restore harmony. But time is running out. …

 

            Shortly after Hiroshima Albert Einstein said, “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thought, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.” Now, deployment of nuclear missiles is increasing. A going phrase in Washington is, “When the war starts…” Many nuclear power plants are being built and operated with money, not safety, as the bottom line. In spite of repeated warnings from scientist and protests from the public, the linear-thinking people continue to ignore the nature of the atom. They act irreverently. They think they’re in control. One day a spark. …

 

            I look beyond the specters of the burning man and the mushroom cloud to a time two hundred years ago, when destruction was bearing down on the Cherokee nation. My foremothers took their places in the circles of power along with the men. Outnumbered and outgunned, the nation could not be saved. But the Cherokee and their culture survived—and women played a strong part in that survival.

 

            Although the American culture is making only slow progress toward empowering women, there is much we can do to restore productive harmony with the atom. Protest and litigation are important in stopping nuclear abuse, but total polarization between pro-and anti-nuclear people is simplistic and dangerous.  It is not true that all who believe in nuclear energy are bent on destruction. Neither is it true that all who oppose it are “kooks” or “against progress.” Such linear, polar thinking generated so much anger on both sides that there is no consensual climate where reasonable solutions can be found. The center cannot hold. And the beast of catastrophe slouches toward us. We need a network of the committed to ward it off. Women at large can use our traditional intercessory skills to create this network through organizations, through education and through weaving together conscientious protagonists in industry, science and government. Women who are professionals in these fields should share equally in policy making.

 

            Our energies may fuse with energies of others in ways we cannot foresee. I think of two groups of protesters who came to Diablo Canyon, California, in the fall of 1981. Women and men protested the activation of a nuclear power plant so near an earthquake fault. The first group numbered nearly three thousand. The protest was effective, but it says much about the dominant, holistic mode of American thought that an article about the second group was buried in the middle of a San Francisco newspaper.

 

            After the three thousand had left Diablo Canyon to wind and silence, a band of about eighty Chumash Indians came to the site of the power plant. They raised a wood-sculptured totem and sat in a circle around it for a day long prayer vigil. Jonathan Swift Turtle, a Mewok medicine man, said that the Indians did not oppose nuclear technology but objected to the plant’s being built atop a sacred Chumash burial site as well as near an earthquake fault. He said he hoped the vigil would bring about “a moment of harmony between the pro-and anti-nuclear factions.”

 

            The Chumash understand that to split the atom form the sacred is a deadly fission that will ultimately destroy nature and humanity. I join this circle of belief with an emblem I created for my life and work—the sacred white deer of the Cherokee leaping in the heart of the atom. My ancestors believed that if a hunter took the life of a deer without asking its spirit for pardon, the immortal Little Deer would track the hunter to his home and cripple him. The reverent hunter evoked the white deer’s blessing and guidance.

 

            For me, Little Deer is a symbol of reverence. Of hope. Of belief that if we humans relent our anger and create a listening space, we may attain harmony with the atom in time. If we do not, our world will become a charred and steaming heap. Burned flesh. Silence …

 

            There will be no sign of hope except deep in the invisible, where the atom’s mother heart—slowly and patiently—bears new life.