by Daniel Schonning
The speculative essay, as far as I hope to use it, insists itself into spaces otherwise barred from the craft.
Last year, the United States dropped the “Mother of All Bombs” on Afghanistan. It was the largest non-nuclear device ever used in combat. Its technical name was GBU-43/B, or Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb—the latter being the result of some weapon developer’s clumsy lexical acrobatics to reach the acronym M-O-A-B. Pope Francis said of the weapon, “I was ashamed when I heard the name… A mother gives life and this one gives death, and we call this device a mother. What is going on?”
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The ones that named the bomb were American men, but they think of “mother” in much the way Arab mothers do. In Cairo or Amman, you can hear them call their children Mama. Mama because they speak to absence: Mama as in qelb Mama, mother’s heart; Mama as in hayaa Mama, mother’s life. Mama because they speak to an audience that hears what they mean, that can feel their way through the web of their absent words to arrive at the same place. Mama because, by saying nothing, they say all of it at once.
The men that made “MOAB” were speaking to absence, too; “mother” as in “motherfucker,” as in “mother look at me,” “mother never was.” This, too, all at once.
What is going on?
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The Enola Gay is likely the most infamous military plane in history. It carried the atom bomb to Hiroshima—the next step up from MOAB. At least 75,000 people died instantly when the bomb struck and at least another 75,000 died in the twenty-four hours to follow. Think of the mothers. All that absence.
Paul Tibbets was the man tasked with flying the plane. Enola Gay was his mother’s name.
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Decades after the event, Paul Tibbets gave an interview about the moments following the explosion. “…as I look up there the whole sky is lit up in the prettiest blues and pinks I've ever seen in my life. It was just great.
“…I tell people I tasted it. When I was a child, if you had a cavity in your tooth, the dentist put some mixture of some cotton and lead into your teeth and pounded them in with a hammer. I learned that if I had a spoon of ice-cream and touched one of those teeth, I got this electrolysis and I got the taste of lead out of it. And I knew right away what it was.”
One day, Enola Gay Tibbets must have settled her child into the rear seat of the driver’s-side of her car and taken him to the dentist, stopping at intersections and waving to neighbors along the way. Sometime after, she must have bought him ice cream. What flavor was it? Did they laugh?
It was just great.
The bomb was called “Little Boy.”
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My grandfather, Gunnar Schonning Sr., was serving in the battle of Okinawa just before “Little Boy” dropped. My father relayed the story to me in an e-mail, with a link to a collection of declassified Navy documents:
9.24.2016; “grandpa gunnar”
I happened to be looking for things in the past and came upon this.
You may already have seen it, for all I know. I may have, too.
It is about the USS Halligan that was sunk in World War II at Okinawa. Grandpa Gunnar was on this ship.
He is listed in the roster. Both before the sinking and after (as wounded). The official account of the men in the boiler room-forward (where grandpa was) is not in line with his account. I am most certain that his account was the true one as the official account makes the survival of these men appear orderly and accountable.
What also interests me is the officer who was sickened by the deck of the ship that was strewn with the body parts of so many men.
I remember grandpa when he got drunk (seldom but usually on Christmas Eve when there was a shop party at work and when we were due at his hateful parents’ house for dinner). He would be in that engine room and then on the deck and he saw the head of someone who was his friend.
Anyway, Grandpa was twenty-five years old at the time. The war was to end in months with the bombing of Hiroshima.
dad
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Alfrida Schonning, too, must have driven Gunnar Sr. to the dentist, stopping at intersections and waving to neighbors along the way. The lead in those fillings could have just as easily been weights, boats, bullets. When the Halligan struck a sea-mine, could he taste the blast? What flavor was it?
It was just great.
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My father included, “You may already have seen it, for all I know” in his letter, as I haven’t spoken to him in fifteen years. He included, “I may have, too” because he is an addict and a drunk. In some 500 messages that he has sent in the meantime, moreover, he has not mentioned Alfrida Schonning once.
Mama because, by saying nothing, they say all of it at once.
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Biblical Paul Tibbets bound
for Dimashq
—dizzied—
Brilliant billowing
Pillar of fire
rattling his
teeth to the root.
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After emigrating to the United States from Denmark, a young Gunnar Schonning Sr. frequented Connecticut lakes and swimming holes. Even then, he could hold his breath for some three minutes. As the story goes, he would ask other boys to stand on his stomach while he laid back-down in the silt, immersed. A young Gunnar Schonning asked that they only let him come up for air when he tapped their ankles. He would send onlooking parents or lifeguards into a frenzy—“You’re drowning him!”—only for him to surface, unbothered.
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Think of the moment that “Little Boy” was conceived—straight from the minds of men, into to the womb of Enola Gay. Think of it growing, moving: Hanger to carrier; carrier to the open air, six miles aloft. For days, “Little Boy” is nestled in Enola’s dark. Then, the bare metal doors crack open by degrees; light washes over the cold body. Think of it born—right on time.
All at once.
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“Fire,” within its myriad meanings, has myriad roots. A recent ancestor is the Old High German, fiur. Another, used when referring to fire as an animate, life-giving force (read: water or air), is egni, the source of Latin “ignis,” or later the English “ignition.” When applied to “fire” as an inanimate object (read: tool) the dominant root is paewr, a Proto-Indo-European word. P-A-E-W-R.
For reference, the firepower of MOAB was eleven tons. The firepower of “Little Boy” was fifteen kilotons.
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Rainer Maria Rilke—
O would that
I were a boy once again, with my life before me, and could sit
leaning on future arms and reading of Samson,
how his mother bore first nothing, then all.
First nothing, then all. The “Mother of All—" Read how Gilgamesh suffered all and accomplished all.
Gilgamesh’s name—more rightly, “Bilgamesh”—translates to “The Ancestor is a Young Man.”
What is going on?
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On holidays or birthdays, packages would arrive at my childhood home from Gunnar Schonning Jr. containing absurd and often useless gifts. He must have bought them when out of his mind, on a bender, watching late-night infomercials. In one box, the patent-pending “Egg-stractor,” for deshelling hard-boiled eggs; in the other, a guillotine-like device for slicing bagels, and the collected works of Philip Levine. He did not know what he was doing.
Via e-mail, the trend persists. Rather than kitchen oddities, he sends a piece on Camus by the Paris Review; a job offer for grading test scores remotely, that pays “over ten an hour to start”; a message with the header “I know this guy from AA,” with a dead link to an article entitled “Man Jailed for Allegedly Shooting at Tree.” Once, he evoked Simone Weil.
5.18.2017 “affliction”
I no longer work at the university.
I don't miss it at all, except the work with plants and trees and grass. I found that to be gratifying. I
love the long leaf pine. When there is a high, severe clear blue ocean sky here (as there frequently
is—the light is the best thing about this place) and you look at it through the green needles of the
long leaf pine, well. I would like my death bed dragged out under one.
Things don't work out like that.
Simone Weil (and a book by Russell Banks) said that the mystery of life isn't suffering but affliction.
Affliction is the indescribable humiliation of the surreal pains of life.
She was so smart.
3/9/50 is my birthday. Born in Greenwich, CT.
I sure don't want to die in NC.
I do not like this place.
dad
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Biblical Samson finds a counterpart in the Greek Herakles. There are myriad online forums, largely populated by fundamentalist Christians and would-be academics, that do their best to claim that the former inspired the latter. The comparison is sensible—superhuman strength, flowing locks, tragic ends, etc.—but any real connection is tenuous.
Depending on whether you believe the account of the Bibliotheca or Euripides, Herakles either killed his children—Therimachus, Creontiades, and Deicoon—or his family entire—Therimachus, Creontiades, Deicoon, and Megara (their mother). According to both the Bibliotheca and Euripides, Herakles was under Hera’s spell at the time—he did not know what he was doing.
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Long before it was an acronym, “Moab” was a name—a figure in Genesis. Though its etymology is contested, scholars are agreed that the name is some variation on “seed of the father;” “mo”—from, “ab”—father.
What is going on?
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Aboard the USS Halligan, Gunnar Schonning Sr. was a petty officer, classified as both F1, or “fireman first class,” and WT2c, or “watertender second class.” The titles were more or less interchangeable—both responsible for tending to the fires and boilers in the ship’s engine room, which is where Gunnar was when the Halligan was “ripped skyward” by the mine.
Of those in the engine room, he was the only to survive. He held his breath, swam through the tear made by the blast. Tending fire, nestled in his dark—the bare metal wound opens by degrees. Light enters all at once.
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Meantime, Oedipal Paul Tibbets
tends to child.
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According to the biblical account, Moab lived some four thousand years ago; he was the son of Lot. As Lot and his family fled the destruction of Sodom—“Then the LORD rained upon Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire”—Lot’s wife, the mother of his daughters, looked back on the city and turned to a pillar of salt. With alternative pious women lacking, Moab was born of Lot by incest with his eldest daughter—hence the former name’s etymology.
Per Genesis, Lot was drunk during the conception—he did not know what he was doing.
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5.20.2017; “nuclear tunnels”
I have a cold.
Did I tell you it looks like I'll be a security guard out at the nuclear power plant? Sleep soundly tonight, America! Trump is the President of the USA and Gunnar is guarding fissionable material that can melt a hole from Wilmington to the other side of the earth. I am planning to facilitate such a hole so I can jump into it and get the hell out of NC.
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In the late 16th century, in another moment of lexical acrobatics, a group of men turned “fire”—with its myriad meanings and myriad roots—into a verb. Sometime around 1588, the Anglo-Spanish sea battles resulted in a revolution in naval tactics that promoted more cannon use and less ramming and boarding. In this moment, “fire” departed from its roots in noun and found new life in verb—a command—“FIRE”—and in so doing was made fully inanimate; fully absent.
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Biblical Moab was the progenitor of the Moabites, who—in turn—founded the kingdom Moab. For centuries, it thrived east of the River Jordan, where today mothers call their children Mama.
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Simone Weil, too, spoke to absence. For Weil, absence is a smattering of wounds that hollow a person out, one atom at a time, until God can ease inside—feet-first—like a child crawls into a snowdrift.
On God, she wrote, “For if we were exposed to the direct radiance of his love, without the protection of space, of time and of matter, we should be evaporated like water in the sun.”
All at once.
The speculative essay, as far as I hope to use it, insists itself into spaces otherwise barred from the craft. Essays of all kinds, of course, essai—attempt, question, exceed their forms even as they build them. By offering yet more license for inference and invention, speculation allows reader and writer to plot those usual threads beyond where they end. Speculation in reference to history, as this issue has occasioned, reinvigorates the phantom limb of what’s past; offers a glimpse through the keyhole of that otherwise closed door. I hope that my piece does so for history of all kinds—communal, personal, and imagined.
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Daniel Schonning is an MFA candidate at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado, where he serves as an associate editor at Colorado Review and the assistant director of the Creative Writing Reading Series. He was a finalist for the Puerto del Sol 2019 Poetry Contest, the 2019 Pinch Literary Awards, and the 2018 Indiana Review Poetry Prize. His work has appeared or is forthcoming from Guesthouse, the Pinch Journal, Sycamore Review, and Seneca Review.