Did Oppenheimer Believe in Coincidence?

Order & Chaos at Columbus Circle

Fuck I can't get a ticket to the 70mm IMAX Oppenheimer at Lincoln Square.

Every seat of every screening is sold out. The massive physical film literally decays every time they screen it.

Several times I check late at night, squinting at dates and times. I'm starting to doubt, but then my little ritual pays off. Two open seats in Row G the very next day at 2:30. I buy one.

It's the next day.

I've been carrying a friend's credit card in my wallet for two months. Neither of us knows how it got there. She lives on 144th so I take it down to her and she gives me some pot brownies, which I ate while writing this.

I catch the A at 145th. It's pulling in as I come down the stairs and at 125th a quartet of older Black men get on the train and sing in 3 or 4-part harmony. It is beautiful. Hermes has blessed us.

I get off at 59th and walk through the isolated island in the middle of Columbus Circle, past the old navigator up on his column. This place is sinister and full of propaganda. A seat of powers both mundane and arcane.

Columbus himself is a top 5 propaganda figure of all human history. It fits that his circle is the zero-mile-point for so many invisible ripples in the city. This the literal center of the bureaucratic city.

Highway signs are measured to Christopher's Column(bus).

75 miles out is 'long-distance travel' for employees of the City of New York, (so like, Yale).

At 25 miles there's an invisible curtain, the so-called 'film zone' inside of which the industry's unions can work (when they ain't on strike). The same boundary also marks the edge of the C-2 visa zone for technocrats traveling to and from the UN.

In the 30s, fascists used to soapbox here.

The 4chan of it's day.

Even earlier, the coal-heart William Randolph Hearst played an important role in developing this area, buying and selling several properties nearby, infusing this area with his lack of concern for fairness or the full picture.

On the corner of the park is the fountain commemorating the USS Maine, the American naval vessel whose accidental sinking was flogged by Hearst's newspapers as the pretext for entering the Spanish-American War. (This fountain is also where Travis Bickle's attempted assassination of Senator Palantine is thwarted in Taxi Driver.)

Now the dark wizard Trump's onyx-black tower looms over it all.

Last night a man jumped 750 feet to his death from one of the twin towers at 60 Columbus Circle.

If New York is an organism at war with itself—daily doing battle between the open hand and the closed fist—then Columbus Circle belongs to the latter. It's the hierophant's lair (one of them). From here emanate systems that undergird global stability and bring chaos and death.

And 30 blocks from here–in the northwestern quintant of the Columbus Circle pentagram—is where Robert Oppenheimer grew up. Maybe he too is one of the Circle's ripples.

I wander into Central Park and sit under a tree near the 59th street wall. I take off my shoes and socks, watching a squirrel dig a hole by frenetically summersaulting in one place. A squirrel ritual I do not understand.

I call my grandmother, then meander back through the park, popping out into the triangle created by Central Park West and Broadway just north of Columbus Circle.

I am on my way to see Oppenheimer, and I am lost in thought about the difference between magic and science. Unconsciously, I end up on 72nd, in front of The Pythian. A place I always stop and gawk.

Today a father and teenage son have also stopped to look at the building, so I join in. We're speaking in Spanish.

"Is it masonic?" the father asks me, surprised.

"Yah," I say. "A lot of New York was built by freemasons. And if you ask me, they still got some juice."

"Not in Spain," he laughs. "Franco cut that out." He makes a scything gesture with his hands.

Then he tells me he's a freemason in Spain.

What is the probability of that, Mr. Heisenberg, Mr. Einstein, Mr. Oppenheimer... That this Spanish Freemason and I would be on this block at the same time?

I tell him what little I know about the building. Built by masons for masons...it 'used' to be temple space for masonic rituals...for years there was an important recording studio... but now it's just a 'regular' 88-unit UWS condo...never mind the twenty foot god-kings up in the sky.

We discuss the weird mix of Babylonian and Egyptian iconography and the art deco playfulness. I tell him to go check out the big hall on 23rd too and then his wife comes up, with a bemused who the fuck is this guy look on her face. The husband explains, everybody laughs, and I take my moment to ask him what degree mason he is.

"4th degree," he says, with a shrug and a grin.

"Are you a mason?" he asks.

I shrug and grin.

I'm late for the movie. I gotta go.

As I walk away the wife yells at me if I know where the T-Mobile store is.

I don't.

But then I walk around the corner onto Broadway and go one block south and there's a guy in a T-mobile shirt and oh right there's the store.

I am frequently accused of apophenia (often by myself), which is the proclivity to see patterns where none exist.

But can you put all these coincidences into an equation on a chalk board?

I go one more block and I'm at the theater.

Oppenheimer was born 75 years to the day before I was. Oppy, The Destroyer of Worlds, was born on Earth Day.

He must have walked this very block on his way to and from school at Fieldston.

Do our footfalls overlap, rippling across time?

How far into the fabric of reality does the ripple of a footfall travel?

I wonder if Oppenheimer believe in coincidence.

I'm in the theater now. Next to me a young South Asian man. We speak briefly about the luck we each had in finding these golden tickets, then we don't talk again. Just two complimentary variables, in the same spot for a moment, then headed off on different vectors.

The film starts, enormous and loud, so big you can see the pores on the faces of the aging actors.

The eyes on that motherfucker.

The roar of the bomb.

The look on Albert's face when he understands.

The ripples on the pond.

I don't know what to do with the uncertainty of it all. How do we manage the coincidence of what could happen versus what does happen?

Is this all explainable by proximity and probability and science?

Or

Is this the quiet hand of the gods?

Yesterday my old zen mentor asked me, "Is six too many, or is half a dozen not enough?"

There is so much more here than we pretend.

Magic is just science with more sensitive instrumentation.