1.

 

I ask you to consider that this is something. I ask you to look at a picture of the bomb dropping on Hiroshima, the first, although that doesn’t matter here. I ask you to learn, for this is a matter of learning, to see people in the bomb. I invite you to formulate and begin to practice an art: and to proceed according to the ideal that one day you could look at the photograph and actually throw up or break into truly authentic tears: really sob, really feel it. But I ask you more than that: I ask you to grasp that these basic potentialities are indeed real potentialities, a real art, or parts of a real art, something that can be taken very seriously, as seriously as you take your checkbook, field of study, work expertise, etc.

 

Yes: “is this something? This is something!” from the SNL skit on a drama instructor’s technical exhortations. Over the top in that skit, of course, but it is not untrue to suggest that somehow the same impulse sets itself up here.

 

2.

 

here is another “datum” (of what has to be clarified): the inventor, more or less, of the bomb, Leo Szlilard, begged Truman not to hit a populated/civilian target. Here we must move in a particular direction: of an “expertise/genius (even) of nonviolence”, and a parallel here: the business of Szlilard projecting the results, projecting effects, weighing how a non-populated hit would in fact have an effect, the business of this effect: these are the stuff of  basic nonvilence; now, here, I ask you to be shocked to the core, to imagine nth degree implications, an “art form” and various unleashingings; this work should do that, I must do that. I am weak, but I must do that.