She further narrowed her scan to a particular spatiotemporal locus early in that year of 1917, to a windswept Manhattan street on a cold January morning prior to sunrise. An incursion into a lifestream carried a degree of risk, not only for herself and the subject, but potentially for the lifestream’s entire species. However, corporeal interaction seemed the only sensible way to proceed. And Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp seemed an excellent first target for the amalgamation.
BERN, 1905
Working as an examiner at the patent office in Bern, Switzerland, was less than challenging. Albert Einstein found much of the work mechanical and routine. The quality of submissions to his office varied greatly, and although many of them at least were straightforward, they too often were accompanied by engineering schematics and explanations woefully lacking in imagination.
Albert had finished his physics studies in 1901 but was unable to find an academic position. He was grateful to get paid work that at least utilized a modicum of intelligence. Here at the Bern Federal Office for Intellectual Property, his specialty was evaluating patents relating to the transmission of electrical signals and the synchronization of time.
The most boring submissions tended to be harebrained replications of devices already in existence. Many of those could be further classified into the subcategory of “inventions likely to prompt litigation by rightful patent owners”. Still, on occasion, applications suggested at least an attempt to create something novel, such as the recent entry whereby a stationary bicycle was linked to a sewing machine, with the operator’s steady rotation of the pedals actuating an electric generator that powered a rhythmically thrusting needle.
But the submissions he enjoyed most were those that audaciously sidestepped or challenged the social norms. Albert prided himself on maintaining an open and liberal attitude, something that could be said of the Swiss in general, at least when compared to those narrow minds increasingly common in his native Germany. The best of those submissions that evaded the status quo could also spark amusement, even occasional bouts of laughter. For reasons that Albert could not adequately explain, the analysis of such items often made the day seem to go faster. It was as if they caused time itself to flow at a different rate.
He had been asked to process one such elegant and amusing entry only yesterday, from the Zurich Electrical Supply Company. The firm’s banana-shaped Premium Vibrator was ostensibly a device for general feminine relaxation and improved health. The applicant claimed, in a barrage of pseudoscientific language that artfully avoided the device’s more titillating potential, that it was intended for face, scalp and body massage, and that regular use engendered remarkable curative properties. Not only would headaches and wrinkles be eliminated, but the vibrator also held out the promise of perpetual youth. And because it plugged into the common outlet – just like your electric lamp, the accompanying advertisement proclaimed – it was said to be quieter and free of the dense clouds of smoke that plagued steam-powered models.
Albert had become a permanent employee at the patent office two years ago. Although technically having to spend at least eight hours a day at his desk, he often was able to finish his allotment of tasks at a swifter pace than his coworkers. The remainder of the workday could then be applied to his true passion: dwelling on the mathematical laws of the universe and writing research papers in support of his calculations and conclusions.
He was engaged in just that activity on this warm afternoon in May 1905, shortly after a thunderstorm had soaked the area. He was alone, planted firmly on a shaded park bench near his office, a selection of local newsprint serving as a barrier between his posterior and the damp bench slats. He’d completed his duties for the day, including an hour squeezed in for his studies. Now, before heading home to wife Mileva and their year-old son Hans, he was taking a few moments to find a solution to a stubborn problem he’d been dwelling on for seven years.
How exactly did relative motion impact the phenomena of electromagnetism?
An answer at times seemed tantalizingly within reach. Yet whenever he completed the calculations, they produced mathematical dead-ends. Recently, he’d begun to experience a sense of despair that the problem could be solved.
As he was churning the idea and a corresponding stream of calculations around in his head, trying to approach a solution from yet another perspective, he reached for the cloth bag at his side. It contained his leftovers from lunch. A small loaf of bread and bottle of milk had already been consumed but a ripe golden apple remained. He’d intended to save it for tomorrow’s lunch but reconsidered, believing that perhaps its jolt of sugar might pump new energy into his brain.
As his hand crept into the bag and grasped the apple, a woman sat down on the far side of the bench, just beyond his reaching arm. He was so startled by her abrupt appearance from nowhere that he wrenched his hand from the lunch bag. That caused the apple to roll off the bench and fall, with Newtonian certainty, onto a patch of moist grass at his feet.
Albert reached down to retrieve the fallen fruit. Not wishing to be impolite and eat in front of a stranger, he returned it to the bag.
“How do you maintain your balance?”
The woman spoke in Albert’s native German. Something about her precise yet lyrical tone made him think that she might be a singer, or perhaps a visiting actress in the employ of one of those touring theater companies.
He could think of no appropriate response to the oddly phrased greeting. Yet it was more than just her words that rendered him silent. In the brief moment he had looked away from her to gather up the fallen fruit, her very appearance seemed to have changed.
At first glance, her dark hair and round face had brought to mind Mileva. But now she seemed to have transformed into a younger woman, no more than twenty years of age, with a slim attractive figure and flowing wheat-colored hair that reminded him of an autumnal field. Indeed, her new incarnation was possessed of such rare and dazzling beauty that the few remnants of calculations and probabilities having to do with relative motion and electromagnetism still churning through Albert’s head were swept away.
He was well aware that such a startling metamorphosis could not have occurred.
A quick analysis of the situation produced the only rational answer. Beneath Albert’s consciousness of the moment, he had been thinking about going home to his wife. Thus upon first laying eyes on the woman, his mind had played a trick. He had perceived the woman from a perspective at odds with reality. Having recently come across several articles published by a fascinating Viennese doctor named Freud, such self-deceptions seemed well within the realm of the believable.
“Is it your custom to ignore an invitation to converse?” she asked in response to his silence.
“Of course not,” he offered in an apologetic tone. “It’s just that you surprised me.”
She lifted her gaze to the canopy of a distant forest. “It is within my nature to have such tendencies.”
Albert found her response infernally odd. He took closer notice of her attire, having initially gauged her long dress as sewn out of a silk-like material, dyed black. Yet as the late afternoon sun crept through the treetops and fell upon it, the fabric displayed an alternating range of hues depending on the angle the sunlight struck it. He glimpsed flashes of scarlet in the material, then a series of yellow-greens reminiscent of grasslands aflame, and finally a selection of mauves and violets. It appeared as if the dress bore the capability of streaming through the entire spectrum of visible light, with a preponderance of colors he associated with the breaking of dawn. But that should not be possible. No dressmaking material with which he was familiar could possibly offer such an extraordinary range of hues.
A suspicion formed that things were not as they seemed. Could he be so addled by her ethereal beauty that he was hallucinating? Or perhaps something more fundamental had occurred and he’d fallen asleep on the bench, and was now the throes of a dream.
“This is not a dream,” she said, as if readin
g his thoughts.
“What proof is there of that?” he demanded, frustration slipping into his words. He couldn’t fathom exactly what was going on and felt that he was suddenly in the midst of a situation that defied logic. Yet simultaneously he realized that his frustration had little to do with the mysterious woman. The vexation’s true cause was his seven-year inability to solve the problem of relative motion’s impact on electromagnetism.
“Who are you?” he asked, recapturing his poise.
“You may call me… Stella. What would you say to a game of chess?”
Surprised by the change of subject, Albert again found himself at a loss for words. He played the game rarely these days, and then only with Mileva. His wife’s background in applied physics, geometry and mechanics made her an effective chess opponent.
“I have little time for such things,” he finally responded. “And unless you’re carrying one of those miniature chessboards in your purse, the question remains theoretical.”
“I am not inviting you to play a game at this moment. I was thinking of another time. Another place. Another opponent.”
He stared in fascination at the collar of her dress, which seemed to be transforming from a vibrant shade of amber to a pulsating crimson. She offered a fresh smile, so dazzling that it filled the air with crisscrossing shafts of white light of such intensity that Albert momentarily had to close his eyes. The illumination seemed to have physical form, as if composed of both waves and particles.
“You appear to emit your own light,” he stated.
“Light is not always what it seems.”
In any other setting, Albert would never be so rude as to put his hands on a woman without her consent. But the ethereal strangeness of what was happening demanded action. He was feeling increasingly unhinged, like a thunderbolt desperate to seek an electrical ground, to seek earth.
He reached out to touch her shoulder. His fingers made contact…
And the world exploded. A barrage of heat and light knocked him violently sideways off the bench. His backside touched down first, on a patch of wet grass. He struggled to his feet, relieved to be uninjured, with the possible exception of his pride.
The intense light had vanished and with it, the woman. There was no sign of her anywhere. The only other individuals present in the park were an elderly couple passing beneath an oak tree some twenty meters away. Albert smoothed his rumpled jacket and brushed leaves from the seat of his pants and dashed over to them.
“That woman who was with me,” he asked breathlessly. “Did you happen to notice where she went?”
The couple’s response only heightened the mystery. Both claimed to have seen Albert on the bench as they strolled past but no one else. They did admit that they thought it rather odd that he appeared to have been talking to himself.
Albert offered a mumbled “thank you” and returned to the bench. The bag with his apple was all that remained to mark the location of the strange incident.
What had happened? Why had the elderly couple noticed nothing out of the ordinary except for Albert vigorously conversing with an invisible presence? How could that be? How could one person perceive something happening in a certain space at a certain time, while other observers experienced an entirely different view relative to the same event?
Stunned by the impact of the encounter, by the woman’s cryptic words and perplexing appearance and disappearance, Albert headed for home. Yet however irrational the incident had been, he was suddenly filled with great excitement, of the sort that accompanied fresh discovery. The seed of an idea had been planted. He could feel it tumbling about within the deepest recesses, on the tantalizing edge of consciousness.
Light is not always what it seems, Stella had said. The notion triggered a flow of equations in his head. He felt as if her presence was the harbinger of a theory that, with just a bit more mental effort, might well illuminate the darkness.
* * * * *
Marcel Duchamp
Nice, France
15th of March, 1928
Alfred Stieglitz
Room 303, Anderson Gallery
Park Avenue and 59th Street
New York, NY, USA
My dear Alfred,
Thank you for the wedding gift, and for your marvelous letter. I hope that O’Keeffe is recovering from her operation, and that your lovely wife’s paintings remain lucrative.
You may be surprised to hear that I am now living in Nice as a bachelor and that my divorce from Lydie was finalized in January. She was more threatened by my chess pieces than by other women. Surely, one can love different things in equal measure without contradiction. Is that how you feel for both Georgia and Dorothy? Out of jealousy, Lydie glued my Staunton set to its board. I knew then that we could no longer be husband and wife.
The divorce has already done me good: I won an international chess tournament last month in Hyères. The game allows me to indulge in a purely mental state where I can think, strategize and create new sequences. Having known many artists and chess players, I have come to the conclusion that while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists.
When I win a beautiful game, I feel a sense of enlightenment that my art has never matched. I must continue seeking out stronger opponents to nourish my skills. The only thing that could stimulate my interest right now is a wonder drug that would make me play chess divinely. That would really excite me. I have tried grinding chocolate with various pharmaceuticals and herbs, but have yet to discover any significant effects.
A disdain for chess is not a universal quality of the fair sex. Even the structure of chess is predisposed towards the dominating queen who hunts the vulnerable crusading king. This brings to mind the events of about ten years ago, shortly after that memorable night in Manhattan, when revolutionary fervor seemed to lead to extraordinary incidents.
I was living in Buenos Aires where I had a series of sensual chess encounters with an enigmatic woman who called herself Estrella. Buenos Aires is dull at night and there was little to do other than work on art or visit the local chess club. Estrella was enchanting, and made for a formidable opponent, as I had not yet mastered the royal game.
The first time we met, we played until the club closed in the early hours of the following morning. We played lightning chess with only a few minutes for each game, and had gone through at least half a dozen games, with me winning the most. The victories brought additional satisfaction as she had mentioned that she would only sleep with men who could beat her at chess.
Afterwards, we made our way to my apartment where we continued to play with the added consequence that the loser of each lightning game removed an article of clothing. An hour later, she was left wearing only a silky black chemise, while I had only removed my jacket and socks. The sight of her beauty served to diminish my concentration however, and thirty minutes later, I too was almost nude. Our mental foreplay soon led to a more physical exchange.
Estrella was an inspiration and shared with me her explorations of automatic writing, alchemical formulas and mesmerism. During our chess games she would often roll an eight-sided die to decide which pawn to move first. In some indeterminable way, her strange habits and interests served to remind me of the mysterious Stella I’d encountered in Manhattan – or perhaps only encountered in dream and hallucination – a woman who seemed able to predict aspects of my future.
Predicting the future is difficult in chess and all but impossible in life, at least for those of us constrained by the dimensions of mortality. However, I will make a prophecy that I shall not paint again. But thank you for proposing another exhibition. I suggest that you pursue Picabia. He is not a fake like most others, and I will gladly make an introduction for you when I am in Paris next month.
Affectionately yours,
Marcel Duchamp
Grand Cafe de la Poste
Place Wilson et 25
Rue Hotel-des-Postes
Nice, France
* * * * *
Even for an outsider such as herself, the universe obeyed rules. From the randomly subatomic to the astronomically immense, order was maintained.
Until it wasn’t.
She’d enticed Marcel Duchamp and Albert Einstein to venture close. Luring them had introduced a level of uncertainty into an inherently unstable situation. During her numerous previous incursions into AT civilizations she always tried limiting herself to dialogue – an intellectual exchange of ideas – since touching a lifestream carried the risk of being ensnared by it.
Of course her strategy of detachment perpetually failed. An amalgamation was a necessary predecessor to an expulsion and required a form of solidity that her isolated existence could not offer. She chose not to examine too closely the fact that she endlessly repeated the identical pattern of events and that the end result was always the same, being wrenched from her pure observational context.
No longer a mere observer of the knowable universe she was caught up in it, snared in a state of faux-physicality. She was trapped within Duchamp and Einstein’s spheres of influence, trapped within a realm of finite yesterdays and tomorrows.
MANHATTAN, 1917
It was nearly noon when Marcel awoke. A good night’s sleep hadn’t alleviated his anxiety over the previous night’s encounter with the mysterious woman who called herself Stella, as well as with the equally cryptic manifestation of the newborn infant atop the arch. And did that invitation to a future chess game possess some significance he couldn’t decipher?
A fantastical idea occurred as he lay there in bed. His interest in the game of kings preceded both ethereal encounters, having grown up in a family that enjoyed playing chess. What if Stella somehow had been the one to inspire his early interest in the game?
Duchamp Versus Einstein Page 3
