61. The Periodic Table - chapter 9 - Phosphorus + Cremains

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March 29, 2015

p109 In June 1942... I realized that my work was becoming useless, and they too realized this and advised me to look for another job...

I was futilely looking when one morning, a very rare event, I was called to the mine’s telephone: from the other end of the line a Milanese voice, which seemed to me crude and energetic, and which said that it belonged to a Dr. Martini, summoned me to an appointment on the following Sunday at the Hotel Suisse in Turin, without vouchsafing me the luxury of any details. But he had said “Hotel Suisse” and not “Albergo Svizzera” as a loyal citizen would be obliged to say: at that time, which was the time of Starace, [Footnote: A. Starace was for many years secretary of the Fascist National Party. He distinguished himself by the stupid zeal with which he strove to “purify” the customs of the Italians, combating the use of foreign words (in fact, such words as “hotel” or “foyer”] one was very attentive to such piddling details, and one’s ears were expert at intercepting certain nuances.

[They meet at the hotel] p110 ...This commendatore revealed himself from his first remarks to be also a no-nonsense, all-business type, and I understood at that point that this strange haste of “Aryan” Italians [in the sense of being speakers of an Indo-Aryan language] in dealing with Jews was not accidental. Whether intuition or calculation, it served a purpose: with a Jew, at a time of the Defense of the Race, one could be polite, one could even help him, and even boast (cautiously) about having helped him, but it was not advisable to have human relations with him, nor to compromise oneself too deeply, so as not to be forced later to offer understanding or compassion.

He is to work on a cure or treatment for diabetes alongside a classmate from university, Giulia Vineis, who recommended him for the position.

p111 The very next day I quit the mine and moved to Milan with the few things I felt were indispensable: my bike, Rabelais, the Macaronaeae, [?] Moby Dick translated by Parvese, a few other books, my pickax, climbing rope, logarithmic ruler, and recorder [?].

The laboratory is excellent but comes with amazing rules and restrictions, to prevent industrial spying among other things. The shifts of the various chemists are arranged so that they will not ride the same trams to and from work when they might talk to each other. Books from the library are to be destroyed and replaced if anyone makes a mark in them or dog-ears a page for fear that this might give anyone a clue as to what they are working on.

I was tempted to skip the description of Giulia Vineis, but since she is the subject of this chapter, that would have been a mistake.

p113 This viaticum [?] of precepts and prohibitions would have made me permanently unhappy if on entering the lab I had not found Giulia Vineis, quite calm, seated beside her workbench. She was not working -- instead she was darning her stockings, and seemed to be waiting for me. She greeted me with affectionate familiarity and a meaningful grimace.

We had been classmates at the university for four years, and had attended together all the lab courses, which are wonderful matchmakers, without ever becoming particular friends. Giulia was a dark girl, minute and quick; she had eyebrows with an elegant arc, a smooth, pointed face, a lively but precise way of moving. She was more open to practice than to theory, full of human warmth, Catholic without rigidity, generous and slapdash; she spoke in a veiled, distracted voice, as if she were definitely tired of living, which she was not at all. She had been there for nearly a year -- yes, she was the person who mentioned my name to the commendatore: she knew vaguely about my precarious situation at the mine, thought that I would be well suited for that research work, and besides, why not admit it, she was fed up with being alone. But I shouldn't get any ideas: she was engaged, very much engaged, a complicated and tumultuous business that she would explain to me later. And what about me? No? No girls? That’s bad: she would try to help me out there, forget the racial laws; a lot of nonsense anyway, what importance could they have?

She advised me not to take the commendatore’s strange ideas too seriously. Guilia was one of those people who, apparently without asking questions or going to any trouble, immediately knew everything about everybody, which to me, God knows why, never happens; so she was for me a tourist guide and a first-class interpreter... The commendatore was the boss, although subjected to obscure other bosses in Basel; however the person who gave orders was Loredana (and she pointed her out to me from the window... who was his secretary and mistress... Living in that factory was not difficult; it was difficult to work there because of all those entanglements. The solution was simple -- just don’t work: she had realized this immediately, and in a year, modesty aside, she had done hardly anything -- all that she did was set up the apparatus in the morning, just enough to satisfy the eye, and dismount it in the evening in accordance with regulations. The daily report she created out of her imagination. Apart from that, she prepared her trousseau, slept a great deal, wrote torrential letters to her fiance, and against regulations, started conversations with everyone who came within earshot...

p115 Of course, if I wanted to work and the research into diabetes interested me, go right ahead and do it, we would be friends anyway; but I shouldn’t count on her collaboration because she had other things to think about. I could, however, count on her and Varisco [the cleaning woman who is also supposed to prepare his meals] when it came to cooking. They, both of them, had to start training, in view of their coming marriages, and so they would offer me some feeds which would make me forget all about ration cards and rationing... outside of a certain mysterious consultant from Basel who... came once a month... looked around as though he were in a museum, and left without breathing a word, no living being ever entered [the laboratory], and you could do what you liked, so long as you left no traces behind. In the memory of man, the commendatore had never set foot there.

...

p116 ...according to Dr. Kerrn, [A German who wrote a book about diabetes that the commendatore only knows in translation] ... phosphoric acid had a fundamental importance in the metabolism of carbohydrates: and up to this point there was nothing to object to; less convincing was the hypothesis elaborated by the commendatore himself on Kerrn’s rather misty fundamentals namely, that it would suffice to administer to the diabetic a little phosphorus of vegetal origin to correct his subverted metabolism. At that time I was so young as to think that it might be possible to change a superior’s ideas; therefore I put forth two or three objections, but I saw immediately that under their blows the commendatore hardened like a sheet of copper under a hammer. He cut me short and, with a certain peremptory tone of his that transformed his suggestions into commands, advised me to analyse a good number of plants, select the richest in organic phosphorus, make from them the usual extracts, and stick them into the usual rabbits. Enjoy your work and good afternoon.

p117 ...In her [Giulia’s] opinion, that mania of mine about work, which even went to the point of prostituting myself to the commendatore’s senile fairy tales, resulted from the fact I didn’t have a girl friend... It was truly a pity that she, Guilia, was not available, because she realized the sort of person I was, of those who do not take the initiative, indeed run away, and must be led by the hand, solving little by little all their complicated conflicts... it hurt her heart to see someone like me throw away the best years of his youth on rabbits. This Guillia was a bit of a witch -- she read palms, went to mediums, and had premonitory dreams -- and sometimes I dared to think that this haste of hers to free me of an old anguish and procure for me immediately a modest portion of joy came from a dark intuition of hers about what fate had in store for me, and was unconsciously aimed at deflecting it.

...

p118 Giulia was a lioness, capable of traveling for ten hours standing up in a train packed with people running away from the bombings to spend two hours with her man, happy and radiant if she could engage in a violent verbal duel with the commendatore or Loredana, but she was afraid of insects and thunder... A furious storm broke, Guilia stood fast for two strokes of lightning and at the third ran to me for shelter. I felt the warmth of her body against mine, dizzying and new, familiar in dreams, but I did not return her embrace; if I had done so, perhaps her destiny and mine would have gone with a crash off the rails, toward a common, completely unpredictable future.

[Levi, with some difficulty, checks out the book (that the commendatore is fond of from the company library]

p119 It was a strange book: it would be hard to think of its being written and published in any other place than the Third Reich. The author was not without a certain ability, but every one of his pages gave off the arrogance of someone who knows that his statements will not be disputed. He wrote, indeed harangued, like a possessed prophet, as though the metabolism of glucose, in the diabetic and the healthy person, had been revealed to him by Jehovah on Sinai or, rather, by Wotan on Valhalla. Perhaps wrongly, I immediately conceived for Kerrn’s theories a resentful distrust; but I have not heard that the thirty years that have passed since then have let to their reevaluation.

...

p120 I set to work, not at all convinced, though convinced that the commendatore, and most likely Kerrn himself, had given in to the cheap spell of names and cliches; in fact; phosphorus has a very beautiful name (it means “bringer of light”), it is phosphorescent, it’s in the brain, it’s also in fish, and therefore eating fish makes you intelligent; without phosphorus plants do not grow; Falieres developed phosphatine, glycerophosphates for anemic children one hundred years ago; it is in the tips of matches, and girls driven desperate by love ate them to commit suicide; it is in will-o’-the-wisps, putrid flames fleeing before the wayfarer. No it is not an emotionally neutral element: it was understandable that a Professor Kerrn, half biochemist and half witch doctor, in the environment impregnated with black magic of the Nazi court, had designated it as a medicament.

...Just as much as the analysis of nickel in the rock had exalted me... so was I humiliated now by the daily dosage of phosphorus, because to do work in which one does not believe is a great affliction; the presence of Giulia in the next room barely did anything to cheer me up, singing in a muted voice “it’s spring wake up,” and cooking away with the thermometer in the pretty little Pyrex beakers. Every so often she came to contemplate my work, provocative and mocking.

...
[One day Guilia demands that Levi ride her across town so she can confront her perspective in-laws,]

p123 Traveling around Milan on a bike was not at all daring in those days, and to carry a passenger on the crossbar at a time of bombing and with people leaving their homes to spend the night in a safer place was just about normal... Guilia, rather restless as a rule, that evening endangered our stability; she convulsively clutched the handlebar, making it hard to steer, suddenly changing her position with a jerk, illustrating her conversation with violent gestures of her hands and head [I’ve never understood how Italians can communicate by phone without the usual visual clues], which shifted our common center of gravity in an unpredictable manner. Her conversation was at the start somewhat generic, but Guilia was not the type to bottle up her secrets and so harbor bile; halfway down Via Imbonati she had already left generalities behind, and at Porta Volta she spoke in quite explicit terms: she was furious because his parents had said no and she was flying to the counterattack. Why had they said it? -- for them I am not pretty enough, understand? -- she snarled, shaking the handlebar.

“What idiots! You look pretty enough to me.” I said seriously.

“Get smart. You don’t know what it’s all about.”

“I only wanted to pay you a compliment; besides, that’s what I think.”

“This is not the moment. If you’re trying to court me now, I’ll knock you down.”

“You’ll fall, too.”

“You’re a fool. Go on, keep pedaling, it’s getting late.”

By the time we reached Largo Cairoli I already knew everything: or better, I possessed all the factual elements, but so confused and jumbled in their temporal sequence that it was not easy for me to make sense of them.

p124 ...he [her fiance] was holed up in some border barracks to defend the nation. Because, being a goy, he was of course doing his military service: and as I was thinking like this and as Guilia continued to fight with me as if I were her Don Rodrigo [Footnote: A character in Manzoni’s [you should read the entire Wiki entry on him] historical novel The Betrothed...] I felt myself overcome by an absurd hatred for this never encountered rival. A goy, and she was a goya, according to my atavistic terminology: and they could have gotten married. I felt growing within me, perhaps for the first time, a nauseating sensation of emptiness: so this is what it meant to be different: this was the price for being the salt of the earth. To carry on your crossbar a girl you desire and be so far from her as not to be able even to fall in love with her. Carry her on your crossbar along Viale Gorizia to help her belong to someone else, and vanish from my life.

p125 ...Giulia told me to wait for her... and flew through the street door like a gust of wind. I sat down and waited, battered and sorrowful. I thought that I ought to be less of a gentleman, indeed less inhibited and foolish, and that for the rest of my life I would regret that between myself and her there had been nothing but a few school and company memories; and that maybe it was not too late, that maybe the no of those two musical comedy parents would be adamant, that Giulia would come down in tears and I then could console her; and that these were infamous hopes, the way a shipwrecked person tired of struggling lets himself sink straight to the bottom, I fell back on what was my dominant thought during those years: that the existing fiance and the laws of racial separation were only stupid alibis, and that my inability to approach a woman was a condemnation without appeal which would accompany me to my death, confining me to a life poisoned by envy and by abstract, sterile, and aimless desire.

Giulia came out after two hours, in fact burst through the street door like a shell out of a mortar. It was not necessary to question her to find out how things had gone: “I made them look that high,” she said, all red in the face and still gasping. I made an effort to congratulate her in a believable fashion. But it’s impossible to make Guilia believe things you don’t really think, or hide things you do think. Now that she had thrown off that weight, and was shining with victory, she looked me straight in the eye, saw the shadow there, and asked, “What were you thinking about?”

“Phosphorus,” I replied.

If this were a work of fiction, we would get the other sides of this scene. The in-laws-to-be who had provoked Guilia to see what sort of fool their son wanted to marry, and who were pleased by her proper, Italian response. Guilia -- also pleased by the chance both to prove her metal and to enjoy a gloriously emotional confrontation. The fiance, delighted that he had been well out of the way so things could play out as they did.

For my sins, I get frequent doses of Levi’s angst here from my online community friends, most of whom are in their twenties and many either at the same stage of life as Levi here, or still in university. They strike me as penguins who long to fly; doves who long to swim; sloths who long to run. I would alter Levi’s metaphor of the shipwreck survivor who stops struggling and let’s himself drown to someone stuck in quicksand who stops struggling against his nature so that he can live.

Guilia got married a few months later and said goodbye to me, snuffling tears up her nose and giving Varisco detailed alimentary instructions. She has had many hardships and many children; we have remained friends, we see each other every so often in Milan and talk about chemistry and other reasonable matters. We are not dissatisfied with our choices and with what life has given us, but when we meet we both have a curious and not unpleasant impression (which we have both described to each other several times) that a veil, a breath, a throw of the dice deflected us onto two divergent paths, which were not ours.

That last sentence is like a red cape to me: Then whose paths were they? And if those other paths were yours, how did you manage to get off them? Recognizing the essential and beneficial qualities of phosphorus (see below) is not the same as having the chemical composition phosphorus is so eager to bond with. Phosphorus doesn’t just sit around waiting, you need to move quickly, which was clearly not Primo’s style -- a style I recognize all too well.

Phosphorus (P 15)

“...As an element, phosphorus exists in two major forms—white phosphorus and red phosphorus—but due to its high reactivity, phosphorus is never found as a free element on Earth...”

“The first form of elemental phosphorus to be produced (white phosphorus, in 1669) emits a faint glow upon exposure to oxygen – hence its name given from Greek mythology, Φωσφόρος meaning "light-bearer" (Latin Lucifer), referring to the "Morning Star", the planet Venus (or Mercury). The term "phosphorescence", meaning glow after illumination, originally derives from this property of phosphorus, although this word has since been used for a different physical process that produces a glow. The glow of phosphorus itself originates from oxidation of the white (but not red) phosphorus— a process now termed chemiluminescence ...”

“Phosphorus is essential for life. Phosphate is a component of DNA, RNA, ATP, and also the phospholipids, which form all cell membranes. Demonstrating the link between phosphorus and life, elemental phosphorus was first isolated from human urine, and bone ash was an important early phosphate source. Phosphate minerals are fossils. Low phosphate levels are an important limit to growth in some aquatic systems. In a commercial sense, the vast majority of phosphorus compounds are consumed as fertilisers. Phosphate is needed to replace the phosphorus that plants remove from the soil, and its annual demand is rising nearly twice as fast as the growth of the human population.[6] ...”

...

“Urine contains most (94% according to Wolgast[32]) of the NPK nutrients excreted by the human body. The more general limitations to using urine as fertilizer depend mainly on the potential for buildup of excess nitrogen (due to the high ratio of that macronutrient),[33]and inorganic salts such as sodium chloride, which are also part of the wastes excreted by the renal system. The degree to which these factors impact the effectiveness depends on the term of use, salinity tolerance of the plant, soil composition, addition of other fertilizing compounds, and quantity of rainfall or other irrigation.

Urine typically contains 70% of the nitrogen and more than half the phosphorus and potassium found in urban waste water flows, while making up less than 1% of the overall volume. Thus far, source separation, or urine diversion and on-site treatment has been implemented in South Africa, China, and Sweden among other countries with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation provided some of the funding implementations.[34]

"Urine management" is a relatively new way to view closing the cycle of agricultural nutrient flows and reducing sewage treatment costs and ecological consequences such as eutrophication resulting from the influx of nutrient rich effluent into aquatic or marine ecosystems.[35] Proponents of urine as a natural source of agricultural fertilizer claim the risks to be negligible or acceptable.[36]”

...

“Phosphorus was the 13th element to be discovered. For this reason, and also due to its use in explosives, poisons and nerve agents, it is sometimes referred to as "the Devil's element".[45] It was the first element to be discovered that was not known since ancient times.[citation needed] The discovery of phosphorus is credited to the German alchemist Hennig Brand in 1669, although other chemists might have discovered phosphorus around the same time.[46] Brand experimented with urine, which contains considerable quantities of dissolved phosphates from normal metabolism.[14] Working in Hamburg, Brand attempted to create the fabled philosopher's stone through the distillation of some salts by evaporating urine, and in the process produced a white material that glowed in the dark and burned brilliantly. It was named phosphorus mirabilis ("miraculous bearer of light").[47]”

...

“Antoine Lavoisier recognized phosphorus as an element in 1777.[49] Bone ash was the major source of phosphorus until the 1840s. The method started by roasting bones, then employed the use of clay retorts encased in a very hot brick furnace to distill out the highly toxic elemental phosphorus product.[50] Alternately, precipitated phosphates could be made from ground-up bones that had been de-greased and treated with strong acids. White phosphorus could be then be made by heating the precipitated phosphates, mixed with ground coal or charcoal in an iron pot, and distilling off phosphorus vapour in a retort.[51] Carbon monoxide and other flammable gases produced during the reduction process were burnt off in a flare stack.

In the 1840s, world phosphate production turned to the mining of tropical island deposits formed from bird and bat guano (see also Guano Islands Act). These became an important source of phosphates for fertilizer in the latter half of the 19th century.

Phosphate rock, a mineral containing calcium phosphate, was first used in 1850 to make phosphorus, and following the introduction of the electric arc furnace in 1890, elemental phosphorus production switched from the bone-ash heating, to electric arc production from phosphate rock. After the depletion of world guano sources about the same time, mineral phosphates became the major source of phosphate fertilizer production...”

...

“The Allies used phosphorus incendiary bombs in World War II to destroy Hamburg, the place where the "miraculous bearer of light" was first discovered.[47]” -Wiki

Phosphorus and mother's cremains

When my mother died I scattered her ashes around a tree beside a particular bench adjacent to the area where I scattered most of my dad's cremains. I chose the spot in part because it was comparatively open with little paths that allowed me to go a bit down the slope (I was attempting to be a little stealthy since there is rather a lot of ash left over after a person dies and scattering them here is not quite legal.) Within a year the tree had been blown down and the area was so overgrown as to be inaccessible -- not only the paths but the bench itself disappeared under a mound of thorny bushes.

In part this was due to the area getting more sun with the tree gone, but I like to think, and have reason to think, that my mother's ashes (which were rich in phosphorus) also played a role. Maybe another year after that, the park staff finally cut back the overgrowth so you could at least get to the bench, and now, over ten years later, you are beginning to see the paths again -- but my mother, who always refused to trim our trees (to their detriment) would have loved the riot of plant growth her ashes facilitated -- as did the bees and hummingbirds attracted by all the new flowers. (And she loved hummingbirds as well)

Without really giving it that much thought (unusual for me) I managed to do probably the best thing -- sticking her corpse in the ground to rot or even placing her ashes in an urn in the local Columbarium (as nice as that place is) would not have been nearly as interesting or appropriate.

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