A Conversation With D. V. Oistrin
We talked with D. V. Oistrin in his apartment on Central Park West
overlooking the park in the seventies. We found Oistrin, for all
of his 84 years, vibrant with life.
“People want to talk with me about understanding. They think that
since I am so old, I should understand something. It is an
understandable wish, I suppose, that someone should understand
something. I cherished it myself for many years. The first step
in understanding is not to understand. The second step in
understanding is also not to understand. The third step as well is
not to understand. And so on and so forth. Can we pass to a limit
at some point? I’m not sure.
“Thirty years ago, even twenty years ago, maybe, I used to think
that if you understood something, then you had a degree of control
and that that was good. Now, at some level, I’m sure that is true
and all well and good. But there’s another side to it, which is
that when you understand something, then you have been possessed by
a certain way of thinking. This way of thinking has control of
you. You may not even be aware of it. You think you’re exploring
what you can do with this way of thinking, when actually it’s
exploring what it can do with you. It’s very hard to develop a
critical attitude towards your own thinking, because you don’t want
simply to be critically uncritical. This isn’t easy to express or explain. I think a person has to have made a lot of mistakes
before all this begins to mean something.”
We reminded Mr. Oistrin that J. Robert Oppenheimer had described
him as one of the most profound and profoundly modest minds that he
had ever encountered.
“Ach,” D. V. Oistrin sighed, “J. Robert Oppenheimer was a very
complicated and profound man. I think what J. Robert Oppenheimer
said about me was really about an aspect of himself that made him
very uncomfortable. You always had the sense that there was more
to him than he could bear. He had so many different facets.
Sometimes I think it got away from him. He was very courteous to
me and I enjoyed talking with him very much. I would describe
myself more as cowardly by instinct than as profoundly modest. I
try to avoid compliments as much as I can because I experience them
as obliga¨tions in statu nascendi. I don’t want to promise what I
can’t deliver and I can’t deliver very much.
“Maybe the nicest thing J. Robert Oppenheimer did for me was not to
ask me to be part of the Manhattan project. I had done some
thinking about Einstein’s work and I had arrived at some fairly
peculiar theoretical ideas which don’t seem anywhere nearly as
peculiar now as they did at the time. I became diverted into an
odd branch of mathematics which has now come to be known as the n dimensional theory of recursive and non-recursive strings, harmonic loops and knots. I spent many years involved in it. I might even say
that I spent many years lost in it. Being lost is not really such
a bad thing.”
A smile played across Mr. Oistrin’s features, so that his face in
the bright autumn sunlight streaming in the window looked for a
moment for all the world like a bright red apple.
“I have to tell you a little about being old, about being eighty-four, soon eighty-five. As usual, the numbers don’t mean much in
themselves. They’re just ways of pointing towards a flavor or form
of experience. I was born in 1906. Like all people of my age, I
was born into a world that no longer exists. So loyalty, which is
always dependent on context, becomes a very complicated question.
I love poeple who are not so much dead as alive only in my head.
They grow old along with me and converse and chuckle and have
little fits of temper and help me sometimes to restrain my impulses
and sometimes to indulge them. Sometimes they help me out with an
idea, an odd association, a fragment of a memory.
“When you’re old it can be very complicated inside. You can even
appear to yourself sometimes in the guise of say, your own great
grandfather. So many different costumes in the closet. I dimly
remember mine from when I was a little boy in Lithuania. He was
about the age that I am now. Another thing about being old is that
sometimes it can be very hard to express a thought. It’s not that
you can’t think. But it’s as if, in order to express the thought
in a satisfactory way, you had to persuade a whole collection of
fireflies to assume just the right positions in the dark to outline
a shape and then to flicker all at once on command. It’s not easy
to get them all to do what you want. They have very limited
patience and very limited capacity to accept instructions.”
Mr. Oistrin made a mock sour face.
“I realize I’ve just expressed a fairly complicated thought in a
fairly graceful way. What doesn’t show is that I’ve worked on it
for a month. It started when I was up in Vermont in June watching
the fireflies flicker. It was very hard to say what stirred inside
me. Ideas most often come to me in the form of perceptions that
trouble me, as if I were aware that what I was seeing or hearing
actually concealed something else not yet visible or audible. In
any case, I am getting older and older. I’m aware now that
thinking is no very serious business, but a department of mischief
making. I try to approach it in that light.
“I wanted to tell you about my mathematical work. I came here from
Lithuania in the early twenties. I was a sickly teen-ager, but I
had a knack for languages and the public schools had libraries. So
I read. I came with my older sister. She was a firebrand and had
played a real part in the Russian Revolution, but got disgusted with it very quickly. It wasn’t safe for her to stay in Europe, so
we came here to stay with one of my father’s older cousins.
“He was a terrible man and tried to rape my sister. Everyone
involved is dead, so there’s no point in not telling the truth.
These things are nothing new. They’ve been going on forever. It
was a great sorrow. We went to live with another cousin, who
treated us badly in another way. My sister got married and settled
down to just the kind of life you never would have dreamed she
could tolerate.
“I took to physics and to mathematics. I always have thought of
physics and mathematics as the study of the mysteries of the
obvious. The thirties were very bad and the forties were worse.
My parents and all my brothers and sisters who stayed in Europe
were killed. I don’t know the details, but I think I have a good
idea of how it happened. Even though I had a family of my own and
I hadn’t seen them in years, when they died a large part of me died
along with them. I don’t mean to be sentimental about it, but in
many ways it was true. I regretted very much that I had made only
the one trip back. That was in ‘thirty-one. I had no idea what
was coming. No one did.
“Losses are very strange, because they make your heart at once too
crowded and too empty. You have to find a place inside for
everybody you’ve lost and it’s hard to find a place for yourself.
‘ Really, once I was done with all the work on the theory of strings
and harmonic loops and knots in n-dimensions, I saw that what I was really
working on was connection and disconnection. To put it into simple
words, what fascinated me was that to represent disconnection
called for a more complicated space in which to represent a whole
array of potential or virtual connections. To be able to describe
disconnec¨tions, you had to be able to wrap the space you were in in
another kind of space. So there was a dynamic for producing more
and more complicated and encompassing spaces.
“I got to be very interested in the theory of wrappings. When some
artists started wrapping things a few years back, I thought they
were started on the same track. I liked it. They were young
people and there was an exuberance to what they did. I found it
charming that they seemed really to believe that they were just
involved in doing something silly. I don’t think they were aware
of what an abyss might open up under their feet. But perhaps my
life experience had made me only too aware.
“I’m not convinced that more convoluted is better. Certainly our
brains, both in their structure and in their function, illustrate
terribly intricate and complex issues in the theory of wrappings.
But when things get terribly complicated, there is usually
something very simple at work beneath the surface. That simplicity
will give way in its turn to new complexity. It oscillates back and forth. It’s very hard to find a framework within which to view
both poles of the oscillation.
“My wife, Esther, died three years ago. The thing I was always
most grateful to her for was that she would listen to me in the
middle of the night. It didn’t seem to bother her. In fact, she
always said that she enjoyed it. It took me forty years to begin
to believe that. I’d ramble on with barely any idea myself who was
talking or what I was talking about. It was like being a mad
inventor down in a dark workshop where there were occasional
flashes of light. It was the flashes of light that were most
disconcerting. I was often very frightened and often very sad. I
would cry and cry without even knowing what I was crying about.
All I knew was that I had to cry.
“The shocking thing is that life stops. Some people say that it’s
not possible to imagine our own deaths. That may be true, in that
thought and imagination are themselves life. But our deaths are in
us. As you get older, you can feel the presence of your death.
You can feel that there is a term to everything. This heightens
the beauty. Sometimes, I’m very primitive about words. So I can
think, for example, that the theme of mathematics is a maternal
creative developing presence that envelops each and every one of
us, giving us form. I am back now, I know, to questions of
wrapping. But it is very hard to stay away from the preoccupations
of a lifetime.
“I have been among the most fortunate and yet the misfortunes of
our times have had their impact on every breath that I’ve taken.
If there is any hope to be had from understanding, I think it’s in
the nature of understanding our way into our predicament. I have
not done any disciplined scientific work in the past two or three
years. I sit and listen to music and watch the light. I think I
can also say that I enjoy the company of people, even sometimes my
own company, although I am by now such a peculiar multitude that I
hardly know what to call myself. So I’m sure you haven’t got what
you came for. But we never do, do we?”