Christensen's "Alphabet"

At the outset of reading Inger Christensen’s “Alphabet” is a weird piece, and I’m not sure whether I should classify it as a poem, or a set of prose poems, or what. But, where it starts off sparsely-worded and a little slow, it soon begins to incorporate mythology and religion, ideas more intangible than the blackberries and cicadas of the first three sections. In 9, she writes that Icarus exists: “Icarus wrapped in the melting wax / wings exists, Icarus pale as a corpse / in street clothes… Icarus-children white as lambs / in greylight, indeed they will exist” and begins the next stanza with, “we will exist”. (I feel like it’s a safe assumption we are all mostly familiar with the myth of Daedalus and Icarus.) Amid the biblical references, she keeps returning to this equation: Icarus has and does and will exist, in all tenses, as we do. But then she soon returns to concrete subjects of existence.

It isn’t until section 10 that she really gives us any footing. In 10, she writes that “no one in / this gossamer summer, no one comprehends that / early fall exists,” seeming to make the argument that we forget the intensity of things that are no longer present. Then the piece really starts to hit its most striking about halfway through the section, with the line, “atom bombs exist” followed by dates and the numbers of dead and wounded in the 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The theme continues about 2/3 of the way through the next section, with the lines:

hydrogen bombs exist a plea to die

and then, after some time talking about ordinary deaths in ordinary lives, she returns to talking about the bombs. She mentions “a plea” that life could continue

without it ever happening that any of all 

the cruel experiments
that the Teller group performed on Eniwetok where the waves of the
Pacific raged in fury, or any of all the experiments that 

the Sakharov group performed on Novaya Zemlya where the waves of the Arctic Ocean raged in fury without these
experiments or those of the British French 

Chinese ever reaching real real- isation here where we still live in a
real real world as opposed to the unreality of
Novaya Zemlya and Eniwetok…

In case you’re unfamiliar with the references: The experiments she’s referring to here are those of hydrogen bomb tests during the high Cold War. Eniwetok is an island in the South Pacific where Edward Teller, the conceptual designer of the hydrogen bomb, and his group tested 67 bombs from 1946 to 1958 for the United States military, and in November of 1952, it was there that they dropped “Ivy Mike”—the world’s first thermonuclear bomb, which had a force of something like 800 Hiroshimas. The island is still covered with a concrete dome today, to keep the radioactive soil contained. Novaya Zemlya has a parallel story: Andrey Sakharov and his group tested Soviet hydrogen bombs at this area in the Arctic Ocean. It was there that in 1961 they tested the Tsar Bomb, the most powerful hydrogen bomb ever made, more than five times as powerful as Ivy Mike.

So, back to Christensen. With her early focus on mythology both biblical and classical, particularly the myth of Icarus, and her later, intensive focus on the recent military history of bombs, it seems to me like she is making the argument that Icarus “will exist” in us, as long as we continue performing these experiments, flying ever closer to the sun and coming ever closer to creating our own automatic, radioactive suns. 

What do you think? Is she making the case that we are creating our own downfall, just built from hydrogen instead of wax? Or is she arguing something else? Or are these existences—mythological and mechanical—even related at all?