Real deep surprises

Czech immunologist and poet Miroslav Holub and American writer Rebekah Bloyd travel to Los Angeles theaters and Death Valley, among other places, during an April week in Southern California, 1985. Central to the essay is this idea: what is invisible or is (as yet) undetected is as important as what is known. Holub's method of poetry writing, his teaching at Oberlin College in Ohio and at Pitzer College in California, his ideas on and practices of translation, and his scientific method and discoveries as an immunologist are interwoven with travel and conversation; related moments from years before and years to come expand on these elements, including Holub's role in the discovery that the lymphocyte is the key cell of the entire immune system. Holub's poems "Crush Syndrome," "The Soul," "Creative Writing," "Behind the House," "The Earliest Angels," and "Hemophilia / Los Angeles" are discussed, as are his essays "Science and the Corrosion of the Soul," "On Growing Up: Comments from a Poet-Scientist," "Translation as Literary Lapse," "Whatever the Circumstances," and "The Discovery: An Autopsy" and his monograph The Immunology of Nude Mice. Motifs of angels, the soul, performance, and discovery appear throughout, and writers Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Ted Hughes, and performance artist Laurie Anderson are mentioned. Two performances some 20 years apart by Marta Becket in her Death Valley Junction Amargosa Opera House book end the account.