Well, I should at least provide an answer at this point.
Lev Sergeyevich Termen is better known in America as Leon Theremin, the inventor of the electric musical instrument called the theremin. Clara Reisenberg/Rockmore was the foremost virtuoso of the theremin. There was a documentary about the theremin that came out in the 90s, it's very much worth seeing. Up until the film-maker Steven Martin (no, not that Steve Martin) was working on this documentary in the early 90s, nobody really knew what had become of Leon Theremin, but Martin found him in Russia where he had been returned by the KGB back in the 30s, and where he had spent his life working as an engineer for the Soviet government. (He even developed the original "bugs" used by the KGB!) Martin reintroduced Termen and Reisenberg after about 60 years of separation—and apparently they had been in love at the time of his disappearance.
Lots of theremin info
To explain the rest of my clues: the theremin is played by causing shifts in the electromagnetic fields generated by the instrument literally by waving one's hands in the air. The quote about butterflies is from Clara Rockmore's discussion of theremin technique. Brian Wilson was the leader of the Beach Boys, and used a theremin in their song "Good Vibrations" (actually at the theremin site, it says that it wasn't an actual theremin that was used, just something similar).
Of course now everyone thinks I'm hopelessly obscurantist and will probably never try to answer my questions again...
Math Is Hard said:
Very beautiful language, plover. I admired it, also.
Thanks.
Gokul43201 said:
That is how I interpreted your words - I guess the ambiguity was lost on me.
Looking at it again, the second reading I was seeing now seems a bit strained. I'm not sure why I thought it more reasonable when I made my comment...
Deify...mmmm...wouldn't go that far, but I do think he's something of a genius !
I don't think many people are trying to deny his excellence as a poet. It's more that now that the tenets of modernism under which he was enthroned have become (so to speak) untenable, he can be assessed in the same fashion as other poets rather than as some kind of monolithic presence. In order to have a full understanding of his accomplishments it's also best to view them in relation to other aspects of his life, e.g. his fairly awful quasi-fascist politics, and the dreadful way he dealt with his wife's mental illness. Some
do see these circumstances as reason enough to reject Eliot's achievement—and some Eliot admirers seem to see Ozick's essay as making such a rejection. As for myself, I don't accept either thesis: it's not necessary to approve of someone as a person in order to find valuable things in their art (and I doubt Ozick thinks so either).
But that comes out of random readings - as does most of my knowledge, which is very unstructured - and that's how I can be a bit of an Eliot fan without having read Alfred Prufrock. You're not the first person I've shocked with my random ignorance.
I would describe myself as bemused rather than shocked. It is always the curse of the autodidact to have those who came to their knowledge through more well-worn paths view their collection of knowledge as strangely shaped and organized. I suffer from this myself.
duke!
... but you're not supposed to answer your own question until other folks have given up. 
