The dynamo and the spime

Henry Adams writes about his life in the third person. Annoying as this is, a limited omniscience does fit his subject matter: himself, a nineteenth-century, Harvard-educated East Coast aristocrat who sees enough during his travels to decide that people like himself have been applying some outdated metaphors to encompass with language all that they did not understand (pretty much anything to do with science, art, and the creation of the universe). Affecting a distance to write about a younger Henry, Adams might as well be the narrated subject fifty or so years in the future. The device is useful, a sort of deus ex machina that spans time.

One of Henry's loves is a machine. He meets it at the Great Exposition of 1900 in Paris. (See "The Dynamo and the Virgin," bookmarked in the sidebar, for Adams' account.) The dynamo had been around for about 70 years, but people like Henry, who knew scientists but wasn't one, were separated by nearly a generation from a device as intellectual know-how and the device as useable object. Henry does not know where to look to see what "the development or economy of forces" (what true science achieves, according to Francis Bacon according to Adams) has been silently generating until a scientist friend leads Henry through the exhibition--past all the latest, de rigueur paintings that fail to show Henry signs of the time--to where the dynamo is silently (a baby sleeping beside it wouldn't wake, Adams writes) generating electricity.

The dynamo

Henry decides that the "occult mechanism" of the dynamo is to the modern sensibility what the occult mechanism of religious iconography (the cross and images of the virgin and Venus) and art had been to (Western, Christian) man until the break with the past the dynamo and its implications affected. The occult mechanism is the mysterious force that turns cause into effect: whatever happens to turn the dynamo's spinning--mechanical energy (a measurable quantity)--into electricity (less obviously, and to Henry impossibly, quantifiable).


The Virgin:
she wants you to think sex is mysterious

Henry doesn't understand how the dynamo could be just a channel for forces already, mysteriously latent in the device itself. The dynamo creates a current--a potential--but does not create electricity. This break between cause and effect leaves Henry a little muddled, so he tries out a metaphor to reconnect the two. What Henry concludes is, the dynamo mysteriously exercises the same force on the mind that other "symbols of infinity" have exercised in the past--the cross could get people to believe in an occult force (g-o-d), and images of the Virgin and Venus could get people to believe in sex as an occult force, something more than just a cause that leads to an effect (babies). In his muddle, Henry anthropomorphizes: he decides that the dynamo now exercises the power once exercised by the artist, "the creator," over the imagination.



The Birth of Venus


Henry also does a little reverse-anthropomorphizing. He compares the human trying to understand the dynamo to a Branly coherer. To indulge in the metaphor Adams sets up: the human is a signal decoder, a device made of material that, when exposed to the right kind of input (in the case of a coherer, a high enough voltage), changes its composition accordingly. Henry, trying to figure out how this machine works, is a component in an analog circuit, analog being an analogy between cause and effect, on and off. (And hey, look at analog.)

In this circuit, there is no omniscience; or rather, the omniscience comes of the process begun by the desire to understand and involves both the subject (human) and object (machine). It's a process that involves human understanding as a component, or channel. (And to be a word drudge one more time, and possibly to point to the obvious, the root of "omniscience" comes from the same Latin word from which our word "science" comes. It means "to know.") By Adams' metaphor, the attempt to understand the unknown is a process much like the one by which the dynamo uses mechanical energy to produce electricity. Latent potential realized through a channel of intentionality.

All of this from the omniscient Adams, removed from himself by his own devise.

Next: What all of this has to do with Bruce Sterling, spimes, and pet rocks.

index economy

you're building a list
to hold the old securities
lax in confidence but
limping to perform
a new economy trick
hidden rankfile in the basement
your maniple's a flock
in a flattened field
where you plan to build a breakwater
get a little privity
a corner and a market
and finish out the summer.

Car lot (sonnet of the car salesman)

I'm walking in new shoes
Through a very narrow space.
I'm getting closer to the thing I lose
In every window. I see my face.
I learned math underneath a little flag, counting up from nought.
It helps me see what's receding, this adjustment I've learned to make.
I looked inside a microscope, staring down my blind spot.
It didn't offer much direction, just wind inside a bag.
Everywhere's a destination, I keep a little map.
I follow lines to where they're going, I might find someone I know.
At night the road looks like it's ending, she could have set the trap.
I demonstrate with all the lights on, they clap at the end of the show.
Light reflects off every surface, unless you want it black.
Look both ways at all the faces, you might see me looking back.

a gift

an access of disease coiled in a drupe,
a little embolus to empty what it fills.
to make a calm to wake to,
when you do,
under a hung blade.
isn't it ideal-
an axenic fiend for cleaning,
an emetic friend that never speaks
but fills the corners' blanks, grows,
sits on its bone exedra and silences.

birdwatching

a slight after banding your red crest coxcomb?
the head of a roc affixed to a mawk.
you're the object of rearrangement,a migration of intention,
a sport or a rite of spectation.
the lens makes two of you, reflecting its own boundary:
one to praise the other's span,
a scenic mirror.
your audience is you, duplicate.
there's a price for that crest,
the emptor of zero wants the sale.

i'd call but i can't affect the pitch you anwer to.

a kind mother

there it goes, night. she's on.
where does it gentle you to, in a sweep of.
of forgetting.

a planked descent into impression:
a chiton sleep dress lapped on
a camphor blanket's fringe.
that enfolding comfort
of forgetting when.

caliginous. a cave
and a dead myth to fix.
build you in it, make a ship of it,
it'll go till the next atomic effacement
of forgetting who.

mother chlorosis you can swim.
arms, galleys of hands
pulling you to an axis
of forgetting where

a space from a word surrounds.
paper bats carry its dark to you,
an atony telling
of forgetting what.

gallipot into intimacy. that alchemy.
chloropicrin in this water?
kisses, mother, put on your yellow fringed vest, rest.