waking up -

It’s our nature to study the world around us and create stories that explain it. Are the stories improving? There’s a bit of the ‘blind men and the elephant’ about them – only picture a spinning globe instead of an elephant, and imagine some of the men not blind at all, just empty-handed, wanting to leap on the rotating sphere but instead being tackled and shackled and handcuffed; and others determined to stop the sphere from moving so they can study it; and then a third group surreptitiously trying to rope the ankles of the others while claiming intellectual property rights over the globe.

What stories will they create? Perhaps we haven’t seen real ‘science’ yet, or perhaps we await its second coming.

Time will tell.

If we are to reclaim our power to make our own ‘reality,’ we have to trust that we can.

The present moment finds us disorganized and demoralized. Capital loves to wow us with the ‘wonders of science.’ And doesn’t it just boggle us all? these machines and robotics, computers and electronics, heart surgery and sonograms, satellites and seismographs – ‘solutions’ are being babbled at us from all sides for the climate crisis and the ‘economic meltdown;’ the world’s a mess – a complex cacophony of twaddle – that says, “I just dare you to tackle me.” Is it any wonder we retreat to our rooms, to our humble but straightforward comforts and conveniences?

But these crises made by podrunk, writ in podrunk, crypt by podrunk, will not go away, designed as they are to sink us. And the ‘correction,’ as they like to put it, could be a whirlpool sucking us in, or a grand steed we agree to mount.

I vote for the latter.

To prepare for this ride, to trust, it might be well to begin with first principles, with what as human beings we essentially are.

Essentially, we are beings that like to figure things out and to make things. These are two sides of the same reality – to force their separation is a heinous act.

And since our art is science and our science art, in our new language we must create a word worthy of our layered longing (as Mark Doty termed it.) I agree with Erich Fromm that fundamentally this longing is to be one with the eternal, and that the most useful art / science recognizes this longing.

Grace Paley has said: “though the world cannot be changed by talking to one child at a time, it may at least be known.”

I love listening to children “figuring it out.” What a gift that always is. It’s like a cat vibrating softly in your lap while your fingers touch either side of him, completing a circuit through his body. Sometimes cats seem to know when you need this treatment before you do. Don’t argue with the master electrician.

Tesla seemed destined only for electricity. All his life he recalled this formative episode at age three with his beloved cat, Macak. “It was dusk of the evening and I felt impelled to stroke Macak’s back. Macak’s back was a sheet of light and my hand produced a shower of sparks loud enough to be heard all over the place.” What was this? the young boy wondered to his father. “‘Well,’ [his father] finally remarked, ‘this is nothing but electricity, the same thing you see on the trees in a storm.’ My mother seemed alarmed. ‘Stop playing with the cat,’ she said, ‘he might start a fire.’ I was thinking abstractedly. Is nature a giant cat? If so, who strokes its back? It can only be God, I concluded. …Day after day I asked myself what is electricity and found no answer.” (Jill Jonnes, Empires of Light, p. 90)

Stop for a moment.

What are your questions? the ones that define your life, reveal your path, nudge you forward? the ones you can’t stop thinking about, that continually recur?

When I was a child, words themselves were often my questions. Words like “different” and “bad” and “good.” The idea of ‘ranking’ was an ongoing scientific study. And because children take you at your word, to use a word like “bad” to describe a child can have the effect of a bomb blast.

When my son was small we were addicted to a computer game called “Oids” which required traveling through the limitless immensity of space and freeing slaves, a very compelling mission, I recall. At certain points shots are fired and bloodless annihilation of tiny moving bits of light results. As we honed in on them I’d use the phrase “take care of them” to express the exact opposite of the literal meaning – very confusing.

Children are “figuring-things-out” made manifest, and they tend to be dogged in their determination to find (or create their own) answers – which means the worst puzzles to burden children with are the irresolvable ones, the ones that bury themselves like knife blades under the skin and bore down infinitely forward, like: “Why did he leave me?” Or “Why doesn’t she love me?”

Listen to the very different questions of these two scientists. In the first, the childhood longing of Alan Turing, one of the ancestors who brought us computers, and in the second an unburdened inquiry:

At a picnic in Scotland, to get his father’s approval for being suitably brave and adventurous, he found wild honey for the family by drawing the vector lines along which nearby honeybees were flying, and charting their intersection to find the hive. (David Bodanis, Electric Universe, p. 156)

(Clearly a child who didn’t get the honey.)

When Einstein was a little boy, he was fascinated with how magnets worked. But instead of being teased about it by his parents, they accepted his interest. How did magnets work? There had to be a reason, and that reason had to be based on another reason, and that reason had to be based on another reason, and maybe if you traced it all the way, you’d reach…what would you reach? …Einstein had great confidence that the answers were waiting to be found. (David Bodanis, E=MC2, p. 86-7)

(And clearly a child who did.)

Point being, it’s important to follow your questions. To take them seriously, they’re the earth moving in you. How could anything be more important than that?

I was part of the electrical crew that built the community college where I live. There was a platform erected adjacent to the sidewalk to serve the man-lift, a temporary external elevator that ferried workers and material up to the building’s six floors. If the lift was aloft when we happened to climb onto the platform, we’d summon it and then lean on the handrail waiting for it to descend. Once, a mother and her small child – maybe four or five – passed by on the sidewalk below while I stood leaning, and I saw the boy, clearly fascinated by the noise and activity, pull his mother to a stop so they could watch.

“What are they doing?” he asked.

“They’re making a building,” his mother answered. Skipping maybe half a beat, the child replied: “Why aren’t we helping?”

Good question.

Earlier this year, on KPFA, I listened to an interview with the mother of Rachel Corrie, the young woman who gave her life at age twenty-three in Gaza trying to stop a Palestinian family’s home from being demolished with a tractor. Quoting from the journal the mother kept when her children were small, she said that Rachel at two and a half had asked her, “Is ‘brave’ part of growing up?”

Questions open doors to paths. As a child, Barack Obama made a game of guessing the captions of photographs he saw. Waiting for his mother in an embassy library in Djakarta at age nine he came across a photo of a man with a “strange, unnatural pallor, as if blood had been drawn from the flesh.” He guessed the man was sick, “a radiation victim.” But, no, the man, he read, had actually paid for a chemical treatment to lighten his skin, in order “to pass himself off as a white man.”

I felt my face and neck get hot. My stomach knotted; the type began to blur on the page. Did my mother know about this? What about her boss – why was he so calm, reading through his reports a few feet down the hall? I had a desperate urge to jump out of my seat, to show them what I had learned, to demand some explanation or assurance. But something held me back. As in a dream, I had no voice for my newfound fear. By the time my mother came to take me home, my face wore a smile and the magazines were back in their proper place. The room, the air, was quiet as before. (Dreams From My Father, p. 30)

Later, back at home:

I went into the bathroom and stood in front of the mirror with all my senses and limbs seemingly intact, looking as I had always looked, and wondered if something was wrong with me. The alternative seemed no less frightening – that the adults around me lived in the midst of madness. (p. 51-2)

Think of your own explorations of science or art as a child – the first time you watched iron filings on paper align themselves with magnetic fields; the acrobatics of squirrels, the drift of clouds, the web-building of spiders, waves chasing each other to shore, new life sprouting. Or maybe you studied hummingbirds, or constellations of stars, or the minute striations of a leaf.

Did you ask yourself why a bubble flies, water boils or things die?

Or was your puzzle the world of humans? The man passed out on the street that nobody seemed to see; children taunting each other; parents screaming, a child too sad or lonely to speak?

Does swallowed injustice rise like bile?

Science is what we’re about, dude! How have we been misled to believe otherwise? All the interlocking cons – what a muddle! Some enterprising housekeeper somewhere should do us all a favor and straighten it out, but I think the result would be a Medusa’s head – best bury the odoriferous mess in the backyard and move on.

So what should we call this con? the “science-you’re-not” con? How much does it hold us back? How quickly will it dissolve under pressure of biological necessity? We’ll see.

What I do know is that it is a con. Disempowerment can also be like a wind that knows no borders. It can start in your work life and blow through your family life and school life and spiritual life and community life and artistic / scientific life. Being told you’re a slave is a message that tends to pollute every part of you.

It’s actually a fairly recent phenomenon, this generalized surrender of our power. One of my neighbors recalls that when she was six or seven, back in the rural Arkansas of 1930 or ’31, she and her two brothers took it upon themselves to heal an ailing pig, Bessie.

Buddy [the brother two years older] was rubbing Bessie, feeling sorry for her. He said, “Let’s get some poke salad root!” So we talked Leon [the brother four years older] into doing it. We made a fire and dug up some poke salad root. Put it in the pot. Boiled it. Got it strong. When it was cool, we put a little black drawf [a powder that looks like pepper] in it and put it in the trough. No, it was “three sixes,” a bottle medicine, with the poke salad water. Put a little corn in it. Bessie drank it. Next week we cooked Bessie corn with a little bit of lye to clean her out. She was so slick and black! That was the prettiest pig. Talk about fat! Then Bessie started chewing on Mama’s dress and Mama said, “I thought Bessie was sick!” She was so glad that Bessie was OK cuz that was the only hog we had on the lot.

The tales Mrs. Trotter tells of roaming the woods as a six year-old with her brothers to catch rabbits, facing down rattlesnakes at age ten, making wagon-wheels from tree stumps, hiding an ice-pick in her bosoms as a young woman…well, it all makes me feel kinda thin, kinda pared down and minimalized. It’s like another planet, Mrs. Trotter’s mind.

But traveling there is a reminder of all we are, all that’s expressed through us, and is there still – nature in us – waiting to be attended to and embodied again.

Reducing our experience of the world to taking orders was not only a con to keep most of us slaves, it created a ladder and a legend to woo a few into complicity.

Podrunks need our ideas, but they also fear them.

Because they feed on our creativity while suppressing it, podrunks have to walk a fine line. How gather enough ideas from the populace, how create enough non-threatening ‘insider-outsiders,’ to inject a little life into a fundamentally death-defined system?

For a system that must always ‘grow’ – i.e. must present the face of ‘exponential increases in the rate of profit’ – ‘innovation,’ or the appearance of it, is critical.

How to generate ‘new’ toys, ‘new’ stuff, ‘new’ ‘products,’ fast enough to maintain the illusion of ‘growth?’ What quality education, and how much, to allow? How guarantee that enough ‘talent’ will be fatted to insure meat over the long, cold winters of stagnant wages and stupefying boredom for the vast majority?

Divisions within podrunk ranks on this matter can never be fully resolved as they reflect different interests and fundamental disagreements on strategy. There are those within capital that believe their own mythology about free markets and meritocracies; and, among these, others that insist on the compatibility of “free market” myths with the rhetoric of democracy.

But the podrunks that have recently prevailed – at least in terms of controlling the state – are the “realists,” the hard-line neocons like Cheney and Rove, who dominate in these debates precisely because they have no principles, nothing to guide their actions other than the injunction: Win!

Theirs is a mentality locked in on itself. This mind is a room of mirrors, a worldview that divides what it sees into “me” and “not-me,” into “what benefits me” and “what doesn’t benefit me.” It cannot tend gardens – it can only raid. And though it may acknowledge the existence of the ones who do tend, those who innovate and create, it does not respect creation. Rather, the artistic spirit is seen as ‘weak’ to the degree that it is generous and inclusive.

And that which is ‘weak,’ in this way of seeing, may be legitimately victimized, its creations seized and consumed, as such usage – forcing the ‘weak’ to serve the greater glory of the ‘master architect’, the ‘brains of the operation’ – by their lights, ‘redeems’ the victims.

But this piratic scavenger mindset (“let’s look around for what’s available to ‘make use of’”) is walled in by its own contempt. It imagines that, with the entire globe as its candy store, it can steal what it needs, and that cultivation is for the ‘lessers’ who must use their hands.

They will never hesitate (after all, hesitation itself is ‘weak’) to ruthlessly suppress general education levels, the speculative imagination. If it needs new stuff it can always find it, they tell themselves, out there somewhere. “Money can buy anything.” But the game, their game, the whole game, the Big Con, depends on our not waking up. This, then, is their most fundamental sine qua non.

Immanuel Wallerstein has argued that their crude lack of nuance has actually accelerated the demise of capitalism; and recent events – the financial meltdown – bear him out. This matter of what comes next and how to get there will be the main focus of the chapter “The Plan,” but the point for the purposes of this discussion is that “science,” “invention,” “art,” can never be fully embraced by the current system, because true innovation is inherently revolutionary; and that true innovation, in class societies, blossoms despite – despite ruthless repression in the majority. The podrunks feel they must control it precisely because it can’t be controlled, will inevitably get “out of hand,” escape established bounds and threaten them, the status quo – those folks with the privileged positions that free them from having to work while stroking their egos with the illusion of mastery.

So, feeding on what it fears (creativity / innovation) forces the more ‘liberal’ faction of capital into its own black widow dance: how stroke the great belly of the people without our noticing how vulnerable they are. Capital is by definition, by necessity, duplicitous. That big, wide open mouth that always wants more can never state plainly what it wants: slaves, resources, cannon fodder – can never admit that what it wants most is obedience and suppressed intelligence in the majority.

Modern capitalism needs men who co-operate smoothly and in large numbers; who want to consume more and more; and whose tastes are standardized and can be easily influenced and anticipated. It needs men who feel free and independent, not subject to any authority or principle or conscience – yet willing to be commanded, to do what is expected of them, to fit into the social machine without friction; who can be guided without force, led without leaders, prompted without aim – except the one to make good, to be on the move, to function, to go ahead. (Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving, p. 77)

Clandestinely, because they can never be open about their true aims, they impose guidelines and boundaries – rules, regs, and rhetoric – that police / supervise, access to knowledge and information. They stir up the confused among the populace with the words charged according to the current conditioning we’re being programmed with (they hope): “Socialist!” “Terrorist!” “Liberal!” – whatever.

The media, mechanization and the military are the front lines.

We must be media-savvy to consume the toys, yet not so savvy that we can use them against the ‘masters.’ They need technicians and engineers to run the systems, but these techies and builders must accept control and be taught to renounce their self-directed power.

We must learn how to destabilize “enemy-nations,” but that applied intelligence must never be applied to the ‘puppeteers.’

We must be taught the ‘art’ of manipulation without our seeing that it is we, the wind from below, that are in fact the targets.

We’ve looked at these dynamics to a degree in talking about the role of the state, but in what follows we’ll examine the false face of philosophy and how it feeds the capitalist con, their counterfeit claim that they are the source of ‘science’ and ‘invention.’

Because equal access to the legacies of our ancestors would end podrunk rule, they encourage philosophers and philosophies that elevate “Rational Thought” – which they equate with “science” – to the status of a god. They then do all they can to make communion with the ancestors a commodity priced beyond the reach of the majority, degrading the educational commons such that we can never believe ourselves capable of possessing “science” or “invention,” and then sit back and enjoy the confusion and demoralization that results.

Philosophy has always presented itself as a cool drink of water, an opportunity to escape the grunge and grime of earthy matters (the manual labor of reproducing our world day after day), and dip into the purifying waters of pure, that is to say, abstract, ‘Thought.’ That we like to play this game of ‘pure,’ abstract ‘Thought,’ would be (and will be) fine if everyone could play and if it wasn’t used as a weapon against the majority. But if everyone played that would defeat the purpose, so it’s a bit of a counterfeit suggestion.

As we look into the face of this con, we find, as with everything promoted by the podrunks to reinforce the illusion of rule, that the truth of it is the inverse of what we’re told.

This pool isn’t clean or pure but rather poisoned. The more you drink of it the poorer you become.

Our ‘collective knowledge-base’ – the ancestors combined with living creativity – is wealth.

‘Rational Thought’ is the opposite of wealth. Yet to make matters confusing and keep us disempowered, it’s promoted as a sine qua non, * that from which all else comes. And since, in the story they like to tell us, the one they want us to believe, we commoners don’t possess this critical tool called ‘Rational Thought,’ we are, again, as usual, dependent on them if we want to receive the benefits of ‘their’ magic.

“What has the economist to do with inventiveness? Have not all inventions fallen into his lap without any effort on his part? Has one of them cost him anything?”

The “science-you’re-not” con is a compatriot of the “commodity-con,” which is a compatriot of the “master-slave” con, which is a compatriot of the “mastering-nature” con – and they’re all part of the “capitalist-con.” If you agree to objectify ‘nature’ and relegate whole groups of people to ‘nature,’ we’ll let you call yourself a master and let you pretend to rule.

In the “capitalist con,” you’re either ruler or ruled, master or slave, eater or eaten – and if you find yourself in the latter categories, it’s because you deserve it (this is the “meritocracy-con.”)

And, if you find yourself in the latter categories, you’re by definition not a “thinker,” you are the inert matter on which the thinker unleashes his “Thought.”

“Thought,” or “Abstract Thought,” as it’s more affectionately known, must be bowed down to and worshipped, or so the story goes, because it’s brought us all that cool stuff I mentioned earlier. So, obviously, we can’t rule ourselves because only the Thinkers have this critical capacity upon which our very lives depend. So, let’s do the best we can with our slave status, not complain, and let the Thinkers get on with making our world “safer,” our lives “better,” our brains emptier and our dreams for ourselves moot.

But, like the others, it’s a tricky con to maintain and manage over the long term.

‘Abstract Thought’ is quite different from ‘thought.’ (Again, since we don’t yet have our own language we have to make do.) It’s important to be clear on this point because the first is created by the wind from above, while the second fuels the wind from below. One is a dream – the other, reality. One the West made a deity (“Logos”), after divorcing ‘it’ from nature; the other is communion with the eternal, the universe, the ancestors, the ‘One.’ One is deeply hierarchical and coercive, the other, anti-authoritarian and generous. One is the rationalization for class society, and the other our bankroll for funding the future.

In essence, one is the negation of nature, while the other is nature expressing itself.

Erich Fromm has said that to achieve mastery in an art (the broad category within which “science” resides) one must practice “discipline, concentration and patience throughout every phase of [your] life.”* And since “art” is what distinguishes our species, to become a fully inducted, card-carrying member, it’s important that we not forsake our innate gifts, and that we demand the right to develop them in ourselves.

So, taking Fromm’s advice, we each must become a disciple, listen or attend deeply, and we must suspend the urge to impose external timetables so that the lesson or insight that we’re listening for can reveal itself however it must, on its own terms.

Let’s think about that for a second, and about our lives as workers.

OK, then. Right. These are obviously not liberties allowed the vast majority of us in our jobs. To even suggest trying to claim them is either laughable or malicious. But, just for a laugh, try to imagine it, try to imagine practicing self-development, or the development of our collective knowledge-base, at work.

There was a period in Tesla’s life, of about a year, after he’d indignantly quit his job at Thomas Edison’s company because Edison royally fucked him – treatment he never got used to despite the frequency of its occurrence – when he had to dig ditches to survive. Imagine our hero, convincing one of his comrades to set aside his shovel for a lesson in electricity. Or, picture him pulling out a text on his break (assuming he was allowed a break, which is doubtful), and getting so engrossed time just slipped away.

Or imagine yourself, a student of the comedic arts, reduced by circumstance to performing your stand-up comedy routines for the customers in a supermarket checkout line as you total their bills. Or perhaps you love computer-generated special.effects and you’re a manager at the post office, is there a way you could bring your love to work with you? Or what if you’re a jazz pianist, forced to repair copying machines? Or you love words and a sentence occurs, fleetingly, while you’re above the ceiling under pressure to finish that conduit run before the boss comes back to check on you?

Well that comic is gone, I was sorry to see, though his co-workers said they found his constant riffing annoying. The CG-aficionado was passing around fantasies of doing contract work for Pixar when I encountered him on a short-call. The jazz pianist might well be out there doing it, but if so, I’d bet he’s bemoaning the lost time, the cost of his best years weighing on him. And as for me, if my body hadn’t ‘failed’ me, would I be writing these words?

I’d tried many times to write while doing wage work and it just never happened. Somehow our dreams slip away from us, our art dissolves. Usually, by the time our bodies give out our art has long since been abandoned.

Let’s stop pretending that this deal is OK. It’s not – not for ourselves, not for our children. We need a better deal, or rather, an end to deals.

I believe Nikola Tesla is a spiritual guide for this effort – an important one among many * – important because he’s a bridge between the dead-end of capitalism and the open vistas of what comes next. Saying this is not to minimize the importance of indigenous spiritual guides like Rolling Thunder and Black Elk – their power and wisdom are incontestable. But we need Nikola because the deeply bored misconceptions about invention have been deeply paralyzing – the “mind-worship” fetish is a voracious tic – and it’s gonna take some serious digging from an unimpeachable source to get them out.

I am credited with being one of the hardest workers and perhaps I am, if thought is the equivalent of labour, for I have devoted to it almost all of my waking hours. But if work is interpreted to be a definite performance in a specified time according to a rigid rule, then I may be the worst of idlers.
Every effort under compulsion demands a sacrifice of life-energy. I never paid such a price. On the contrary, I have thrived on my thoughts. (Autobiography, p. 9)

The essence of science / art / invention – is freedom. But he’s not restrictive in his injunction against force; “every effort”, he says, “under compulsion, demands a sacrifice of life-energy.” But the ‘science’ he inherited was nothing if not fundamentally about force – forcing submission, isolation, separation, reduction, “controlled conditions,” categorization.

Nikola Tesla’s method was quite different.

In my boyhood I suffered from a peculiar affliction due to the appearance of images, often accompanied by strong flashes of light, which marred the sight of real objects and interfered with my thoughts and action. They were pictures of things and scenes which I had really seen, never of those imagined. When a word was spoken to me the image of the object it designated would present itself vividly to my vision and sometimes I was quite unable to distinguish whether what I saw was tangible or not…I soon discovered that my best comfort was attained if I simply went on in my vision further and further, getting new impressions all the time, and so I began to travel; when alone, I would start on my journeys – see new places, cities and countries; live there, meet people and make friendships and acquaintances and, however unbelievable, it is a fact that they were just as dear to me as those in actual life, and not a bit less intense in their manifestations. This I did constantly until I was about seventeen, when my thoughts turned seriously to invention. Then I observed to my delight that I could visualize with the greatest facility. I needed no models, drawings or experiments. I could picture them all as real in my mind. Thus I have been led unconsciously to evolve what I consider a new method of materializing inventive concepts and ideas, which is radially opposite to the purely experimental and is in my opinion ever so much more expeditious and efficient. (Autobiography, p. 12-13)

Many apparently inexplicable things happened to Nikola Tesla, and because he is a true scientist, a true artist, a true lover of life, he made no attempt to edit them out of his story. On the contrary, his science deepened precisely because he owned / honored ‘mystery.’

Probably such experiences are commoner than we know because we’ve been kept so divided from each other. I’ve experienced floating up to the ceiling and looking down on my body lying on the bed. In reading Firebird, I discovered that this had happened to Mark Doty as a child as well. One such incident occurred after he was forced to get a haircut:

I take off my clothes and under the covers I am a big shorn baby, a naked ugly boy, and I try to do what I do sometimes, a kind of spiritual exercise. I pay attention to each part of my body starting at my toes, and I tell it to relax, to let go. By the time I’m up to my chest I am moving into some other state of mind, dreamy, loosened. …I am relinquishing, am nothing but relinquishment…if I’m lucky I can begin to leave my body altogether…now I can cut free of it altogether, and I feel myself lift from myself, start to float up out of the confines of my skin, unmoored, buoyant. I am moving toward the bedroom ceiling, and soon I am face-to-face with it, not my flesh-and-blood face but my soul-face. I’m weightless, a shadow, uncapturable in my phantom form. And then I turn, spirit-body that I am, to look back at my bed, at that abandoned boy empty there, his pale scalp glowing in the twilight (p. 143)

But I think we can agree that Nikola’s ability to see from above was astonishing. I think these gifts come from the ancestors, the great communal mind, in us. When Nikola Tesla was a child:

In the school room there were a few mechanical models which interested me and turned my attention to water turbines. I constructed many of these and found great pleasure in operating them. How extraordinary was my life an incident may illustrate. My uncle had no use for this kind of pastime and more than once rebuked me. I was fascinated by a description of Niagara Falls I had perused, and pictured in my imagination a big wheel run by the falls. I told my uncle that I would go to America and carry out this scheme. Thirty years later I carried my ideas out at Niagara and marveled at the unfathomable mystery of the mind. (Autobiography, p. 22)

You can see photos of his accomplishment in Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes. She writes:

In fact, Tesla had devised something far more original than a water wheel…Finally, on August 26, 1895, almost a year later than predicted by the engineering journals, Niagara power was harnessed for full-time commercial use…The New York Times noted in its small story buried back on the ninth page, “The power from the power house is sent over copper cables laid in a conduit to the aluminum works [the first customer of Niagara power.] The current sent is an alternating one, and before it can be used in the making of aluminum it must be transformed to a direct current. This is done by passing through four of the largest rotary transformers ever built. These are 2,100 horsepower each, and three of them are running. Everything was found to work perfectly and great satisfaction was expressed by the officers.” (Empires of Light, p. 295, 319-320)

Science.fiction writer H.G. Wells wrote at the time:

These dynamos and turbines of the Niagara Falls Power Company impressed me far more profoundly than the Cave of the Winds; are indeed, to my mind, greater and more beautiful than accidental eddying of air beside a downpour. They are will made visible, thought translated into easy and commanding things. They are clean, noiseless, starkly powerful. All the clatter and tumult of the early age of machinery is past and gone here; there is no smoke, no coal grit, no dirt at all. The wheel pit into which one descends has an almost cloistered quiet about its softly humming turbines. These are altogether noble masses of machinery, huge black slumbering monsters, great sleeping tops that engineer irresistible forces in their sleep…A man goes to and fro quietly in the long, clean hall of the dynamos. There is no clangor, no racket…All these great things are as silent, as wonderfully made, as the heart in a living body, and stouter and stronger than that…I fell into a daydream of the coming power of men, and how that power may be used by them. (quoted in Empires of Light, p. 323)

But Tesla’s daydreams were not about “the coming power of men.” He dreamed about the coming unity of men:

…The earth was found to be, literally, alive with electrical vibrations…this planet despite its vast extent, behaved like a conductor of limited dimensions… The results attained by me have made my scheme of intelligence transmission, for which the name of “World Telegraphy” has been suggested, easily realizable. It constitutes…a radical and fruitful departure from what have been done heretofore…it will add materially to general safety, comfort and convenience, and maintenance of peaceful relations. It involves the employment of a number of plants, all of which are capable of transmitting individualized signals to the uttermost confines of the earth. Each of them will be preferably located near some important center of civilization and the news it receives through any channel will be flashed to all points of the globe. A cheap and simple device, which might be carried in ones pocket, may then be set up somewhere on sea or land, and it will record the world’s news or such special messages as may be intended for it. Thus the entire earth will be converted into a huge brain, as it were, capable of response in every one of its parts. Since a single plant of but one hundred horsepower can operate hundreds of millions of instruments, the system will have a virtually infinite working capacity, and it must needs immensely facilitate and cheapen the transmission of intelligence. (Nikola Tesla, Collected Papers, Vol. 2, p. A-153 – A-158)

Tesla had devised a means for the wireless transmission of power, not to enrich a few, but to bring the world together.

With its full development and a perfect system of wireless transmission of the energy to any distance man will be able to solve all the problems of material existence. Distance, which is the chief impediment to human progress, will be completely annihilated in thought, word and action. Humanity will be united, wars will be made impossible and peace will reign supreme. (Nikola Tesla, Collected Papers, Vol. 2, A-184)

Reading Tesla from the perspective of an elapsed hundred years – a hundred years down a very dreary and dangerous road that the podrunks pitted and landmined for us – makes me cry. What a rare jewel he is, so of course he died penniless, that goes without saying. He was mocked, often, in his day, for his absence of avarice. He gave away his patents to George Westinghouse because he believed Westinghouse would make sure the wider public benefited. (Pause while all sigh and emit a grim chuckle.) He moved lightly among the world of things and was never confused about what “wealth” was and what it wasn’t. I think his mother made sure he got the “honey.” Erich Fromm explains ‘honey’:

Affirmation of the child’s life has two aspects; one is the care and responsibility absolutely necessary for the preservation of the child’s life and his growth. The other aspect goes further than mere preservation. It is the attitude which instills in the child a love for living, which gives him the feeling: it is good to be alive, it is good to be a little boy or girl, it is good to be on this earth! …Milk is the symbol of the first aspect of love, that of care and affirmation. Honey symbolizes the sweetness of life, the love for it and the happiness in being alive. Most mothers are capable of giving “milk,” but only a minority of giving “honey” too. In order to be able to give honey, a mother must not only be a “good mother,” but a happy person – and this aim is not achieved by many. The effect on the child can hardly be exaggerated. Mother’s love for life is as infectious as her anxiety is. Both attitudes have a deep effect on the child’s whole personality; one can distinguish, indeed, among children – and adults – those who got only “milk” and those who got “milk and honey.” (The Art of Loving, p. 45)

If the essence of science / art / invention – is freedom, might not “a love for living” be an asset? Would not a feeling of “happiness in being alive” pull you more immediately into the ‘all of it’ that reveals the synergies and interconnections on which innovation feeds?

And wouldn’t an exuberant sense “that it is good to be on this earth!” further an imaginative ability to see from above, to see phenomena and forces not in isolation but in interdependency?

Every living thing is an engine geared to the wheelwork of the universe. Though seemingly affected only by its immediate surrounding, the sphere of external influence extends to infinite distance. There is no constellation or nebula, no sun or planet, in all the depths of limitless space, no passing wanderer of the starry heavens, that does not exercise some control over its destiny – not in the vague and delusive sense of astrology, but in the rigid and positive meaning of physical science.
More than this can be said. There is no thing endowed with life – from man, who is enslaving the elements, to the numblest creature – in all this world that does not sway it in turn. Whatever action is born from force, though it be infinitesimal, the cosmic balance is upset and universal motion results. (Nikola Tesla, Collected Papers, Vol. 2, p. A-172)

Tesla believed that the walls between disciplines would eventually fall, because nature is a whole that encourages wholes. He once said that it was a great day when:

The artist felt the desire of becoming a physician, an electrician, an engineer or mechanician or – whatnot – a mathematician or a financier; for it was he who wrought all these wonders and grandeur we are witnessing. It was he who abolished that small, pedantic, narrow-grooved school teaching which made of an aspiring student a galley-slave, and he who allowed freedom in the choice of subject of study according to one’s pleasure and inclination, and so facilitated development…men who look far above earthly things, whose banner is Excelsior! Gentlemen, let us honor the artist, let us thank him, let us drink his health! (Nikola Tesla, Collected Papers, Vol. 2, A-102-3)

Science is not the province of the few. If the white-jackets have learned a few things – bravo – but their true fulfillment will be when they share what they’ve learned – not just with each other, but with the newly-born babies and the slightly-worn elders, and when they listen to them, and learn from them, in turn.

Continue to "The Two Winds" - Part 5

* Which literally means: “without which, not.”

* The Art of Loving, p. 100.

* To those who resist with love, my gratitude is offered on the last page – just a small cross-section of all the numberless heroic lovers of life, known and unknown.

Nascence to End Work

waking up -

Chapter II: The Two Winds (Part 4)

Waking Up: Freeing Ourselves From Work