essays, poems, cartoons – since 2007
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Reflecting yesterday afternoon on my morning post, “On the Coast Starlight,” in which I suggested thought, if we are to try to compare it to anything, seems more bird-like than the train of thought first found in Thomas Hobbes’s 1651 “Leviathan,” I thought, to force thought onto a track where ideas are coupled one after another in forward motion toward some predetermined destination results from printing press technology, as McLuhan has shown. Thinking like a train does produce advantages, but the linear notion of thought may put us in a cage. Then it came to me that a reader might have commented that I seem birdbrained.
Since I’ve had comments and likes off for recent posts, no such reader was able to suggest it, so I’ve come forward to suggest it myself. (Readers intent on comment, like, or dislike, btw, will find an email address at the bottom of the Toad’s About page.)
But why we have come to disvalue flightiness to the extent we have, I’m not sure. Birdbrain, according to Google Ngram, is a word product of the second half of the 20th Century, while bird-witted has a more storied past, with interesting spikes of usage in both the 1720s and the 1820s.
I readily agree that my brain seems to be more bird-like than train-like. But upon discussion with Susan, she informs me that only the hummingbird is able to fly backward. Trains, of course, can travel forward or backward, but not at the same time. Yes, but trains can’t leave the track (except to switch to another track), and two trains running in opposite directions on the same track – well, in a quantum train world, perhaps a train may indeed run forward and backward at the same time. In any case, the intelligence of birds is not in question. The question is whether to think like a bird offers the human any advantage over thinking like a train. But we are only speaking to the metaphors, of course, because of course trains don’t actually think at all, and people don’t and can’t and will never think like birds any more than they’ll be able to fly like a bird.
It’s probable that in the era of trains, people did think more like trains than bird-like, while before artificial locomotion was mass produced, people thought more like other animals think. Now, people no doubt think more like automobiles. And we might update Hobbes to suggest an automobile of imagination.
The poet Marianne Moore, in her poem “Bird-witted,” leaves no doubt that to think like a bird is to think like a human:
parent darting down, nerved by what chills
the blood, and by hope rewarded -
of toil - since nothing fills
squeaking unfed
mouths, wages deadly combat,
and half kills
with bayonet beak and
cruel wings, the
intellectual cautious-
ly creeping cat.
We climbed aboard the Coast Starlight in Portland, bound for Los Angeles, 24 train-ride hours away, but we stopped unexpectedly somewhere up in the Cascades southeast of Eugene. Snow was falling. In those days, you could walk between the cars and open the top of the dutch door for some fresh air. The air was raw and cold, the woods dark, and the smell as strong as a cigar of pine sap. The tracks followed rivers, valleys, passes, built along paths of least resistance. It’s possible now to consider the railroad a naive form of travel.
When we speak of losing our train of thought, we are comparing thinking to a train, I suppose to indicate how one thought after another coupled together are all headed in the same direction, or should be, if the logic holds water, but thought does not move like a train, the engine a thesis statement, the coal car fuel of claims, the cars one example after another, all following the same track of thought, the dining car full of opposing arguments, the caboose a bright red conclusion.
News travelled slowly on trains in those days. Long and longer minutes passed without anyone new coming into our car. Our conductor reappeared and explained we were stopped because a freight train ahead of us had derailed. At first, it wasn’t clear how long we would be delayed. Equipment to reposition the freight train was en route to the wreck. Minutes, as it turned out, became, as they always do, hours. The conductor came through our car again to announce we would all be treated to a free dinner in the dining car. There was also a club car where we could hang out while waiting.
Thought, if it moves at all, is more like the flight of a bird. But Thomas Hobbes, in his 1651 book, “Leviathan”, put us on the track of thinking of thought as a train, to wit:
“Of the Consequence or TRAYNE of Imaginations. BY Consequence, or TRAYNE of Thoughts, I understand that succession of one Thought to another, which is called (to distinguish it from Discourse in words) Mentall Discourse. When a man thinketh on any thing whatsoever, His next Thought after, is not altogether so casuall as it seems to be. Not every Thought to every Thought sueceeds indifferently. But as wee have no Imagination, whereof we have not formerly had Sense, in whole, or in parts; so we have no Transition from one Imagination to another, whereof we never had the like before in our Senses. The reason whereof is this. All Fancies are Motions within us, reliques of those made in the Sense: And those motions that immediately succeeded one another in the sense, continue also together after Sense: In so much as the former comming again to take place, and be predominant, the later followeth, by coherence of the matter moved, in such manner, as water upon a plain Table is drawn which way any one part of it is guided by the finger. But because in sense, to one and the same thing perceived, sometimes one thing, some times another succeedeth, it comes to passe in time, thatjn the Imagining of any thing, there is no certainty what we shall Imagine next; Onely this is certain, it shall be something that succeeded the same before, at one time or another.”
I ordered a salmon steak and a glass of red wine. I don’t remember what Susan ordered, but since she dislikes fish, I suppose she might have had a filet mignon with a glass of white wine. We were not in a hurry. Had we been in a hurry, we would not have taken the train in the first place.
By the time we pulled into the station at Santa Barbara, the train was five hours behind schedule. Another, new conductor had come aboard in San Louis Obispo. A group of passengers who had been on board even longer than us, having boarded in Seattle, were told to wait at the door at the end of our car. It was noted this door had not previously been used at any of our stops; nevertheless, our new conductor insisted the group wait at this door. An anxious wait ensued. The door did not open. The train began to move. The group would have to travel with us all the way to Los Angeles, where Amtrak would put them on a bus which would drive them back to Santa Barbara.
Inventions are usually a response to a problem. A problem is something that limits or impairs access to needs, wants, or values. An invention solves the problem, granting or improving access. An invention might be a machine, an idea, or a new value. Inventions alter our environment and often present side effects, good or bad, that may or may not have anything to do with the original problem, and may or may not have been anticipated. Inventions can create new problems, and changes in our environment can change us, often in unexpected ways, change our response to our environment, change us externally or internally, physically, mentally, or emotionally, change our behavior and the way we think of ourselves. Inventions can change culture and change the direction of societal development. Sometimes, as in the case of synthetic biology, an invention takes on “A Life of Its Own” (Michael Specter, New Yorker, 28 September 2009). This “life of its own” we might call implications. Invention shares with experiment, discovery, and creation what it means to be human.
As machines, inventions have a shelf life, for they are subject to entropy, wear and tear, as well as obsolescence created by changes in the environment or by other inventions. It was Socrates, in Plato’s Republic, talking about the creation of the State (which begins as an idea), who said, “…the true creator is necessity, who is the mother of our invention” (Jowett, V-128, Book II, p. 60). What happens to the old machines when we no longer perceive the necessity? And if inventions are a response to a problem, what problem did the automobile solve?
Imagine life today without the automobile – not that you simply give up your car, but that the automobile was never invented.
According to Google Patents, the oldest patent using the word Automobile was filed in 1809, but not issued until 1902. The patent, by J. Ledwinka, “subject of the Emperor of Austria-Hungary,” but, “residing in Chicago,” was a design allowing for the independent functioning of the four wheels of the carriage. The patent improves the efficiency of the automobile, making it easier to operate. The terms Motor-car and Auto-car will fetch other, equally old patents from Google Patents.
The word “automobile” suggests a self-moving vehicle. A US patent for L. Bollee, of France, providing improvements for a “self-propelling vehicle,” was filed in 1896 and issued in 1898. This patent involves improvements to “…five principal parts: first, the motor; second, the frame; third, the transmission gear; fourth, the brake; and, fifth, the mechanism for engaging and disengaging the motor, for changing the speed of the vehicle, and for actuating the brake.” There’s no mention of a radio or radar detector.
Many of the patents surrounding automobiles suggest that most patents are inventions of improvement. The automobile itself, as an invention, isn’t a new machine as much as an improvement on older machines. The idea of a wheeled vehicle is very old, and may be said to leverage the underlying general principle of the circle, its latent energy (as Fuller’s piano top life preserver illustrates the underlying general principle of flotation, and his magic log illustrates the underlying general principle of the fulcrum, or leverage). Humanity’s first observations of round things rolling, seemingly of their own volition, perhaps needing a kick to get things going, seems to have set off a chain of inventions in what we now call a “snowball effect.” Society seems to be a tower of inventions, not all necessarily designed to improve our humanity.
Imagine life today without the automobile – not that you simply give up your car, but that the automobile was never invented. This is increasingly difficult to do because we may have lost sight of the original problem the automobile was designed to solve, and the automobile has itself created new problems for which it is the invention that appears to be the solution. This is why Fuller said, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
Related:
All Stung Over By Links of Googled Grace
Earth-Glass Half Empty or Fuller?: Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth
The Coming of the Toads 