Education of Henry Dynamo

Henry Adams can catch you unaware. He seems as if to be the first modern man. He runs through scenarios of meaning that might work in a turbulent world, and the view is a world view, all the time quite big on bemusement.  He was ready to directly critique the modern world.

He is an American, yet with a high quotient of sarcasm; erudite but seeming to surprise himself. He seems to deliberately discard the first view, and makes sure where possible to find the unexpected view.

Encountering such unexpectedness can happen with a writer like Melville, or Whitman. They too convey the familiar strangeness of insight that seems to transport easily to today. But it is somewhat occasional; on the main, they are in their time. The Henry Adams of The Education of Henry Adams is busting with observation out of the wormhole of time in most every line.

Besides taking an active role in American politics, diplomacy, education, and the study of American history, Adams had a deep knowledge of the medieval.

Adams’ encounter with an electric dynamo at the Chicago Exposition is one case in point. He clears the wall that separates science from religion; he sees what is old in the new. Of  course his pessimism and weariness drain any joy there in this leap; his balloon deflated by what Britannica describes as politicians and a society in which all became “servant[s] of the powerhouse,”  and by a certain lack of certainty in the present. To Adams the dynamo became a “symbol of infinity”.

As he grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross. . The planet itself seemed less impressive, in its old fashion, deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this huge wheel, revolving within arm lengths at some vertiginous speed, and barely murmuring: scarcely humming an audible warning to stand a hair’s breadth further for respect of power – while it would not wake the baby lying close against its frame.  Before the end, one began to pay to it; inherited instinct taught the natural expression of man before silent and infinite force. Among the thousand symbols of ultimate energy, the dynamo was not so human as some, but it was the most expressive.

Apollonaire picked up this tack in Zone. The Pope blesses an early aviator, and the beacon of this event bathes him as the most modern man of Europe.

Ginsberg tapped into the issue of the dynamo as he described in Howl's first lines "the starry dynamo in the machinery of night." WE remember too, Tesla's dynamo dreams of youth of Niagra later consumate.
Ginsberg at PBS
Ginsberg at American academy of poets
Tesla on PBS
With flash description of Tesla's Niagra process

Last update: 6/18/2003; 8:54:56 PM.