Saturday, January 09, 2010
23. "…WHATEVER THE SUN IS NOT NEW…"
(from 'The Thomas Edison Papers'):
"One thing you have to remember is that whatever I achieved was not achieved by accident and when I came out of that first office and lab in Newark I knew that I was after something and when I first came off the hill where I would locate my Menlo Park laboratory I knew that I was started I first got off the train and walked the mile and a half or so needed to top the landscape it was beautiful there were vines and trees and bushes everywhere the water was plentiful and the meadows beckoned so that I knew I could sense and feel the call within me of an entire new translation of what the world was about and the knowledge that I was about to begin to change all of it and I always thought it funny how all of us
Ford Bell myself Westinghouse each and every one of us and all the others right then who were basically adventuring into the unknown all measured up at about the same time I always felt that to be a strange kinetic an electricity of time that surpassed all things and went right through each of us and connected us so that within ourselves we could feel and understand the vast motives of a new time and place which were shaping things remember this was perhaps but 17 or 20 years after the Civil War a conflict which I'm not sure people really understand for it meant so much it meant a true break in the meaning of living as we knew it this became a place fraught then with possibility had the great European powers at that point stepped in and tinkered with the sides or the finish of that great war I'm not sure any of this would have happened as they would have burdened and defeated and watered down the expectations for wherever the sun is not new or not as brightly shining there much less gets done and after those years this was a very bright place harsh and brilliant with words and work and the study and engineering delicacies of oh so many people and undertakings you had Roebling you had Fernando Wood and Tweed the beckoning fringe of New York City with streets still littered with carnage and breakage and the dead heaps of horses and bodies and people and places needing light and air and freshness and new thinking and we furnished it as brilliantly and electrically charged as if from the very God within all of us when I walked first the trail of Menlo I knew and then from that it only grew we built one after another wooden house and shed and the grounds and the lands prospered and the spirit veritably flew and the distant vistas which I knew would be changing within the next thirty fifty seventy years those distant vistas were patient enough for me to finish and move on now Menlo is unfortunately nothing of what it was all gone a ghosted memory of sequence and denial amidst energy and plenty but there too my spirit lives and my mind as fresh as yesterday can still walk those first walks and see the little trains crawling by and hear the whistle as it breaks through the woods but so little did I really know of what this vast future would look like that I did not really envision it nor Glenmont nor the laboratory and the streetcar traffics that so confused and interfered with my words and work but I do recall the armless men the lame and the broken those who still roamed around from the war with their jagged wounds and those who slept in occasional woods and new burial grounds as they were added to with war markers and the tiny broken flags of regiment and state it was all about sacrifice really but all I had ever sacrificed was time which is all the more precious because of being lost I never talked much was not good at it could not hear well and was therefore loud and sounded bad but yet as I recorded and developed things I even recorded myself and formed new ideas from hearing that voice wondrous though bad as it was and the kinetescopes the nickel palaces the movie stands I formed they became an entire new and little industry of themselves for which many of these broken and lame men were quite grateful as it allowed them all along the streets of new York city to open their penny movie palaces and make a penny from their nickel and thereby live and prosper and they thanked me often ad all I ad to do was develop newer and newer ideas and keep my little industry of the movies going and there too look at what I started an entire empire for so many immigrants and Jews and walkers and carpenters and those who worked the new fantasy of the future as it occurred I furnished the idea of pictures and sound things that moved it was all a dream I had walking it allowed them all along the streets of New York City to open their penny movie palaces and make a penny from their nickel and thereby live and prosper and they thanked me often ad all I had to do was develop newer and newer ideas and keep my little industry of the movies going and there too look at what I started an entire empire for so many immigrants and Jews and walkers and carpenters and those who worked the new fantasy of the future as it occurred I furnished the idea of pictures and sound things that moved it was all a dream I had walking and I knew I would make it real for within myself the core was saying that it was all about timing and this was the time the great force of time the cosmic clock is all like a fine Swiss watch and we're all working for it whether we know it or not and there's a celestial clock with gears within gears and wheels within wheels and individuals spiraling through life I don't know if I can explain it other than when it's time it's time it's almost like one of these movies is one of our lives each of us and it's already filmed and ready for the running but with the earth as our stage so everybody's got parts and when each us comes to our final end then that's that with nothing more and no ado nor adieu do you see that?" and as he said that I understood and I myself even I flashed the vivid image of the photoplay palaces all along the streets around 14th where in New York for a nickel these tired and haggard people in great dresses of the time and the men in their wool suits and strange ties of top hats would line up to play their nickel and see The Great Train Robbery or the circus movie or the boxing fight or the train landscape and be frightened out of their lives as it occurred and they realized the moving picture of the life they lived and they saw reproduced the abstracted quality of their own time and place and the vast cavernous city around them and amidst which they were walking and the cluttered storefronts sang to them and the sky-lit movie motion allowed them to see and the street-lamps just then which illumined the great and triumphant nighttime of life and living and brought the great city down to bear upon them and all their lives and yes it did had was changing and re-ruling the very world around them this great turn of life this invention mill this cauldron of Hell and Heaven combined this laying of history out for the ages yet unmarked and then Edison spoke again "I was never very visual couldn't give a damn abut it but Mina knew and she showed me and she tried to help and Rembrandt was brought to me in great color plates and Rubens and I saw the difference there between two world systems that Rembrandt was bought by his patrons and in the dead and tired world they then lived in he never flew in the face of their basic requirements those of portraiture and likeness and calm but rather sought to transform them into something impossible to envision from antecedents his dissolution of self into image and the characters of all he portrayed the soldier the countess the beggar the ruler the prince the burgher I remember well studying with dim candlelight at first and later with my own lamplights the color plates of the great Supper at Emmaus from 1628 and The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp from 1628 and Danae and The Night Watch and The Staalmasters from 1662 I remembered how brilliant my new lamps cast his dark even brown hues and I became proud in my memory and was glad to prosper because of that."
(from 'The Thomas Edison Papers'):
"One thing you have to remember is that whatever I achieved was not achieved by accident and when I came out of that first office and lab in Newark I knew that I was after something and when I first came off the hill where I would locate my Menlo Park laboratory I knew that I was started I first got off the train and walked the mile and a half or so needed to top the landscape it was beautiful there were vines and trees and bushes everywhere the water was plentiful and the meadows beckoned so that I knew I could sense and feel the call within me of an entire new translation of what the world was about and the knowledge that I was about to begin to change all of it and I always thought it funny how all of us
Ford Bell myself Westinghouse each and every one of us and all the others right then who were basically adventuring into the unknown all measured up at about the same time I always felt that to be a strange kinetic an electricity of time that surpassed all things and went right through each of us and connected us so that within ourselves we could feel and understand the vast motives of a new time and place which were shaping things remember this was perhaps but 17 or 20 years after the Civil War a conflict which I'm not sure people really understand for it meant so much it meant a true break in the meaning of living as we knew it this became a place fraught then with possibility had the great European powers at that point stepped in and tinkered with the sides or the finish of that great war I'm not sure any of this would have happened as they would have burdened and defeated and watered down the expectations for wherever the sun is not new or not as brightly shining there much less gets done and after those years this was a very bright place harsh and brilliant with words and work and the study and engineering delicacies of oh so many people and undertakings you had Roebling you had Fernando Wood and Tweed the beckoning fringe of New York City with streets still littered with carnage and breakage and the dead heaps of horses and bodies and people and places needing light and air and freshness and new thinking and we furnished it as brilliantly and electrically charged as if from the very God within all of us when I walked first the trail of Menlo I knew and then from that it only grew we built one after another wooden house and shed and the grounds and the lands prospered and the spirit veritably flew and the distant vistas which I knew would be changing within the next thirty fifty seventy years those distant vistas were patient enough for me to finish and move on now Menlo is unfortunately nothing of what it was all gone a ghosted memory of sequence and denial amidst energy and plenty but there too my spirit lives and my mind as fresh as yesterday can still walk those first walks and see the little trains crawling by and hear the whistle as it breaks through the woods but so little did I really know of what this vast future would look like that I did not really envision it nor Glenmont nor the laboratory and the streetcar traffics that so confused and interfered with my words and work but I do recall the armless men the lame and the broken those who still roamed around from the war with their jagged wounds and those who slept in occasional woods and new burial grounds as they were added to with war markers and the tiny broken flags of regiment and state it was all about sacrifice really but all I had ever sacrificed was time which is all the more precious because of being lost I never talked much was not good at it could not hear well and was therefore loud and sounded bad but yet as I recorded and developed things I even recorded myself and formed new ideas from hearing that voice wondrous though bad as it was and the kinetescopes the nickel palaces the movie stands I formed they became an entire new and little industry of themselves for which many of these broken and lame men were quite grateful as it allowed them all along the streets of new York city to open their penny movie palaces and make a penny from their nickel and thereby live and prosper and they thanked me often ad all I ad to do was develop newer and newer ideas and keep my little industry of the movies going and there too look at what I started an entire empire for so many immigrants and Jews and walkers and carpenters and those who worked the new fantasy of the future as it occurred I furnished the idea of pictures and sound things that moved it was all a dream I had walking it allowed them all along the streets of New York City to open their penny movie palaces and make a penny from their nickel and thereby live and prosper and they thanked me often ad all I had to do was develop newer and newer ideas and keep my little industry of the movies going and there too look at what I started an entire empire for so many immigrants and Jews and walkers and carpenters and those who worked the new fantasy of the future as it occurred I furnished the idea of pictures and sound things that moved it was all a dream I had walking and I knew I would make it real for within myself the core was saying that it was all about timing and this was the time the great force of time the cosmic clock is all like a fine Swiss watch and we're all working for it whether we know it or not and there's a celestial clock with gears within gears and wheels within wheels and individuals spiraling through life I don't know if I can explain it other than when it's time it's time it's almost like one of these movies is one of our lives each of us and it's already filmed and ready for the running but with the earth as our stage so everybody's got parts and when each us comes to our final end then that's that with nothing more and no ado nor adieu do you see that?" and as he said that I understood and I myself even I flashed the vivid image of the photoplay palaces all along the streets around 14th where in New York for a nickel these tired and haggard people in great dresses of the time and the men in their wool suits and strange ties of top hats would line up to play their nickel and see The Great Train Robbery or the circus movie or the boxing fight or the train landscape and be frightened out of their lives as it occurred and they realized the moving picture of the life they lived and they saw reproduced the abstracted quality of their own time and place and the vast cavernous city around them and amidst which they were walking and the cluttered storefronts sang to them and the sky-lit movie motion allowed them to see and the street-lamps just then which illumined the great and triumphant nighttime of life and living and brought the great city down to bear upon them and all their lives and yes it did had was changing and re-ruling the very world around them this great turn of life this invention mill this cauldron of Hell and Heaven combined this laying of history out for the ages yet unmarked and then Edison spoke again "I was never very visual couldn't give a damn abut it but Mina knew and she showed me and she tried to help and Rembrandt was brought to me in great color plates and Rubens and I saw the difference there between two world systems that Rembrandt was bought by his patrons and in the dead and tired world they then lived in he never flew in the face of their basic requirements those of portraiture and likeness and calm but rather sought to transform them into something impossible to envision from antecedents his dissolution of self into image and the characters of all he portrayed the soldier the countess the beggar the ruler the prince the burgher I remember well studying with dim candlelight at first and later with my own lamplights the color plates of the great Supper at Emmaus from 1628 and The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp from 1628 and Danae and The Night Watch and The Staalmasters from 1662 I remembered how brilliant my new lamps cast his dark even brown hues and I became proud in my memory and was glad to prosper because of that."
