WALKING WITH MR. EDISON
30. WALKING WITH MR. EDISON:
Being the man who visited with Edison and walked the fragrant hills of Menlo Park and Llewellyn Park together in transient time at one and the same with leaves falling and tannin-scented Fall air around us walking stick by stick two by two alone the gruff and the direct the vague and the gentle making sense of something nothing whatever by 1887 these were days of the future past like an old book upon a tired shelf the phonograph the incandescent lamp - which is what people called it in those days - a phrase we now cannot recognize as it is no longer part of the current language the modern day L'air de temps' like the French guy said the air of the times got no time no air no more and then Thomas himself pipes up looking me face front with the gnarled stick in his hand the stick of which we had just picked up beneath the sycamore tree along the border "This is where Mina and I will be buried according to our plans right here on this property and I don't think anyone will mind and if they do we will anyway you know these manager types who run this park thing trying to keep but the exclusives in they try to tell me in a roundabout way that I can be buried here but they don't know if it isn't here then it will be here right into my carriage house with Alton my footman helping I'll show them these types who go about declaiming that I've only invented the first 'practical' incandescent lamp and its accompanying electrical distribution system they actually say that these pointy-heads with so severe an outlook that they have to list and limit - do you know that very much of my work with electrical current of which they know nothing has been involved actually with listing ad limiting flow and push of current and power which is yet a very mysterious thing that the average man has no can have none idea of it being to foreign in the mind the only thing I can connect it to for a concept is water for it is much like the flow if water this electrical yet at the same time the idea of water must remain foreign too in people's minds to what electrical current is about so I cannot make much on that idea cannot put out to people the notion of thinking of electricity as water it wouldn't work but now these writer type executive managers think they can limit what it is I've been doing by sub-clause and footnote for what I've done - I should have stayed in Menlo where things were smaller and quieter and I could keep more to myself the rooming house the drawing room the study the little railroad in the woods the shed the row-house the storage room the hilltop now instead they have given me a biography which states that I wanted this factory this huge undertaking this industrial mass of brick and men foraging for work a place devoted to the rapid and cheap development of inventions allowing us to invent to order any of the useful things that every man woman and child wants at a price they can afford to pay what a crock of bile what a foolish man's purse of bad coin what crap they say the damn industrialists just want to make money and more money off of everything I do they have me captive they have me Barnum'ed in this mansion chained and enslaved to this rambling factory wherein I only seek escape now the movies the Black Maria anything like that will do I've been quoted wrong so many times wrongly they say I say that the new lab can build anything from a lady's watch to a locomotive but they're wrong their motive which they wish I could invent anew is greed poor bastards that they are all are all I am stuck here I am a museum piece now to these bastards I just want to sleep and hide and stay within the library the only damn good place in this whole pile of rubble I'm no clerk I'm no accounter I'm no executive I'm anarchy and they try to channel me where I should go but it's not like that only electrics do that I want the world free and lit and wild and wide I want New York City I want it all for everyone without definition and without endings and so I work within forms that and only that I invent voices and pictures things these little folk have never seen nor heard poor bastards that they are being pushed about and around by the monsters in their drawing rooms and counting rooms and big desks they hide behind in groups you never see one of them alone they conspire to kill they want war they push me ever and ever further along my search they say now is for synthetics they want rubber they push me about synthetic rubber will make our world work they plead there's money there Tom fella’ a whole industry waiting to be born so I go to Florida I search and I stay deep in the everglades the swamps the places where they can't reach now I'm here again and they say 'I only invent to obtain money to go on inventing' how cozy and how comfortable - they can say what they want New York City I want it all for everyone without definition and without endings and so I work within forms that and only that I invent voices and pictures things these little folk have never seen nor heard poor bastards that they are being pushed about and around by the monsters in their drawing rooms and counting rooms and big desks they hide behind in groups you never see one of them alone they conspire to kill they want war they push me ever and ever further along my search they say now is for synthetics they want rubber they push me about synthetic rubber will make our world work they plead there's money there Tom fella a whole industry waiting to be born so I go to Florida I search and I stay deep in the everglades the swamps the places where they can't reach now I'm here again and they say 'I only invent to obtain money to go on inventing' how cozy and how comfortable - they can say what they want I'll never do for them what they seek to do for themselves and I know I'll be dead long before their mechanizations bring the war they want but I do begrudge them their self-satisfied rubbish and their glee now that I have 200 plus men working for me under threat of sentence like a slave camp I feel so bad that I even I make sure I punch each day the same punch clock they must these poor soup bastards lined up each morning with their bread and coffee in a row waiting to punch in to hit that time clock which as I now remember it was a broad tall big wooden thing almost alike to a mantle clock which we hung on the facing wall to the plant entry and as they passed the general office they filed by and sullenly punched as the big clock clicked and the stern thud of time was heard for these men two or four times a day I don't even know but I myself would punch in and out daily even though I never left or almost never anyway it was my show sham for the academics the bastards who tried to run me I shoulda' let them all go blind the scientists and the engineers the chemists and the physicists all those with education vast and such learning that could put out a sun and not get burned they thought and the mathematicians always trying to work something out of numbers to find a gain more like an evil alchemist from the back-lot outhouse to make gold from shit all of them my men the real men are muckers and I am but the chief mucker the bigwigs sit there and figure and calculate and I can guess better than any of them and my guesses come up right every time as they claim they are 'surprised by the accuracy of my guesses' no problems are unsolvable even when theoreticians say otherwise - they forget I lit up New York City against everything every one of them ever said - it's only a matter of intense application to bring out the secrets of nature and apply them for the happiness of man - that's another quote I've heard they strung me with - the list to them is lucre alone: phonographs cameras storage batteries fluoroscopes rubber but here's a quote I'll give you right now: "Hell they're ain't no rules around here we're trying to accomplish something" I'm fighting them everyday they want nothing more than to make a manager of me three stories high this brick building 250 feet long machine shops engine rooms glass-blowing rooms heaters generators pumping rooms chemical departments photograph studios electrical testing stock rooms my only haven a 10,000 book library each volume with no price for the bastards to account for priceless with four one-story labs stocked with every substance for experimentation from horse-hair to raw silk "everything from an elephant's hide to the eyeballs of a United States Senator" - there's another quote for you - and then I remember well when it all burned just like that poof I was sixty-seven and what to do the assorted bastards and number pushers were still around – even them getting older - and they realized that to exist for them I had to rebuild they had lives and families and monies on the line so I was old but not too old to make a fresh start and I did.
Being the man who visited with Edison and walked the fragrant hills of Menlo Park and Llewellyn Park together in transient time at one and the same with leaves falling and tannin-scented Fall air around us walking stick by stick two by two alone the gruff and the direct the vague and the gentle making sense of something nothing whatever by 1887 these were days of the future past like an old book upon a tired shelf the phonograph the incandescent lamp - which is what people called it in those days - a phrase we now cannot recognize as it is no longer part of the current language the modern day L'air de temps' like the French guy said the air of the times got no time no air no more and then Thomas himself pipes up looking me face front with the gnarled stick in his hand the stick of which we had just picked up beneath the sycamore tree along the border "This is where Mina and I will be buried according to our plans right here on this property and I don't think anyone will mind and if they do we will anyway you know these manager types who run this park thing trying to keep but the exclusives in they try to tell me in a roundabout way that I can be buried here but they don't know if it isn't here then it will be here right into my carriage house with Alton my footman helping I'll show them these types who go about declaiming that I've only invented the first 'practical' incandescent lamp and its accompanying electrical distribution system they actually say that these pointy-heads with so severe an outlook that they have to list and limit - do you know that very much of my work with electrical current of which they know nothing has been involved actually with listing ad limiting flow and push of current and power which is yet a very mysterious thing that the average man has no can have none idea of it being to foreign in the mind the only thing I can connect it to for a concept is water for it is much like the flow if water this electrical yet at the same time the idea of water must remain foreign too in people's minds to what electrical current is about so I cannot make much on that idea cannot put out to people the notion of thinking of electricity as water it wouldn't work but now these writer type executive managers think they can limit what it is I've been doing by sub-clause and footnote for what I've done - I should have stayed in Menlo where things were smaller and quieter and I could keep more to myself the rooming house the drawing room the study the little railroad in the woods the shed the row-house the storage room the hilltop now instead they have given me a biography which states that I wanted this factory this huge undertaking this industrial mass of brick and men foraging for work a place devoted to the rapid and cheap development of inventions allowing us to invent to order any of the useful things that every man woman and child wants at a price they can afford to pay what a crock of bile what a foolish man's purse of bad coin what crap they say the damn industrialists just want to make money and more money off of everything I do they have me captive they have me Barnum'ed in this mansion chained and enslaved to this rambling factory wherein I only seek escape now the movies the Black Maria anything like that will do I've been quoted wrong so many times wrongly they say I say that the new lab can build anything from a lady's watch to a locomotive but they're wrong their motive which they wish I could invent anew is greed poor bastards that they are all are all I am stuck here I am a museum piece now to these bastards I just want to sleep and hide and stay within the library the only damn good place in this whole pile of rubble I'm no clerk I'm no accounter I'm no executive I'm anarchy and they try to channel me where I should go but it's not like that only electrics do that I want the world free and lit and wild and wide I want New York City I want it all for everyone without definition and without endings and so I work within forms that and only that I invent voices and pictures things these little folk have never seen nor heard poor bastards that they are being pushed about and around by the monsters in their drawing rooms and counting rooms and big desks they hide behind in groups you never see one of them alone they conspire to kill they want war they push me ever and ever further along my search they say now is for synthetics they want rubber they push me about synthetic rubber will make our world work they plead there's money there Tom fella’ a whole industry waiting to be born so I go to Florida I search and I stay deep in the everglades the swamps the places where they can't reach now I'm here again and they say 'I only invent to obtain money to go on inventing' how cozy and how comfortable - they can say what they want New York City I want it all for everyone without definition and without endings and so I work within forms that and only that I invent voices and pictures things these little folk have never seen nor heard poor bastards that they are being pushed about and around by the monsters in their drawing rooms and counting rooms and big desks they hide behind in groups you never see one of them alone they conspire to kill they want war they push me ever and ever further along my search they say now is for synthetics they want rubber they push me about synthetic rubber will make our world work they plead there's money there Tom fella a whole industry waiting to be born so I go to Florida I search and I stay deep in the everglades the swamps the places where they can't reach now I'm here again and they say 'I only invent to obtain money to go on inventing' how cozy and how comfortable - they can say what they want I'll never do for them what they seek to do for themselves and I know I'll be dead long before their mechanizations bring the war they want but I do begrudge them their self-satisfied rubbish and their glee now that I have 200 plus men working for me under threat of sentence like a slave camp I feel so bad that I even I make sure I punch each day the same punch clock they must these poor soup bastards lined up each morning with their bread and coffee in a row waiting to punch in to hit that time clock which as I now remember it was a broad tall big wooden thing almost alike to a mantle clock which we hung on the facing wall to the plant entry and as they passed the general office they filed by and sullenly punched as the big clock clicked and the stern thud of time was heard for these men two or four times a day I don't even know but I myself would punch in and out daily even though I never left or almost never anyway it was my show sham for the academics the bastards who tried to run me I shoulda' let them all go blind the scientists and the engineers the chemists and the physicists all those with education vast and such learning that could put out a sun and not get burned they thought and the mathematicians always trying to work something out of numbers to find a gain more like an evil alchemist from the back-lot outhouse to make gold from shit all of them my men the real men are muckers and I am but the chief mucker the bigwigs sit there and figure and calculate and I can guess better than any of them and my guesses come up right every time as they claim they are 'surprised by the accuracy of my guesses' no problems are unsolvable even when theoreticians say otherwise - they forget I lit up New York City against everything every one of them ever said - it's only a matter of intense application to bring out the secrets of nature and apply them for the happiness of man - that's another quote I've heard they strung me with - the list to them is lucre alone: phonographs cameras storage batteries fluoroscopes rubber but here's a quote I'll give you right now: "Hell they're ain't no rules around here we're trying to accomplish something" I'm fighting them everyday they want nothing more than to make a manager of me three stories high this brick building 250 feet long machine shops engine rooms glass-blowing rooms heaters generators pumping rooms chemical departments photograph studios electrical testing stock rooms my only haven a 10,000 book library each volume with no price for the bastards to account for priceless with four one-story labs stocked with every substance for experimentation from horse-hair to raw silk "everything from an elephant's hide to the eyeballs of a United States Senator" - there's another quote for you - and then I remember well when it all burned just like that poof I was sixty-seven and what to do the assorted bastards and number pushers were still around – even them getting older - and they realized that to exist for them I had to rebuild they had lives and families and monies on the line so I was old but not too old to make a fresh start and I did.
posted by gary j. introne at 6:55 PM
0 comments
