I omit speculation about why boys, in particular, should be drawn to them—the backhoes, steamshovels, frontloaders, dumptrucks, cranes. (It isn’t that hard to surmise; though I don’t rule out girls’ being so drawn, also). More interesting is why this fascination should come at this particular moment, why at this time in the child’s life. Surmise: it comes just after the stage of becoming highly mobile—of being able, not just to manipulate objects (the prior stage), but to move oneself, to run, jump, climb. These possibilities of displacing oneself raise the possibility of extending oneself, in a synthesis of the current and the prior stages. Tools are, as McLuhan notes, the “extensions of man,” and the child apprehends this—in the most prehensile way, by a sympathetic projection of self into the motions of scooping, digging, raking, picking up, transporting from place to place of the fascinating steamshovel. And the machine’s acts are in turn reflected back upon the child, which aspires toward being a screen, a mirror, sufficient to match that shadowing. And in some degree becomes so.
For the same reason, no doubt, the fascination with dinosaurs, somewhat allied—“yellow dinosaur steamshovels,” Robert Lowell calls them, his man’s and child’s nose pressed at one and the same time to fence and aquarium glass—comes later. To learn of dinosaurs requires imaginative acts. They are reconstituted from books, from bones. To learn of, to internalize, the fact of their destruction is one of the child’s first experiences of unsatisfiable longing. The steamshovel is present in its immediacy—or almost immediacy. It is there, however held at bay by fences and hoardings. To comprehend it one need only repeat and extend the sympathetic self-transcendence with which one has, just last week, grown into one’s future body. Catachresis is growth. The new body, today’s, draped on the soul’s projected forms. Shaped on the soul’s last.
One thinks again of
’s argument for the primordiality of the internet—the present one being the degraded manifestation of a yearning for total connection, total communicability, diffused throughout the cosmos, held alike by humans and plants. Technological perennialism, Smith-Ruiu’s stated position, seems to imply the possibility of the proleptic skeuomorph—or, as I prefer to think of it, skiamorph (shadow instead of form). The object that, rather than imitate some prior technology, prefigures a future one. McLuhan’s Vitruvian extensions seem to suggest the same. The extensions of the body are latent in the body. The steamshovel has, in a sense, always existed. Why should it not be among the radicals of experience—those objects whose fascination seems never to have to be taught, that seem given—in the same way that the candle, the knife, the fountain seem given.There are other radicals—not of the body, but of the soul. One such, I think, is the experience of generations, as an aspect of the experience of time. One perceives early that the child knows, without having to be taught, that it will one day be older, bigger. “When you are older you can do it,” you say. “When you are bigger.” This apparently complex thought—which presumes so much about the persistence of identity through change—in fact does not require any laying-in of floorboards. The concepts are already there, or rather, the preconcepts: not the foundation, but the bedrock. Pre-known, pre-existing the individual. True, specific family relations are difficult for a child—it is hard to comprehend that “Grandma is Daddy’s Mom, Grandpa is Mommy’s Dad.” (Though how well do you, dear reader, conceive of your parents as having parents, the fact of their childhood? Individual as opposed to collective pre-existence remains, for most of us, the most obscure of all. Too linked, perhaps, to the specific fact of our origin—the one thing, aside from our end, from which we consistently avert our eyes.) But the fact of generations, of older and younger, of one’s contemporaries and one’s parents and their contemporaries and their elders, seems, again, radical and given. It is known, I might say, prehensilely—as an aspect of the world’s navigation.
Would you believe me if I told you this is true of things, also? “Old-fashioned pick up truck,” my son said to me one afternoon as we were walking together. And, a few days later: “Old-fashioned sports car.” These “old-fashioned” things lack any common characteristic. They aren’t all cars from the 1920s, for instance, with running boards and bug eyes. They are just as apt to be from, say, the 1990s, to be twenty or thirty rather than fifty or a hundred years old. Nor are they all the same kind of vehicle. An “old-fashioned pickup truck”—the first was a beat up red Ford—has little obviously in common with an “old-fashioned sports car.” (This latter was, in fact, a sagging brown Chrysler sedan, a lumbering behemoth, no sports car at all).
One possibility—a likely one—is that he is perceiving weathering. It makes sense, though is somewhat surprising, to think that among the immediate categories of apprehension is some sense of the aging of things—in the same sense that one apprehends the aging, the weathering, of people. It is plausible—though, again, surprising—to think that one does not have to be taught that the rust on that blade, the moss on that stone, the lichen or mold on that warped and sagging wood fence is a sign of its age, its venerability, its desuetude, as the case may be. A primitive sense for entropy, for broken-down-ness, might indeed be given. (Broken-down-ness, but not brokenness. The finality of being broken is, again, something the child learns with difficulty. Against one’s wish does one accept that some acts can’t be undone, some things cannot be mended, not by all the king’s horses and all the king’s men.)
Yet obscurely, too—is it possible?—there seems to be some sense of changing styles; I had almost said, “of historical time.” The PT Cruiser we spotted the other day looked as new as anything. It was certainly not weathered. And yet it received its bestowal: “old-fashioned jeep.” Would a man walking down the street in a toga, or a tricorn hat, just as readily be marked out? As out of step? Out of time? To suppose that such an apprehension exists in one so young goes against much knowledge and sedimented thought. Is not fashion a random churn? Does not every new mode seem new in its time, the novelty itself nothing at all? If all fashions could appear simultaneously, without weathering—torn out from history’s costume department—would the marks of their sequence reveal them? Is there, somehow, such a thing as integral ages, integral sequence? It makes you think the intervals of change were keyed to a hidden absoluteness—like a man who reckons the minutes to boil an egg not by stopwatch, but only by the clock? Or like a tribe that knows neither right nor left, but orients itself only by the cardinal points?1
In each new self, the Vichian ages rebegin their ricorso.
Or, perhaps, of a currency that cannot be exchanged without altering the public ledger?
Really excellent
Wonderful every time