The Human Wheel
Aside from the obvious illustrative debt to Brewster’s kaleidoscope, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.’s “Human Wheel” gives voice to some interesting thoughts on the human condition which I feel it pertinent to note:
THE starting-point of this paper was a desire to call attention to certain remarkable AMERICAN INVENTIONS, especially to one class of mechanical contrivances, which, at the present time, assumes a vast importance and interests great multitudes. The limbs of our friends and countrymen are a part of the melancholy harvest which War is sweeping down with Dahlgren's mowing-machine and the patent reapers of Springfield and Hartford. The admirable contrivances of an American inventor, prized as they were in ordinary times, have risen into the character of great national blessings since the necessity for them has become so widely felt. While the weapons that have gone from Mr. Colt's armories have been carrying death to friend and foe, the beneficent and ingenious inventions of MR. PALMER have been repairing the losses inflicted by the implements of war.
. . .We should not tell the whole truth, if we did not own that we have for a long time been lying in wait for a chance to say something about the mechanism of walking, because we thought we could add something to what is known about it from a new source, accessible only within the last few years, and never, so far as me know, employed for its elucidation, namely, the instantaneous photograph.
The two accomplishments common to all mankind are walking and talking. Simple as they seem, they are yet acquired with vast labor, and very rarely understood in any clear way by those who practice them with perfect ease and unconscious skill.
Thinking about this inventive conflation of walking and talking, of war and technology, I was struck by the historical affinity between war and methods of articulation. Warblogging anyone? Understanding the human bleat hasn’t become much easier since the Civil War. Holmes was more optimistic about it though:
New Media
I am constantly amazed by the sort of “epic” language applied to each new twist of the social ladder brought about by communications technology. David Weinberger’s spin of the Warhol adage “In the future everyone will be famous to fifteen people” was used to invoke a panel I attended last night. No one credited him with the phrase. Perhaps, in the future, no one will really be sure who said what. We live buffeted by waves of quotations. The tide of utopianism, even in the wake of devastating political defeats in the US, refuses to abate. I listened to speakers drunk on new media talking as if blogging was still some kind of brave new world. One would have thought that the hangover would have kicked in by now.
Sometimes I’d like to cast the epic promoters of a utopian new world high on their own performance out of the republic. As Burningbird has observed regarding a different conference, they are usually professional, usually white, and usually male—speaking of a new equality as if it were a given. Ultimately, they present new media as if they embodied an ideal form where all old disputes become unimportant. It reminded me of a section I recently revisited in Eric Havelock’s Preface to Plato:
But if we remember the centuries of old habit, which fused subject with object in sympathetic self-identification as a condition of keeping the oral tradition alive, we can realize how this inherited state of mind was for Plato the enemy, and how he would wish to frame his own doctrine in language which met it head on, and confronted it, and destroyed it. The net effect then of the theory of Forms is to dramatize the split between the image-thinking of poetry and the abstract thinking of philosophy. In the history of the Greek mind, it puts the stress on discontinuity rather than on continuity.
This is ever the way with makers of revolutions. In their own day and to themselves and their own audiences they are prophets of the new, not developers of the old. (266-7)
