Now, I have become rather formulaic about my blog titles, using a word or two topic followed by a colon and a neat little sub-heading that would show up in smaller letters were my post titles on the front of a book. The sub-heading for this post would have been "The Decay of Innocence and Childhood Wonder," but I decided that would make the title far too long and no one would want to read it. It is still highly relevant though, and it seemed to be the major theme that stood out in my fourth read-through of this phenomenal book.
The Dream of Perpetual Motion is a steampunk spin on Shakespeare's "The Tempest", which I have yet to read, but I have heard mixed feelings about it. The general consensus about it is that it is highly atypical considering the rest of Will's plays, alongside "A Midsummer Night's Dream." Neil Gaiman's Sandman comics lend an interesting perspective on the matter, which is highly irrelevant to the point here. Dexter Palmer took his Doctorate in English Literature and his love of Shakespeare and turned it into this haunting novel about a man's slow descent into insanity and his love of an equally crazy woman.
Harold Winslow is a former writing student that now works in the greeting card works of his lovely industrialized metropolis of Xeroville. The story begins with him explaining his current situation, trapped aboard the good ship Chrysalis, a massive zeppelin powered by the world's first perpetual motion machine. The voice of Miranda (his life long love and daughter of Prospero Taligent, the world renowned engineering miracle worker who dresses like a wizard) haunts him everywhere in the zeppelin, begging him to talk to her, to say even a single word. Harold has decided to write down the story of his life from beginning to end, to try and relate each phase of his life and each person he became to the next in an attempt to make sense of everything that happened to him.
The story is told in five parts, each going back to a portion of Harold's life relevant to his changing character and the major events that caused the shifts that turned him from one person to the next, with interludes that tell more of himself in the present aboard the good ship Chrysalis. The first, titled "nightfall in the greeting card works" is a sort of introduction to the adult Harold and his mental state at the end of this ridiculous series of events, but before the events that led to his imprisonment on the zeppelin. The second, "lovesongs for a virgin queen" tells about Harold as a ten year old boy, how he met Miranda, was brought to study with her in the magical island playroom her father built for her, and how he was banished for 'staining her innocence'.
The third, "music for an automatic bronzing," tells of Harold and Miranda's kidnapping by luddite extremists ten years later, his heroic rescue of the damsel, and the events that lead up to the loss of his sister Astrid. Section four, "romance in a mechanical dancehall" talks about Harold at thirty, the letter from Miranda begging him to come rescue her from her psychotic father, Prospero's declaration of his lordship over the earth and his airship loaded with death rays, and the events preceding Harold's decision to go to Taligent tower and rescue Miranda. The final portion, "the dream of perpetual motion" tells of Harold's journey up the tower, the people he meets and the stories they tell him, and then his final confrontation with Prospero atop the tower.
Through the whole book, there is an on-running theme of the decay of the old world of miracles and the advent of the noisy and mechanical new age, where there is no place for feelings or spoken world any longer. The children are taught with horrific 'teaching machines'; mechanical men perform most of the basic services to humanity; the new mode of transportation, that also meets the psychological needs of the population, is the 'Shrink-cabbie' with a trained psychologist/cabbie-driver; drugs and intravenous absinthe drips are a totally acceptable way to deal with the neuroses your trip in the shrink-cabbie didn't cover; and the sound of machinery is a constant and inescapable part of reality.
| Imagining the Perpetual Motion Machine, by Myke Amend |
Now, the fun part: quotes and excerpts from the book.
"Sometimes I have a little trouble holding things together. It seems strange and inaccurate, when writing of what oneself once was, to speak of oneself as "I," especially when I find it difficult to own up to some of the actions performed by the people I once was: the ten-year-old boy who played innocent games on Miranda's magic island; the twenty-year-old who returned that island when he had no business there; the thirty-year-old who committed the crime for which I have been imprisoned aboard this ship, with the madwoman. In this last year I've spent time with all of my past incarnations (oh, yes, they have their voices, too, they have just as much to say to me as Miranda), and we have decided that the only way to make sense of our existences is to set the stories of our lives down on paper, to try to make one tale to show how the twentieth century turned Harold Winslow into Harold Winslow into Harold Winslow into me.
Any story told in this machine age must be a story of fragments, for fragments are all the world has left: interrupted threads of talk at crowded cocktail parties; snatches of poems heard as a radio dial spins through its arc; incomplete commandments reclaimed from shattered stones.
Every story needs a voice to tell it though,or it goes unheard. So I have to try."
And my favorite part of this first monologue of Harold's:
"I still have enough faith left in language to believe that if I place enough words next to each other on the page, they will start to speak with sounds of their own."
-Harold Winslow, the last portion of the prologue of the book.
I picked up the book because of the title, opened it because of the cover, the first picture above, and decided I had to own it because of the prologue. And never has a book impressed me more in less than five pages. This quote sets up the book fantastically, better than any words I could have put together could. And this is only the last piece of the prologue.
"'When I was your age,' Harry Winslow's father says, 'miracles were commonplace. To me my childhood and adolescence seem as if they happened just a little time ago, just on the other side of the line dividing centuries. But you, who cannot remember a world that was not filled with machines, will never be able to imagine the drastic differences between your youth and mine. When I was a child people could fly without the need of jerry-rigged contraptions that were just as likely to explode as not. When I was young angels and demons walked the city streets. And they were fearless.'"...
"'Fearless,' Allan says. 'You could be strolling down a sidewalk one morning, minding your own business, chewing on a still-steaming hot cross bun and planning your day's youthful exploits, and then suddenly an angel would fly out of nowhere and stand in your path and just stare at you. Winking and leering, doing a little dance and flapping its wings, chuckling to itself, as if to say: Go ahead and try it, child. I dare you to disbelieve in me.'"
-Allan Winslow, Harold's father, on the age of miracles he grew up in.
This is your first peek at the supposed time before machines and mechanical men started to be everywhere in the world, through the aging mind of Harold's father.
"'The girl in the class says it helps to have an eye for art to get the problems right,' Harold says. 'She's always going on about elegant solutions and symmetry and things like that. And sometimes I see something like that, and I get it, but where I guess I'm supposed to feels some sort of universal awe at the order of things, instead I feel - I don't know. Nervous. Terrified. Take - take destructive interference. Now here is one of the things I kind of get,' he says, feeling once again the pleasure of having got it. He takes a fresh index card from the stack on the table and draws a wave across it, nothing like a sine wave, but close enough to get the point across.
'That's the shape of a sound,' says Harold. 'But every sound has an enemy. And to discover the shape of a sound's enemy, you hold a mirror up to it.' Harold scribbles on the card some more, adding to the original drawing. 'Now take this sound on the other side of the mirror and pull it into your own world. And if you add these sounds together, this is what you get.' Flipping the card over and drawing a straight line across it from corner to corner. 'Nothing.'
'Well, what's so god-awfully scary about that?' asks Astrid.
'It's scary because every day thousands of new sounds are born into the world: new machines with new rhythms; new words to name those new machines. Every day there are more sounds, and I'm afraid that, some day in the future, every sound that's possible to make will be in the world at the same time. And since every sound has its opposite, they will cancel each other out, and at the end of the day there'll be billions of machines with their percussive rhythms, and billions of words in a language that doesn't work anymore, and billions of people trying to be heard, screaming their lungs out, hurling their impotent noises into a world so saturated with noise that it might as well be deaf, and dumb, and blind.'
Now it's Astrid's turn to say nothing.
'All the noises of the world add up to silence,' says Harold. 'This world will begin and end in silence.'"
-Harold, talking about his Physics for Poets class and Destructive Interference.
| A diagram that shows the gist of Harold's drawings from the book. |
"'Son. What's happened to your voice? I hear something new in it when you read the papers. There used to be music in it; now there's metal in its place. Not something strong and forged, like steel - something cheap that breaks when you bend it. Tin, or the gilding on a cheap thing that makes it look like gold. Yes - there's metal in your voice now.' Allan's gaze drifts, and he looks confused.
I don't know what he's talking about, Harold thinks. But he does.
'To tell the truth, it wasn't sudden,' Allan said. 'For years I've heard it creeping in, more and more, a cheap tin noise coming from something cheap and made of tin. Wait - that's too harsh. I'm sorry. I'm sorry I said that. If I said it it's because I'm sitting here in these empty rooms and turning to tin as well. Just like everyone else.
'But your voice had music in it when you were a child! I remember when you were so excited about that silly roller coaster. Spinning yourself dizzy. Tornadoooo! I'd never hear high notes like that out of you now; haven't for years. You haven't felt like that for a long time, have you?
'All the high notes have left your voice. Mine too.'
Harold says nothing and looks at the floor.
'I can't blame you,' says Allan. 'Soft hearts provide poor harbor; tin hearts can better stand against time and bad weather, thin and hollow as they are. So you pray to change from flesh to metal, and the dying Author of the world hears your plea and performs his final miracle. He lays His hand on you and then He vanishes. And what mortal man can undo that? What human on this earth has the power to change a tin man back to flesh?'"
- Allan Winslow, during Harold's 20's, rambling about the loss of innocence.
This next excerpt is probably the heart of the philosophical purpose of this book, and it describes a conflict of interest visible in many different aspects of life.
"-Two moral forces shaped how we think and live in this shining twentieth century: the Virgin, and the Dynamo. The Dynamo represents the desire to know; the Virgin represents the freedom not to know.
What's the Virgin made of? Things that we think are silly, mostly. The peculiar logic of dreams, or the inexplicable stirring we feel when we look on someone that's beautiful now in a way that we all agree is beautiful, but the unique way in which a single person is. The Virgin is faith and mysticism; miracle and instinct; art and randomness.
On the other hand, you have the Dynamo: the unstoppable engine. It finds the logic behind a seeming miracle and explains that miracle away; it finds the order in randomness to which we're blind; it takes a caliper to a young woman's head and quantifies her beauty in terms of pleasing mathematical ratios; it accounts for the secret stirring you felt by discoursing at length on the nervous systems of animals.
These forces aren't diametrically opposed, and it's not correct to say that one's good and the other's evil, despite the prejudices we might have toward one or the other. When we're at our best, both the Virgin and the Dynamo govern what we think and what we do. But the fear that we felt standing in the Hall of Dynamos stemmed from the certainty that the Virgin was in trouble, and that we needed her, just as much as we needed and even wanted the Dynamo. What the Dynamo threatened to do was murder the Virgin by explaining her to us, because it was its nature to explain. To us common men it wasn't worth the pleasure of looking at a woman and knowing that we found her beautiful because of the distance between the tip of her nose and her top lip and the size of her eyes, if it meant losing the equally wonderful pleasure of looking at that same woman and finding her beautiful without knowing why.
Imagine a damsel in distress, tied to a train track and screaming. Her impending death would be unfortunate, but would you call the engine that drives the oncoming train evil? You have to ask: how did the damsel get there? Where's the black-cowled dastard in the top hat and the handlebar mustache who did the tying? He is one who forces us to view the damsel and the engine as moral opposites when, in fact, they're nothing of the kind. He is a person who believes that all of our human problems can be solved by the all-knowing Dynamo. And if the Dynamo has to run over a Virgin or two as it barrels unerringly toward its final destination: no great loss, really, in the end."
I'll come back and talk about all this stuff when I'm done posting quotes and excerpts.
"What he can't bring himself to say to Miranda is:
'When I was a child, I used to look at adults half with conclusion, half with envy, trying and failing to imagine the nature of the mysteries to which they'd been initiated, the pleasures they were keeping to themselves. Have you ever watched the swings of moods that toddlers go through, the way they act as if they're attending their own funeral if the axle falls off a favored toy car, or the rapturous expressions that show up on their faces when they suck on sweet things? Though the memory's fading, I can still remember feeling like that, and I thought that being an adult would be even more like that - that the emotions that make us human got more intense, the older you grew. Even at the age of ten, simple surprise gifts could be enough to make me feel like my heart and my brain were both about to burst. I couldn't imagine how people even survived to the age of twenty when such pleasures were lying in wait, out in the world.
'But that hasn't turned out to be what happened - instead, my own father tells me that he thinks I'm turning into tin. Something inside me is dying, and I don't know what to do to save it; something inside me is slipping away, and somehow my memories of what you were as a child have come to stand in for all the things I want to keep alive inside myself and don't know how. In dreams I see you as a queen, standing at a roof's edge; again and again you beckon to me, and again and again I watch you fall, and with you fall all those things within me that make me best.
'There has to be a spell to speak to save you, and myself. But for the life of me I can't come up with the words.'"
- Harold, in what was a pivotal moment in his life, and he chose not to say what could have saved him.
"This is the time of night just before sunrise, the time that no one owns, and if you have found yourself awake and alone during this time, out in the city, outside the safety of the walls you call your own, then you know me, and you have felt what I have felt. This is the hour of the night it's best to sleep through, for if it catches you awake then it well force you to face what is true. This is when you look into the half-dead eyes of those who are either wishing for sleep or shaking off its final remnants, and you see the signs of the twilight in which your own mind is suspended.
"At any other time it's better. You can do the things you feel you should; you're an expert at going through the motions. Your handshakes with strangers are firm and your gaze never wavers; you think of steel and diamonds when you stare. In a monotone you repeat the legendary words of long-dead lovers to those you claim to love; you take them into bed with you, and you mimic the rhythmic motions you're read of in manuals. When protocol demands it you dutifully drop to your knees and pray to a god who no longer exists. But in this hour you must admit to yourself that this is not enough, that you are not good enough. And when you knock your fist against your chest you hear a hollow ringing echo, and all your thoughts are accompanied by the ticks of clockwork spinning behind your eyes, and everything you eat and drink has the aftertaste of rust."
- Harold, narrating this time, talking about the time of night he is heading home from the club.
"'You've told me many secrets," Prospero says, and smiles. "Now I will tell you one. It's my darkest. Are you ready?
'It is this.' He leans toward me and spreads his arms in mock surrender. 'I have no past. You may think that I was once small and young and unwise as you once were, but I have always been as you see me before you. Always an old magician in exile.'"
- Prospero Taligent, on his past.There are more quotes than that I'd like to share, but they're kind of vital to the plot and goings on and will spoil the story for you. The last one from Prospero almost earned a spoiler alert, but I decided it wasn't enough to ruin anything specific for you, given that you haven't seen his character's development up until that point in the book.
What I love about this book is the elegant and very subtle development of Harold's character through those series of events that lead him to become the man he is aboard the Chrysalis. It's the slow and inevitable and inescapable chugging motor of the Dynamo, turning everything into metal as time progresses. And it's not something it knows it's doing. It's just the natural progression of things. Time changes us and shifts the way we think and perceive and operate in life. Things that used to be important to us become trivial matters, and things that didn't used to even cross our mind now consume our thoughts and cause us to worry and fear and give us many sleepless nights out of sheer stress. And there's not a whole lot anyone can do to stop it.
There's a point in the book where Harold could have changed the entire series of events that came after that point and maybe even saved himself from his inevitable fate. But his failure to admit what is happening to him and accept it leaves him powerless to change it. He won't say out loud that he's terrified to death that he's turning to metal, and instead returns to Miranda's playroom and tries to deny what he feels inside. And, at the end of the day, that choice is what doomed him to end up on the good ship Chrysalis, circling the earth endlessly, trying to find Miranda and not accept his madness by talking to her.
In short, YOU HAVE TO READ THIS BOOK. I love it so much that the ending still gets me literally every time, though the tone and meaning has changed and shifted every single time I've read it. It's become so much more serious and so much darker as I peel back each successive layer and discover more about the characters and the series of events as they progress. It blows my mind how much stuff there is to be found and discussed in such a small story. It does have a pretty complex character development that took me a few reads to fully grasp, though I may not have read as carefully or paid close enough attention the first few times through. But it's totally worth taking the time to break down and pull apart and figure out, though that might just be the Dynamo in my crying out to understand everything going on.
Since I've read this book, I've been more conscious of the battle between the Virgin and the Dynamo in my life, in my need to explain and understand everything about my universe. I've started to appreciate life more at face value and stop trying to detect the motives behind everything or attach value to something that doesn't necessarily mean anything at all. I tend to take things way too seriously and not just lay back and relax and enjoy life and the progression of things. I'm rigid and ordered and systematic and analytical and structured, and because of that, I can be a stick in the mud on a lot of occasions. And, I don't understand people who aren't as structured and rigid as I am. They don't make sense to me.
So I've been striving to reconcile the Virgin and the Dynamo within me, and to learn to understand people who aren't like me so that all of our interactions aren't abrasive and difficult and just annoying. Which is why I've had a huge fascination with body language and personality types and reading people over the last few years. I'm trying to understand other people so that I can meet them in the middle and not have all sorts of arguments and ridiculous fights and disagreements over simple misses in communication like I tend to.
Anyway. Read The Dream of Perpetual Motion. It's awesome and amazing and I love it. Sorry this one was so long audience. I didn't intend for it to be this long. Till next time.
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