Fantastic Metropolis

Imagine that the cabal of the best and brightest in Birmingham came up with the following idea: they would bring down the current worldview they found themselves part of, indeed, the very traditions they themselves worked in: Franklin would destroy the fluidic nature of electricity, Lavoisier would wipe out the various alchemical secrets of the past and replace them with chemical elements and the oxygen theory, creating a chemical revolution, and the Darwin-Wedgewood-Galton alliance would breed champions of evolutionary theory. (That’s right: they got together and deliberately bred their extended families together to create Charles Darwin. They bred Darwin. Think about that one too hard and your brain might melt.) Together, these actions would seize the Newtonian initiative from the previous century, the first hammer-blow of the great man’s shock to the system of established physics, and channel it to exacting specificity in exactly the directions they wanted it to go. Within a century, it would be a rare mind indeed that could conceive of the world as it had been imagined in their time, and since they stood outside the set of reality being absorbed into the minds of those to follow them, they were in essence both immune to its preconceptions and able to exploit them. If one considers the origins of Priestley and Lavoisier’s discovery of oxygen… that they were experimenting on red oxide of mercury, a component of the infamous red lion of the alchemists, connections almost seem to force themselves onto us. This is a very subtle and sensitive alchemy being worked, not the dull alchemical japery of tricksters like Johann Becher and Georg Stahl… this is the quest for the perfection sought by Paracelsus, the true philosopher’s stone, making manifest outside what is within.

Of course, there were consequences. It took time for the new shockwaves to sweep the globe, and not all minds could or would absorb them… Franklin and Arkwright had to arrange for Samuel Slater to arrive in the Blackstone Valley and Jefferson had to introduce Eli Whitney to the assembly-line concept, infecting him with the ideas of Honoré le Blanc: in this fashion, both the conceptual primer for the later shocks was set off and the later Great Awakening of religious fervor was understood and even utilized by them. When Fourier’s keen mind was exposed to the incomplete new way of thinking, it simultaneously accepted and rejected it, applying rigorous and logical scientific thinking to the matters of human behavior and social theory while at the same time rebelling by creating a mad fantasyland of natural science where the smell of a planet could create livestock or bring oranges out of permafrost and icecap. (Fourier and Franklin were both self-educated, keen witted, from a mercantile background, and I can’t help but notice that Franklin repeatedly visited France up until 1775 when he was recalled to America, and Fourier was born in 1772…) Without the complete set of preconceptions in place, Fourier was free to believe such fancies, and in fact that might have been part of the program as well, since it certainly served to prevent the Bible Communists from dismantling the growth of the industrial-materialistic mind virus as conceptualized by the Lunar Society and spread by their proxies. Likewise, possibly due to his head injury, Spear was the right kind of mind, so open to the neurolinguistic messages encoded in the new set of reality, that he heard the general message for mankind and embraced it, interpreted it as a direct communication for him and him alone from Franklin and the others, and set out to build the “machine god” a century and a half too early.

After all, Franklin’s many obsessions included the storage of knowledge, its controlled application as propaganda, and even its dissemination, begun while acting as Postmaster for the whole 13 colonies before the war, and the free and open distribution of his inventions, like the Franklin stove or the bifocal eyeglasses. What does he remind you of?

Imagine the Lunar Society working to etch their very obsessions into the minds of those who would come after them, to edit their worldview, to impose a pre-planned epistemic shift on the whole world. Canals and firearms and chemistry and electrical static… dispensing with ideas like the fluid transfer of energy, etheric vortices of matter, the phlogiston that departs from a destroyed item and which can recreate it. Jefferson died on July 4^th, 1820, but before he did, his friend and correspondent John Adams, who died that same day hundreds of miles away, exhaled the proclamation that “Thomas Jefferson still survives”: did he know because Jefferson managed to expel his phlogiston from his dying body and visited him? Did Lavoisier treat death lightly because he intended to will his internal essence forth from his disembodied head as soon as he was done with it? Imagine these giants of invention and science gathering themselves in the imprints they’d left behind: there was no storage medium then large enough to hold a human essence save the minds of the multitudes to come after them, and so the phlogiston of the Lunar Society stored itself in those thoughts they allowed us to think. (Shades of Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think” and its role in suggesting the internet to come.) And as the Industrial Revolution gave way to the Information Age, that mindset is still fully in effect throughout much of the world, as the great storage medium, the machine god is carved like circuitry onto the skin of the world and beamed through its air. The epistemic wave is rolling back in, and we’re seeing new consequences as ideas like morphic resonance, implicate/explicate holomovement, and quantum Darwinism actually bring the old ideas, the ether, the essence back into our lexicon in new forms. The astral plane, the Akashic record of the human mind is beginning to understand that there are things it cannot explain using its current set of axioms.

And the mad electrician from Philadelphia slouches toward the transfer hub of electrons, perhaps, to be reborn in the machine god.

Discuss this and other heresies at Matthew Rossi’s message board.

Matthew Rossi is the author of Things That Never Were (MonkeyBrain, 2003). He has work forthcoming in Peter Crowther’s Postscripts magazine, and a new collection of essays, titled Bottled Demons, will be out next summer from Prime Books.