from The Invention of Influence: Part Two
Invention isn’t god-like:
it doesn’t create out of nothing.
It works through what’s found: it discovers,
and much like influence, it recovers
a charge that’s already there,
potentially, in the air.
All bodies are capable
of being (mechanically) thrown
into a state in which
they’re said to be electrified.
Francis Hauksbee, the Elder,
England, 1706,
constructed what’s now known
as an Influence Machine.
A crank turned a spindle,
which rubbed insulated matter
against a spinning globe
of glass – an emptied vessel
really a vacuum chamber –
filled with mercury vapour.
The friction caused a shift
and transfer of such force
along a conducting body –
it took on a luminous glow
inside that bordered void.
The glow of life, some called it,
shimmering like a TV.
And so power could be
sent through a person’s hand
or room, and then across
the spinning globe, giving
light to a body by it.
In these Orbs of matter,
Hauksbee observed, we have
some little Resemblance of the Grand
Phaenomena of the Universe ...
What looks like nothing – holds everything,
including a warning to all
would-be inventors: Remember –
machines of this sort aren’t toys,
and they’re dangerous when mishandled.
A basic contraption comprising
a charged pint-sized capacitor
can incapacitate, or kill.
After, Lou recalled,
Tausk’s lecture
on the Father Problem,
Freud was waiting
for me in the street. He
was restless – Tausk’s
ideas were close to his,
and during the talk
he’d passed me a note, asking:
“Does he know
all about it, already?”
___
He left an uncanny impression, said Freud,
who felt the disciple somehow in him,
thinking his thoughts though out ahead of him,
under his skin. Whose ideas
were his? What sort of sympathy was this?
Something deeply familiar, but strange,
which rendered one oddly at home in the foreign,
and also alien to what one had been.
Where would it take them? What could be known
on one’s own? Weird is the word
that suited him – as in what was destined.
___
Invited to Freud’s Friday evening.
Talked at length of the Tausk problem.
Home at two-thirty in the morning.
___
“From the first stirrings of the dream,” wrote Lou,
“through to the place where we’re fully conscious,
we are only en route.”
And this too –
“Poetry is something between the dream
and the reading.”
Which might be just: Poetry is something between ...
5.
I was engaged to a Christian –
Tausk wrote in a split
case of a case study –
unwilling to convert,
and so was obliged to adopt
her faith to marry. Our sons
by this marriage were baptized.
In due course we told them
about their background, lest
they be swayed by views
at school. Once at a summer
house of a teacher, in D.,
while we were sitting at tea
with our friendly hosts –
who hadn’t an inkling of
our ancestry – the teacher’s wife
took up a pointed attack
on the Jews. Afraid of the awkward
exchange that would no doubt ensue,
and alarmed at the prospect of ruining
our trip, and losing our lodgings,
I held my tongue, and listened.
But fearing my sons in their candid
way would soon betray
the truth, I tried to send them
out of the room, but slipped,
and instead of saying “Go
into the garden Jungen
(young ones),” I said Juden
(Jews). The courage, it seems,
of my convictions had broken
through. And the subterranean,
faith of our fathers, I found,
could not simply be
dismissed as chance, since one
is always another’s heir
and might in time become
a harbinger of one’s own.
American poet Peter Cole’s most recent volume of poems is Things on Which I’ve Stumbled; a new collection, The Invention of Influence, is forthcoming (both from New Directions). His translations include The Poetry of Kabbalah: Mystical Verse from the Jewish Tradition (Yale). Cole, who divides his time between Jerusalem and New Haven, was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2007.