Motor Eyes.

[jporter]

> From: "John Bailey" <johnbonbailey at hotmail.com>

> 
> And, not surprisingly, it was shortly thereafter that "The Golden Age of
> Automata" came into being, in France and thereabouts.
> 
> We can also level a quivering finger at Julien Offray de la Mettrie, who,
> following Descartes, tried to expand the Metaphor of Man the Machine in his
> saggy-bottomed tract of the same title, though I prefer to translate it as
> "Machine Man!" (exclamation mark added), which difuses some of the heavy
> handed seriousness of its polemic...He later wrote a companion piece, Man
> the Plant, not a guidebook to nuclear power management, but a diatribe on
> "our" place as vegetable matter.
> 
> La Mettrie's work was very popular, and is still reprinted today. It's also
> a prime example of the way new vogues in technology (ie. automata) bleed
> into far more important issues, such as the very way we conceive of our
> subjectivity. When we get to SHOCK and SHROUD, we will be duly informed of
> one of the more insidious ways this very process has occurred: in the 18th
> Century, man conceived of himself as a clockwork machine...later, as new
> "discoveries" asserted themselves, we became bundles of heat, conduits of
> energy, what next? Look around, folks. Since V. was published, we've been
> meat computers, quantum flesh mutations, what've you got?
> 
> Technology and spirituality are not two important themes in Pynchon, they're
> one.
> 

Yes, yes- me too. Leaning far enough into the wind tonight, I too can smell
those Frenchies... detente off the starboard bow, spelled: S C I E N C E.

The third person singular has its uses after all. Somewhere between
Auschwitz and Los Alamos, the new technicians of the sacred are busy
refining their craft.

Perhaps working from the inspiration of some half-remembered tale heard at
the feet of the third man- the civil engineer who made it back with Hugh and
Pike-Leeming, and then discreetly disappeared- some grandson or
granddaughter is busy tonight.

What's next?

jody