He finally turned to me and said, “You’ve got no head for this, so why do you bother?”
“It’s not about being practical,” I told him. “I like looking at engines. I think they’re works of art.”
He gave me a queer look, and returned to his work. After a few minutes curiosity finally got the better of him, and he broke the silence. “What do you mean, ‘Works of art?’”
“I mean I think they’re beautiful. They have this terrific balance between function and form. All these meticulously crafted geometric shapes put together for optimal mechanical performance; in the process they attain an aesthetic balance as well.”
He snorted. “You’d probably surprise a few engineers with that thought.”
“Would I? Just look at the block of a V-8 engine and tell me someone wasn’t concerned about it actually looking nice. It’d be one thing if it were just a hunk of metal with 8 holes bored into it, but it’s actually a smooth hunk of metal, with well-defined edges. The holes are perfectly round, evenly spaced. It’s very tidily designed. I’m telling you, if you shone the right light on it and photographed it from the right angle, you would think it’s beautiful.”
I still believe that to be true. In fact, someone with the right talent could make quite a snazzy coffee-table book out of photographing the guts of a car (hey, JD: you listening?). But my fascination is spurred by more than some Platonic sense of perfect balance. I can remember the awe I felt when I saw my first motorcycle dismantled, staring into the tabernacle of those combustion chambers and thinking, So this is where it all happens.
It’s a little like looking inside the human body. I sort of know how it all works, and in the case of the combustion engine, I have some glimmer of the reasoning applied to its design. And of course the way an engine “goes” isn’t in the same league of mystery as the way recombinant DNA “goes.” But still: wow!
Reverence — that’s the word I’m looking for. I actually revere this stuff. Tomorrow I'll post another example from my youth.
4 comments:
I'm with you on this, WP. I even took some drafting classes eons ago because I loved the schemactics (??) of the engines. My dad, a chem eng, used to take carbeurators (remember those?) apart because he figured he'd do a better job of optimizing their operation. You know, that Slavic sense of paranoia that one grew up in over in the old country. So, the paranoia of The Man simply transferred from shadowy Party figures to equally cloudy Corporate officials. I loved seeing him lay out all of the components (he likened it to the human heart) and then putting them together, with modifications he concocted.
I lose you on the inner workings of the human body, though. Never one to stomach gooey items, I find the body innards to be excessively "plastic"-y as opposed to the hard honed and polished engine innards. Throw in the color of the liquids inside one's body and I get weak at the knees.
Now, if blood and plasma and all those other fluids were the color of oil or anti-freeze, I may have gone on to med school.
What I'd like on my coffee table (if I had one) would be a little finely bound collection of select WP/DV post-&-comments banter. : )
Harder & harder to love anything that burns the fleeting fossil fuels, but I'm with you too, even so. A deep-seated attachment to this connection between darkly gleaming metal, component form, and the potentials of motion & symmetry, established in boyhood.
DV - I'm with you when it comes to exploring the human body. I guess I was thinking of my only Physiology course, first year University. Didn't have to visit the cadaver room or anything like that, thank goodness. The stuff I was looking at looked more like the Peterson Field Guides, or Body Worlds.
PB - yeah, these engines have literally become the bane of our existence, haven't they? Still and all, "component and form" as you say.
Paul,
I believe the true trick in any commenting is to be the remora feeding off the Shark postings.
As we, his faithful readers know, WP is the Whale Shark of postings. Lots of stuff to feed off of.
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