Kiran Subbaiah/Texts by KS/Revised Lessons in Taking and Giving
Chancing upon one of my secondary school physics exercise books I noticed in its back pages a diagram I had made of a dynamo that charged a motor, which in turn propelled the dynamo. The idea was that once the apparatus is assembled and the central flywheel given a push to get the mechanism started, it should continue to work all by itself without any more energy having to be applied to it. This devise of course serves no other purpose but to exist by and for itself, or if we consider the motor and dynamo as separate entities, they function as a pair of mutual companions, each keeping the other in motion.
In spite of its theoretical fidelity to the laws of motion, as the physics teacher later explained to me, the contraption in actuality would not function. This is because the load of its various components and friction would come into account and consume more energy than the system could produce to keep itself in motion.... Knowledge can be quite disappointing.
Consoled by the fact that even da Vinci had repeatedly tried designing contraptions for perpetual motion - of which none materialised - it seems to me now, that there are other important lessons to be learnt from such failures. The fact that a wheel when made to spin freely, slows down and eventually comes to a halt, should eliminate the necessity to elaborate on any mechanism for perpetual motion. It is only when the complexity of these elaborations go beyond our ability to comprehend the performance potential of such mechanisms that they seem to accommodate extra-real possibilities. A schoolboy fortunately has his teachers to consult - shortcuts to disillusionment. Pioneers like Leonardo however had to take the pains of constructing their devices to learn that they wouldn't work.
As an inventor Leonardo's imagination was rather farfetched for his times. His ideas for flying machines, which he had worked on with so much conviction, materialised only four centuries later. He did not begin conceiving them with the intention of engineering an air-transport vehicle. His craze for the machine was inspired by the spiritual profoundness associated with flight during his times.
The first model of the helicopter that Leonardo conceived would appear rather ridiculous to us today:
This machine was to be propelled by four men pushing the shaft handles, running around on the platform in circles. It is hard to believe this pre-industrial inventors inability to premonition the amount of power required to elevate such a bulk of an object. Many supportive inventions later when the men were replace by an engine as powerful as a handful of horses and the Archimedean screw metamorphosized into an outstretched propeller, the machine finally rose from the earth. But when the dream was realised its profoundness ceased to exist; the Gods and Angels vacated the skies to seek refuge in a greater beyond.
Formulations for perpetual motion however have remained within the hypothetical premises of mechanics. They bear their significance as objects of science fiction - not in the sense that they speak about what can one day come true, but ironically as manifestations that remind us about the limitations of technological progress in bringing about an extra-material deliverance.
As a sculptor I had already been exploring the possibilities of making quasi-functional objects which spoke about the call for such deliverance, as well as to lay bare the reasons for it remaining unfulfilled, So when I came across this back-page diagram of the motor and dynamo, it struck me as something rather poetic. The contraption wasn't being conceived in order to serve a practical purpose, and though it was a purely technical idea it revealed to me something about my naive school-time romanticism. Disillusionment did not extinguish this romanticism but has helped it evolve from its ignorance.The word 'Utopia' surely did not exist in my vocabulary at that time, and yet the diagram appears to have been fabricated as a mechanical allegory for it. In this toy-like contraption I had wished to see functioning a fair and uninterrupted transaction of effort and command between two entities, where one entity consequentially turned out to be a mirror image of the other. The diagram lies before me now as a symbol for what the phenomenon of Taking and Giving ideally ought to be, and the dream of seeing it perpetuated with the fairytale ending 'happily ever after'.
The beauty of a dream after all lies in its impossibility.
July 1997
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Index:Texts by KS
