Time and Tide

The Steampunk movement is half fashion and half imagination, a creative vision of an alternate world that spans possibility both in mechanical terms and in terms of the human response to our own machine creations. It halts for a moment at the boundary of the modern electronic era and envisions the art and adventure potential in a world of steam and gears.

Personally, I love the grace and beauty of the minute range of gears encompassed in our miniaturized watches, and the majestic power of the gears that turn massive hands on our largest clocks. But there are other feelings bound up in my response to steampunk as well. Certainly there is a sense of lost adventure in an era when the world was still a vast place with frontiers to discover. There were new wonders on every island and in the clouds, and reaching them was not the forlorn journey of a thousand lifetimes that exploring space would be. Where the scope and scale of the exploration to be done today dwarfs any individual to a microscopic size, the exploration of a world half-built with civilizations brings us down only to the size of ants on tiny air balloons, still holding the power to act independently and discover a thousand details in the span of a day where-ever the wind might blow.

Steampunk harkens back to an era when so much of the world was known that we could begin to think ourselves marvels of science, of technology to master new horizons, even as the science we held revealed to us that the expanse of those horizons might broaden unto the infinite. Our science was new enough to be like a child's kit of chemistry, emitting wonderful lights and bubbles, weird smells and corrosive agents that made us laugh at what they could eat through and etch - a side journey away from that corrosion that touches the spirit instead. It was an era where we could feel that we might learn anything, and an era still wrapped in a sense of wonder and a veil of undispelled mystery about what that anything would turn out to be. Foreign potentates had the power to amaze with strange costumes and vast empires of jewels, elephants and unicorns, even as we were still cheerfully arrogant enough to think nations of millions with a civilization of ten thousand years quaint and backward. We were bulls in the China shop, introducing vices and thinking those who succumbed to them inferior. We were unlimited by responsibility other than what we claimed to family and country, and those with more means than to be stuck working in factories that turned lungs to soot-stained rags might use those means to travel in India or Kenya with the surety of masters. Those raised to run in blackened streets might escape to ply the seas and die an early death of scurvy or the noose after a wild run of pillage and plunder. The black soot parts and vicious naivete are scrubbed away in most steampunk, leaving only the wonder and a child's sense of adventure at playing pirates, the details as ornate and piercing as the song of a wind-up nightingale.

When I look in the looking glass of steampunk style, I picture a society teetering, balanced on point with a parasol on a tightrope line balanced between future and past, between superstition and science, between mountains and rivers, what is solid and what moves, between god and man and the power of mystery and the terrible power of knowledge. These are not things, by any means, that are gone today - we still fight to find ethics and goals between our understanding of the struggle of the proletariat and our dreams of capitalist success or universal health. For now, we try to meet a common point with democracy - and in the midst of it still debate god vs. science in incompatible terms, work to understand how to exploit natural resources without destroying natural wonder, seek the unknown in the minute and the universal - all extensions of those same questions that have been with us all along but rose in such dichotomous intensity in blossoming of the Victorian and Edwardian eras. Was it then that we became so black and white in so many of our questions, or is this a tendency that has been with Western culture all along?

Many of the questions have become more desperate as we reach a point where the earth itself can no longer support many of our long held habits. Stepping into steampunk is like taking a step back, a moment for breathing room, when there was a hundred years between us and the question of the end of the world and we were all unaware of it, before there had ever been such a thing as a world war and before anyone realized that the black soot of those factories would stain the entire earth before we were done, carried in vast winds from the Chinese coast over entire oceans, pooling in clouds over Los Angeles and Mexico City. I wonder, in another hundred years, whether someone will look back at the current era as a romantic time of innocence when our understanding of the results of our past and the currents of our future was still unfolding with the inescapable grace of a fractal design, the curling tides sweeping into every nook and cranny like an eddy in the smallest pool.

The question of time itself has weighed on me since I was a child. When I drowned in a mountain river at the age of nine, what I felt included a vision of time far more flexible than we perceive on any given day, and immense beyond all knowing. Since then, I've had a feeling about time that pairs the longest ages with the shortest moments.

At twenty-six, I witnessed a dance done by a handful of Korean senior citizens. As they moved in the ancient steps, each dancer brought their own individual flair to the dance, from the gentleman who stepped as carefully as if his foot might break a shell of glass to the lady with the sere expression who marched with her back as straight and immovable as stone, the lady who seemed a little lost and the one who flung out her sleeves and made a great effort to smile flirtatiously at every turn. The dance, they estimated, was ten thousand years old; a version of it dated to the earliest records in China. The dancers were perhaps seventy years old on average, and to me they were ancient, three times my age as an adult. Yet even that ten thousand years was the smallest drop in the ages of the earth, and earth a newborn itself. I was moved to tears by how young these dancers were, and how swiftly lost in the river.

I stand in the heart of Denver sometimes, and look at the few remnants of the days when this city was new - a granary turned to a shop turned to a condominium, a storehouse half burned down to make way for a high-rise, a chunk of concrete from the remnant of a bridge that stood for years like the broken column of a giant's spine, a street called Little Raven - and know that it is barely 150 years old, and so much already has come and gone. We live as a soliton, maintaining our shape so long as we travel at constant speed, and we travel at a speed so swift that when we are interrupted we unravel at the pace of a heartbeat and the little left is dispersed like a curl of dust in the wind.

I am making jewelry of watch gears and the faces of women who were beautiful in 1910, many of whom are forgotten today but for these slips of images from French postcards at the time. I doubt the fascination of most people with those moving gears and turning hands has quite so much melancholy in the sense of time as I feel, but I do think that somewhere under the steam is a realization of time - both eternal and passing.

Is it Natsukashii - nostalgic? Or Aware - piercingly feeling a moment of perfection just before it passes - a kind of future nostalgia? That latter word, Japanese, is pronounced a-wah-reh. But I like it a lot that the romaji spelling for it matches the English word aware.