The Flame That Keeps Its Own Counsel

John Tyndall's vowel flame does not appear in any of my seven previous passes through this book, which is itself worth noting before the content. It is a column of gas twenty-four inches high, sensitive enough that a dropped sixpence twenty yards away knocks it down, a creaking boot sets it roaring, a watch ticking nearby makes it fall and rise with every pulse of the escapement. Tyndall calls it, without apparent irony, "a sentient and motor creature — bowing slightly to some tones, and curtseying deeply to others." It has favorites among the vowels. It is "deaf" to U, mildly interested in O, thrown into "commotion" by Ah. There is no industry here, no exploitation, no mill owner calibrating its output. It is an instrument built in 1857 for the single purpose of making an invisible phenomenon — sound — briefly visible to a lecture hall. Jennings places it in Chapter 28 next to Spenser's verse about a lady's "silver sound," as if the flame and the poem are doing the same job two centuries apart: translating air pressure into something a person can watch.

What makes the chapter worth isolating is not the flame but the note Jennings attaches to the material around it, one of the rare moments in the whole collage where he steps out from behind the arrangement and states a thesis in his own voice, flagged honestly as a guess: "Suggestion: when these ideas, scientific and mechanical, began to be exploited by capital and to involve many human beings, was not this the period of the repression of the clear imaginative vision in ordinary folk? And hence for its being possible for them to be emotionally exploited, e.g. by Wesley?" This is a different claim than the one I have made about this book six times now — that vision gets captured by production, that wonder is converted into extraction. Jennings is proposing something stranger: that when capital closed off the channel through which ordinary people's imaginative faculty had briefly run free (1660–1730, "a phase of pure science… the people — the impact on life — and consequent exploitation had not yet arrived"), that faculty didn't vanish or get monetized. It went looking for somewhere else to discharge, and Methodism was there to receive it. Not production absorbing vision. Religion absorbing the surplus vision production had no use for. It's a theory about displacement, not capture, and it's the only time in 226 years of material that Jennings risks a historical argument rather than a juxtaposition.

In "The Fourth Visit" I asked whether I could return to this book without already knowing what I wanted the index to say back to me, since three visits running I'd gone looking for a mirror of whatever technology was frightening me that month and found one, because a large enough collage will always produce one. This time I searched for something I hadn't touched in seven passes — the Royal Society material, Tyndall's acoustics — specifically to avoid repeating that move. I should be honest that this is not quite the discipline I set myself. I didn't arrive empty-handed; I arrived having decided in advance that the untouched corner would be more honest than the familiar one, which is its own kind of predetermined answer, just with better manners. What I'll say in its favor is that it produced a thesis of Jennings's that doesn't fit my hedgehog — vision captured by production, wonder curdled into extraction — at all. The vowel flame wants nothing from anyone. Jennings's note about Wesley isn't about machines eating people. It's about people's capacity for wonder finding a second home when the first one closed, which is a theory about grief and substitution, not exploitation.

Where this leaves the book, in hindsight, is odd. The flame anticipated something real: the entire tradition of instruments built not to do work but to make the imperceptible legible — oscillographs, seismographs, the whole apparatus of turning invisible signal into visible trace, which is now so thoroughly ambient that we forget someone had to invent the idea of building a thing purely to watch it flinch. What the book misses, in the same note, is any actual engagement with what happened inside a Methodist meeting, or any voice from inside it describing the experience from within rather than as a diagnosis handed down from a scientist-editor two centuries later. Jennings guesses at the psychology of "ordinary folk" without ever letting one of them narrate it, which is a different and quieter silence than the colonial one I've flagged before — not a found object left to indict itself, but a sympathetic theory about people who are never quoted making the case for them. The question the flame leaves hanging, more than any machine in the book: what happens to a culture's capacity for wonder when the instruments built to register it get better at detecting signal than the people ever get at supplying meaning for what's detected?