—after Raúl Martínez Beteta
At the Museu Maritím Barcelona, I stood
in the entryway and watched the automaton:
a dull metal fish that swung and rotated
without any apparent assistance
save for the push of air that my presence
brought to it. The steel was an orange shimmer
of underwater motion; the sky above glowed
topaz like the Mediterranean; and the fish,
larger than life, swung its creaky tail
from one side to another with a sound
of recycled metals and nails and nets,
junk from the sea that would and does kill
any real ocean life, now repurposed
and born again. The fish hearkened back
to a Renaissance desire for things
that move as if on their own, so lively,
so animated with a kind of spirit,
that they might even be capable of emotion.
When the spring is pushed, the machine stirs,
just like the human body with its various clocks
that chime throughout the day.
Who knows how much of any being
is sheer will, and how much pure inertia.
Take Topsy, for example. When I first read
about this spectacularly troubled elephant,
it was in the context of Edison's great
experiment: his way of assuring the world
that direct current was superior to alternate,
that its shock would be swift, clean, and painless.
Topsy's rage was her primary emotion.
By the time she was electrocuted, she had already killed
a man, attacked several others, and her death
was, in the view of her owners, inevitable,
no matter that the man she killed had goaded her
with lit cigarettes and booze and heckling.
When you've got a bad elephant
on your hands, the thinking went,
there was nothing to do but send a charge
through its body, and if the death
were in service to modern electricity,
progress, and change, then all the better.
In the moments before Topsy died,
it almost seemed like the cyanide-laced carrots
and her slow walk in copper slippers
were a part of the elephant's wish, a last great bow
that only she could initiate. I look again at the fan
of the fish's tail, its creak and glide, how it opens
to all possibility, which is a machine of its very own.
[Note: the italicized quotes come from Joseph Roach's anecdotes about Rene Descartes in The Player's Passion (University of Michigan Press, 1985), p. 62.]
