Impossible machines

and the dream of sustainable work

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The pursuit of perpetual motion appears too pleasing a puzzle to some minds for them to ever abandon its tantalizingly impossible solution.

What would right, balanced healthy work look like if we lived in an economic system that permitted it? Work that was not extractive, or abusive, toxic, draining, devaluing. Work that rewarded us with the ability to feed and house those we love, but also moved through the world as an extension of our love?

What if our output was equal to the input? What if most people got back what they put in?

I almost can’t imagine it.

The pursuit is no other than most tantalizing delusion and an infallible snare.

My personal inheritance around work is complex, messy. On one side – a legacy of family farmers who pulled food from the soil and saw their work as feeding a nation. On the other, a family of extractive robber barons, Pennsylvania oil and southwestern natural gas, living off pollutants and the exploited surplus value of those did their dirty work.

My father, lived off inherited wealth and SSD payments never found a way to work in the world, referring to himself from age thirty on as “medically retired,” My mother ran toward liberation, taking us and leaving my father and all that oil wealth behind, and ironically – worked pumping gas, just at poverty level, for much of her short, emancipated life.

As I entered adulthood, I flailed around trying to understand what work could and could not be for me. Wanting to be a priestess in service of Art and never think about work at all, I was an actor for a decade. Which also meant that I waited tables for ten long years – barely making enough to pay for rent and utilities. Eventually, I dropped the Art – or Art dropped me - and I chose Service as my organizing call and got myself into social work school. I pursued work as sacrifice, focusing exclusively on the needs of others while erasing my own. My reward for that self-erasure was supposed to be a combination of appreciation and income. But eventually my own disabling illness rained down upon me and it all turned to sawdust in my mouth.

None of it was enough.

The archeology of engineering has no similar phase of enduring and pertinacious pursuit, despite conflicting evidence and multitudinous instances of degrading failure.

I was grateful to have been able to support my family and feed and house my kids and elders – but negotiating and then emerging from several years of disability initiated me to the deep consideration of the notion of sustainable work.

Nothing I had seen or tried had ever approached sustainability.

I came to know, through a mandatory embodied process that is hard for me to find language for, that screamed in my central nervous system, a cry that came from my very cells that the way I had been working was killing me. It was viscerally unsustainable.

I also came to recognize that some work energized me, filled me, allowed me to operate closer to my center, where work felt easier, almost frictionless, natural.

A particular gentleman insisted that he had an important invention which turned out to be no other than a herculean perpetual motion machine, of power and dimensions like a steam-engine, But of which he only possessed the drawings and few cast-iron wheels.

This was not as simple as noticing my preferences, it was not about work I liked or didn’t like. It was not about what I wanted or didn’t want, or even about doing what I loved. It was about uncovering what I had a heart for, and what I didn’t, discerning what was my business, and what was not my business at all. My body told me this. It involved little to no cognitive process.

My body told me, through invigoration and enervation how to work as close to my internal energy source as possible. It required that I eliminate waste and diffusion, reduce frictions, minimizing toxic build up, relying as much as possible, on only the purest personal fuel.

When I tried to articulate it to others, it sounded ridiculously close to the anthem of privilege: “Do what you love” – which really wasn’t what I meant at all. I was talking about something far more mechanical, trying to extricate myself to whatever degree I could, from a dehumanizing system of labor that is designed to kill us, use us up, grind our bones to make their bread.

He shortly afterwards abandoned any further inquiry finding it too exciting for his brain, causing him to talk on the subject in his sleep.

I yearned to get back what I gave out, get it back again and give it out again in a perpetual circle of enough. Behind all my inadequate and inexact language lurked a steam-punk image, a mechanical archetype of a perpetual motion machine, a contraption that generates energy equal to its expenditure.

According to the laws of thermodynamics self-motive mechanisms are impossible. All movement slows toward inertia. But that hasn’t stopped seven or eight centuries worth of inventors from trying. Patent offices, since the 1400’s have received thousands and thousands of applications for self-sustaining devices – and none of them viable.

The course of descent will gradually diminish as compared to ascent, and hence oscillation and rest must be the inevitable result of any arrangement.

In the mid-1800’s, engineer Henry Dirks wrote a book surveying all the failures he could find to “restrict the course taken by deluded inventors” who relentlessly continued to pursue the impossible.  Those in the grips of “perpetual motion mania” spent fortunes, destroyed their health and reputations trying to create a device that works infinitely without an external energy source, that didn’t grind to a halt, succumbing to the forces of inertia.

I suspect such fixations are wishes that our own bodies, the machines we inhabit, could find a way to work in the world and never wear out and come to rest. The quest for perpetual motion as the dream of immortality and self-energizing work in a system that takes our output, hands it up to the wealthy and leaves us struggling to keep up production.

But we do break down. We age. We wind down. Our bodies stop. We run an eternal deficit until we grind to a halt.

The impossible pursuit of perpetual motion as the impossible industrialized expectation that we find a way to work as if we are the perpetual motion machine.  

Loving your work or finding labors that are generally pleasurable might reduce the friction, allowing the machine to run longer – which may be why so many people hope that transforming hobbies, arts and recreations into labor will fulfill them. But inertia still exerts its pull:  pleasures become chores, repetitive tasks organized around production numbers and deadlines, the joy of dabbling and play drains away.

Oh, ye seekers after perpetual motion, how many vain chimeras have you pursued? Go ahead and take your place with alchemists! – Leonardo DaVinci

The balanced machine of fantasy cannot sustain itself solely from the value it produces. Money is necessary but it isn’t enough on its own to keep the gears turning.

I watched my mother exhaust herself to feed and clothe her children. I know she performed this labor for love’s sake, to provide for us. She performed labor out of terror of what would happen to us all if she stopped. Her work was toxic, smelly, physically draining, work designed to break a body down. And it did.

I know she yearned for more, for fulfilling work that allowed her to participate in meaningful relationships, that fed her sense of purpose.

Or maybe I just yearned for that for her.

And for us all.

To run long, well and smoothly, we are dependent on sources of energy beyond those we can manufacture ourselves. Water, wind, sunlight, harnessing the forces of nature, borrowing their force and flow is as close to clean fuel and perpetual motion as we are ever going to get.

Philosophers their skill to show,

The problem sent both far and wide,

To make machines vie with the tide;

Their center lasting as the Sun,

With weights, like stars, their course to run.  

What are the healthy forces that can fuel human effort and keep it running as long and as healthfully as possible?

Spirit? Connection? Relatedness? Love?

Something else, something larger, some Source that empowers us if we stay near, and that leaves us empty and drained if we are lured or pressed by the systems we are embedded it, too far away.  

Maybe it is when we feel that our work brings true benefits to both self and other, when work connects us to the interdependent web of life in all its forms, when we align our own nature with with the flow of Nature. When our work, because of all that we love, and in return for all that we have received, becomes an opportunity to demonstrate our love to the wider world. We can even do work we hate, for love’s sake.

When we are full-filled with this ineffable pneuma – wind – spirit, when work does not obstruct larger natural forces moving in and through us, perhaps then our labors can become sustainable.

Citations from:  Perpetuum Mobile: A History of the Search for Self-Motive Power from the 13^th to the 19^th Century, by Henry Dirks

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