2: Transmutation through Play

From garbage to gold

There’s a difference between discovery and invention. Broken down etymologically, discover is very much like reveal. Discoveries can be made by accident, while inventions, ideally, are the fruit of effort toward a goal. Troposcope is truly both of these things - at once an invention and a discovery. It is my invention, but within that it is also the refinement of something I discovered by accident.

Though I had a goal when I set out, the result is the fruit of serendipity and of a certain kind of alchemy.

In the previous post I hinted at the feeling of piercing the veil which accompanied my discovery of the mechanism behind Troposcope. Today I’ll delve into how that discovery came about, and also begin to write about the feelings I experienced as this process unfolded. The truth is, I had an idea and a goal, but I failed. In the failure there was a hint of something very special.

I found the first components of this invention in a dumpster. I began with literal garbage which I assembled in a new way, and within days I had a perfected mechanism whose operation made me feel like I had revealed something almost miraculous. I accomplished this by seeing the magical in the mundane.

I had been working for several months managing the small warehouse of a floor coverings store. We sold and installed carpet and linoleum, but also window treatments like Venetian blinds. At the end of this particular workday I took a carpet remnant out to place it behind the dumpster, where the owner of the business wanted me to leave such things for the local homeless population. I must also have had something to throw away, because I looked inside the dumpster and saw that someone had tossed one of our display model blinds. What really caught my eye were the small aluminum beads which decorated the ends of the cords used to raise and lower the blinds. I had already been collecting trade beads and other ornaments for years, so I couldn’t let these beautiful things be destroyed. I took them home.

These beads were composed of two hollow, threaded hemispheres which came together to hide the knot at the end of the cord. That weekend I attached these two beads at either end of a two-foot length of thin, braided cord.

Why? I couldn’t have told you.

What I do know is that I loved holding on to one bead and whirling the other around. The shiny surface picked up and threw back the light of the sun and made something really nice to look at.

At some point I decided it would be fun to try to grasp the cord in the middle and try to make the two terminal beads orbit in opposite directions.  So, at 21 years old, I was playing with a length of string with a bead fastened to each end, hoping I could get them to orbit opposite each other if I pinched the string right in the middle and swung the beads this way and that. 

I failed. Yet I really wanted this to work, and kept coming at the problem from different angles.

A few tinkerings later found me with the same cord tied at its midpoint to the end of a pencil, waiving it around like some kind of magic wand. I failed yet again, but something new started happening: The knot I’d tied to keep the cord on the pencil began to roll.  It didn’t come undone, but I wound up with one long length of cord and one short to either side of the pencil.  Because the knot was no longer very tight, the beads always wound up orbiting together. This was really not what I wanted, so I gave up trying to make one bead go this way and the other that, and just started spinning them and let the two of them go around in the same direction.

That’s when my dad called my name from the other side of the room. Spinning all the while, I turned to face him.  I have no idea what he wanted to say, because I was quickly distracted from it by the swat one of the beads gave me on the forearm. I had run smack-dab into gyroscopic precession.

This was intriguing enough, but when I did it again (spinning, turning, and wincing) I was even more intrigued to see that the bead on the shorter string came toward my arm to smack me while the other on the longer string essentially went about its business and continued to whirl away as it was.

Why didn’t this feel like another failure?  Why didn’t I get tired of self-flagellation? I don’t know, but I knew I had something neat. I knew I had to get to the bottom of something which mystified me. I was hooked by this phenomenon and had to keep going.

I wanted to crack this code and get the more reactive side of my gizmo to come out of alignment with the lazier one but not whack me on the arm.  I kept at it and kept getting closer.  The measure of my impending success was the progression of red spots on my forearm as I got closer to my goal.  The longer I was able to keep it from hitting me, the farther around my arm went this trail of little welts.

I had a special spot where I went to read and daydream, so when I went there later in the afternoon I took this contraption with me.  This meant that when I finally  got it to work, with one pendulum spinning on a fairly steady plane and the other changing planes all around my arm, full circle again, I was fifty feet up an oak tree on a web I’d woven of polypropylene cord, and it’s a wonder I didn’t fall in my excitement.  

The new device looked like nothing when it was stationary, but open and spinning, made up as it was of pink paracord and polished aluminum, it looked like some sort of nebula or flower, or like a futuristic Tibetan prayer wheel.

I felt like I’d cracked the cosmic egg.

In a very real way, this was a spiritual experience for me. Not only had the raw and rejected components of my contraption been transformed, but so had I. The feeling of connection with all things great and small. With microcosm and macrocosm was amazing.

When I’ve been present as other people have learned to use Troposcope, I’ve often heard that they too feel something special when they get it, and that this goes beyond a simple feeling of accomplishment. The magic is palpable to many.

I hope you’ll give it a whirl. Pick one up here.