pneumatador
July 28, 2010
Going through the drive-through at the bank is a taste of The Future. Modest though it may be. I do not mean the actual future that we are plummeting headlong towards. Rather, The Future as envisioned by the types who put up the Space Needle for Seattle’s 1962 World’s Fair.
That vision of The Future caused me, and the rest of us at the roller rink, to look eagerly forward to the distant 2000s when we’d have moving sidewalks, levitating shoes, maybe even teleportation. A pristine future where gravity had little hold. In That Future we’d all approach weightlessness. In our travels, we’d rise on clean, invisible energy that would not even muss our hair, let alone interrupt our profound thoughts. We’d all be equals. We’d be outfitted in sleek jumpsuits. We’d have pristine cities and we’d lean towards spire-and-blob architecture. We’d love a good pool of serene water; we’d take for granted the force field that enables us to stroll across it. We’d be blissed-out. It might have been perfect, if utopia weren’t terrifying. (Thanks George Orwell, Ursula LeGuin, Margaret Atwood, Aldus Huxley, among others, for clarifying that point.)
pneumatic rubber fender air bag
So, anyway, a trip to the bank drive-through is all it takes to send me off into that realm. Those pneumatic tubes that you send your meager deposit, whoosh, from exterior to interior, are cool. Despite the fact that I am using them in the present, they seem oddly like a vestiage leftover from a culture that went to The Future and is now long gone.
pneumatic carriage
Now that I am in parent mode I have the opportunity to explain to curious little ones how pneumatic tubes work. They were mostly satisfied with my explanation, but I wasn’t. I’m obsessing about the word and the mood the technology puts me in. Generally, when I’m stuck by obsession it is time to go research the full meaning of a word; it’s origin, its’ varied meanings often illuminate why an obsession took hold.
So first a trip to Wiki.
Quick and dirty definition of pneumatics:
Pneumatics is a branch of technology, which deals with the study and application of use of pressurized gas to affect mechanical motion.
But wait! I can’t tell you how delighted I was to find out about this:
Pneumatic (Gnosticism)
The pneumatics (“spiritual”, from Greek πνεῦμα, “spirit”) were, in gnosticism, the highest order of humans, the other two orders being psychics and hylics. The pneumatic saw himself as escaping the doom of the material world via the secret knowledge. Outsiders could only know these secrets by joining a gnostic group. To be a gnostic is to believe in three planes of existence: the pure unknown (demiurge), the material world of coitus and comfort, and the pure spiritual realm of ascension or escape.
Discovering pneumatic gnosticism has me dreaming up a character with the job title: pneumatador. The pneumatador is adept at jumping across the three planes of existence; remains conscious of the other two while existing in one; does not need to join any group to do this and thus annoys the pneumatic gnostics.
demonstrating a pneumatic exoskeleton
Here’s a few more striking images I came across searching the word pneumatic. Judging by the imagery, pneumatics is as arcane now as it was for the Greeks.
pneumatic symbols
(Was a little surprise to find no bikini-clad girls. Has pneumatic fallen out of use for describing a particularly gravity-defying rack?)
