the timboucher experience

“By learning the rules, or laws, applying to the behavior of electricity, and by understanding the methods of producing, controlling and using it, electricity may be ‘learned’ without ever having determined its fundamental identity.” - Basic Electricity, The Bureau of Naval Personnel Training Manual

It’s staggering to think of how heavily we rely on forces which we only barely understand. While electrical effects were known to the ancients, it’s really only been since the late 1800’s that we’ve made widespread use of this force of nature as a part of our daily lives: just a few generations really. The history of human technological development, it seems, is driven almost entirely by a combination of what works and what we can get away with.

My own investigation of electricity has, up until now, been guided largely by what might be described as a primitivist impulse - a kind of magical curiosity about just what this mysterious force is which animates the world around me. The word electricity comes to us by way of the Greek word for “amber” (elektron), courtesy of one William Gilbert who wrote a treatise in the year 1600 on electricity and magnetism. Apparently if you rub amber with a cloth, it will take on a negative electrical charge and attract small objects to it.

The notion of an inner animating force at work in the universe seems to cut across cultures and historical epochs. Whether you’re talking about the aether, the vivifying pneuma, ch’i, prana, orgone, odic force, elan vital, mana or more modern conceptions of electricity, there seems to be some shared root human experience of an energy which flows through all things in varying degrees, giving motion and life to those forms in which it dwells most powerfully.

Though we have at this point in history accumulated many models and theories of what this vivifying force or energy actually is, our most important means of understanding it still comes from observing what it actually does, the observable effects it has within the bands of reality of which we are capable of perceiving.

The other day a friend of mine said something to the effect of, “Reality is the geometrization of energy” - a statement so simple that it immediately struck me as true. We exist, as human beings, amidst swirling seas of energy. Our bodies, as material constructs, are something like slowed down concretizations of energy. The unique arrangement of our constituent atoms and molecules into cells and organs provides us with the technical means and apparati by which we’re able to perceive ourselves as experiential entities within the field of reality. It is an arrangement which is governed, on a fundamental level, by observable chemical and energetic laws of interactions. Our cells transmit electrical impulses as part of their communication processes. And yet our bodies are so finely tuned that even a miniscule variation in electrical current (50 or 60-Hz AC, or DC 300 to 500 mA ) flowing through our body is enough to fatally upset the rhythm of the human heart. We don’t understand what electricity is, but we know it can either kill us or power our homes and appliances. It’s all a matter of proper application of the fundamental energy which animates the cosmos: of figuring out how, through human art, to create the proper channels, circuits and pathways for the flow of energy from point A to point B. It may be that we never quite *know* what electricity is, but that the models and theories we apply towards understanding it allow us to continually create new tools, methods and techniques of harnessing what might be described as the universal life force which flows through and around us, animating our very beings.

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