TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/012990/0129640.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.4 KB | 126 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 84

Hoy! Hoy! Mushi-Mushi! Allo!


By Lance Morrow


    When Mel Brooks' 2,000-Year-Old Man was asked to name the
greatest invention in the history of the world, he answered
without hesitation: "Saran Wrap." A nice try, but wrong. The
greatest invention in the history of the world was -- is -- the
telephone.

    The telephone is a commonplace item on a much-wired planet.
The idea of being able to throw your voice around the world and
in a few seconds hit precisely the ear you wanted among all the
globe's 10 billion ears has lost its capacity to surprise. But
the telephone has strange powers. The sudden little Ice Age that
descended upon AT&T last week may have given some Americans, in
an almost subliminal way, a dose of the metaphysical spooks.

    One hundred fourteen years ago, Bell's instrument began the
electronization of the earth. The telephone system has amounted
to the first step toward global mental telepathy. The telephone
and its elaborations (computer modems, fax machines and so on)
have endowed the planet with another dimension altogether: a
dissolution of distance, a warping of time, a fusion of the
micro (individual mind) and macro (the world). Charles de Gaulle
declined to have a telephone, undoubtedly because he had already
fused micro and macro -- Le monde, c'est moi.

    With the telephone, reality began to dematerialize and go
magic, disintegrating here to recombine over there. Information
began riding around the world on electricity. The abrupt
disconnection of such a familiar yet mysterious faculty, the
telephone, must be profoundly unsettling -- like a glimpse of
a dead world, a premonition of absolute cold.

    The telephone is one of those miracles one can discuss in
terms either sacred or profane. (The same is true of babies.)
The phone is of course a mere home appliance and business tool,
and by the standards of the 21st century, a primitive one. To
bring electronic mysticism to the telephone may seem something
like illustrating the wonders of flight by discussing pigeons.

    If you think of the telephone purely as a secular voice
thrower, it arrives in the mind at its most irritating. For
example, no one has yet devised a pleasant way for a telephone
to come to life. The ring is a sudden intrusion, a drill in the
ear. Pavlov's dog hears and picks the damned thing up. The
Satanic bleats from some new phones are the equivalent of sound
lasers. Don't hurt me again, says the dog. I'll talk. Perhaps
the phone that looks like a duck decoy and quacks instead of
ring will breed new species -- phones that bark or baaa or moo
or, maybe, sound like distant summer thunder.

    But the ring cannot be subtle. Its mission is disruption.
The phone is the instrument we were issued for a march into the
age of discontinuity. The telephone call is a
breaking-and-entering that we invite by having telephones in the
first place. Someone unbidden barges in and for an instant or
an hour usurps the ears and upsets the mind's prior
arrangements. Life proceeds in particles, not waves. The author
Cyril Connolly wrote lugubriously about the sheer intimacy of
intrusion that a telephone can manage. "Complete physical union
between two people is the rarest sensation which life can
provide -- and yet not quite real, for it stops when the
telephone rings."

    Something about telephones is obscurely comic, related to
some manic vaudeville. In your fist you clutch to the ear an
object that looks ignominiously like the shining plastic cousin
of a shoe. Designers have produced more streamlined models, but
an essential ungainliness is inescapable. It results partly from
the pressing of technology against anatomy. The technosmooth
circuitry is pushed bizarrely against the old Darwinian skull.
The talker's being comes unfocused from the visual immediate
room and refocuses -- through the ear! -- elsewhere. The Here
communes with There through sudden activations of breath, vocal
cords, jawbone, tongue, lips, eyes, emotions. Through the thing
held to the ear, we hear voices from another world. We would be
amazed by this spectacle if we were not so used to it.

    In 1886 a poet named Benjamin Franklin Taylor caught both
the metaphysics and, unintentionally, the comedy when he wrote
this rhapsody to the phone: "The far is near. Our feeblest
whispers fly/ Where cannon falter, thunders faint and die./ Your
little song the telephone can float/ As free of fetters as a
bluebird's note."

    Alexander Graham Bell thought the telephone should properly
be answered by saying, "Hoy! Hoy!" -- an odd term from the
Middle English that became the sailor's "ahoy!" and reflected
Bell's sense that those speaking on early telephones were
meeting like ships on a lonely and vast electronic sea. The
world has now grown electronically dense, densest of all perhaps
among the Japanese, who answer the phone with a crowded, tender,
almost cuddling, quick-whispered mushi-mushi. The Russians say
slushaiyu (I'm listening). The hipper Russians say allo.
Italians say pronto (ready). The Chinese say wei, wei (with a
pause between the words, unlike the Japanese mushi-mushi). Wei,
wei is meaningless, except as a formula to answer the phone.

    Why is the telephone the greatest invention in the history
of the world? Forget its existential oppressions (the
disruptions, the discontinuities of mind, or, if you want to
look for trouble, the horrifying thought of the sheer
obliterating noise that would be made if all the telephone
conversations of the earth at a given moment were audible at
once). All of that is nattering. The telephone, with the
fluidities of information that it has enabled, has proved to be
a promiscuously, irrepressibly democratic force, a kinetic
object with the mysterious purity to change the world. The
telephone, like the authority to kill, might have been legally
restricted to kings and dictators. But it is in a way the ideal
instrument of freedom -- inclusive, unjudging, versatile,
electronic but old-fashioned (here so long no one really fears
it). The telephone, like democracy, is infinitely tolerant of
stupidity; it is a virtual medium of stupidity, a four-lane
highway of the greedy and false and brainless. But it is (unless
tampered with) a faithful channel of words from mouth to distant
ear, mind to mind, and that is, absolutely and exactly, the
meaning of freedom.