How do we become ourselves, riveted from the many possible streams? How do we wend into the wave worn shell that we have become over time, like leather, this particular skein of habitual bendings? How rivered are we into this weathered mask?
How works the pruning of limitlessness til there’s left solely the withering constraints defined by daily pleasantries, the lies and gruntings that grind themselves into corniced wrinkles of our lips and eyes?
Are we defined primarily by others, or by ourselves? Are we shorn naked of definition by gods regardless of any titles we may attempt to stake temporally as ours?
How do we reform or dissipate in reaction to the events that destroy, that cause trauma, that cause irreparable harm?
Lebanon, 1828
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“Finn!” her hoarse lilt arced over trees, a rushing crescendo of roiling water over sharp rocks.
Her voice portending nourishment or sanction. The essence of life. Phineas came running.
They dwelled on a brook curling off the river. Even through the snoring of his father and intermittent rustlings of siblings, the brook could be heard rumbling along its everpresent passageway.
Phineas would lay awake attuned, envisioning dreams of those far upstream carried through the night, along to a distant sea he’d never seen, just knew was there because his father once told a story of it. It tasted, his father’d said, of salt.
His mother stood arms hanging at her sides, curls upswept, watching as Phineas emerged.
As soon as he could sustain the effort to stand, Phineas was at work. Work was. Unquestioning. Soft once you understood it as hard, an unyielding set of principles training to acquiescence.
His mother wanted something more than survival for her children, a notion abstract. An Education. She couldn’t articulate this vision clearly. Her husband would eat, listening, nodding slowly, his elbows heavy on the table, loving the sound of her tongue forming around her vowels and the manner in which her curls shuddered in her ardency, but the substance of the tools that calloused his hands and the money he earned superseded everything. These staggered fields slashed out of a dense thicket of woods, this was everything. Theirs. This was real.
There was nothing else to existence but memories or dreams. Stories are the dreams and memories of the world we pretend to know. The stories we tell to each other around the table, drawn by the fire, a story that Phineas’s mother told to their children of a future, the stories his father told of a world inhabited by an ocean and a king and a neverending thirst for freedom and ownership and work.
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“Finn.” She breathed, kneeling down, holding his shoulders gently, gazing directly into his eyes. There was no escape. “You must be better than us. You must lead the way for your brothers and sisters.”
--
East Lebanon. 1831
Phineas knew what it was to listen to a brook motioning to distant secrets in the quiet of the night. The soft sweep of wind through summer leaves. But this schoolmaster’s voice, gruff with nightly rum and smoke, required an utterly different form of listening. A listening that was at once pretence and shield.
Yet he took some solace in the practice and drills with numbers, which was a form of work he felt more at ease in, rather than the endless copying of letters, and the mouthing of morals made hollow by his schoolmaster’s clear dissolution.
Turns against mother’s dream.
--
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This is about a man who had been a hard worker, in a position of leadership, who in a momentary loss of attention, had an iron rod blown through his throat and out the top of his skull, removing a sizable portion of his frontal lobe.
→ A man of integrity, not a lot of depth -> Appears as he is
→ Transformative event -Tamping iron
→ Others expect him to be different -> their perceptions and expectations alter his behavior
→ Yet he does not perceive himself to be different → Uncertainty
→ He throws himself into role of exhibitionist, appearing at revivals, Barnum’s circus, science meetings → We wear the mask
→ Throws former life to the wind, becomes a new person in Chile, learns new skills, new culture
→ Finds himself again?
→ Returns to his family, now in San Francisco
→ Becomes nothing, dies
He managed to recover, amazing doctors. He still appeared to be a fully functioning, capable adult; though there were some reports, possibly apocryphal, that he “was no longer Gage,” and that he became counter to his original character. He reportedly became intemperate, angry, and promiscuous.
What did Gage perceive of himself? Did he see himself changing? Did he feel a loss of brain function? Did he see his relationships changing? Did he act differently as a result of others treating him differently, because people looked for him to different, expected him to be different?
He ends up going down to Chile and completely changing his life trajectory, driving a coach, speaking a new language (?), immersed within a completely foreign culture. Developing new networks within his brain → see Pat Martino, jazz guitarist.
Born 1823 - Lebanon, NH - “Where did he grow up? Was it on the farm of his mother's parents in or near Lebanon?”
The political mood at the start of the 1820s was referred to as the Era of Good Feelings, following the collapse of the Federalist party.James Monroe, the sitting U.S President since 1817, was re-elected in 1820, virtually unopposed. In 1823, Monroe introduced the Monroe Doctrine in the State of the Union Address, declaring that any European attempts to recolonize the Americas would be considered a hostile act towards the United States.
The feeling of unity during the Monroe administration was dispelled in the presidential election of 1824, which due to an Electoral College stalemate, was decided in the United States House of Representatives. John Quincy Adams was chosen as the sixth U.S. President, despite receiving only 30.9% of the popular vote to Andrew Jackson's 41.3%. This gave rise to Jacksonian Nationalism and the rise of the modern Democratic Party,[14] with Andrew Jackson elected in the 1828 election.
Slavery, serfdom and labor[edit]
• March 3, 1820 and March 6, 1820 – Slavery in the United States: The Missouri Compromise becomes law.
• 1820: Robert Owen devises the labour voucher.
• 1820: 18,957 black slaves leave Luanda, Angola.
• 1828 – 32,000 Angolans are sold in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
• June 5, 1829 – Slave trade: HMS Pickle captures the armed slave ship Voladora off the coast of Cuba.
• Invention of the photograph and the first still existing photograph taken in 1826.
• May 25, 1827 – Romanian inventor Petrache Poenaru receives a French patent for the invention of the first fountain penwith a replaceable ink cartridge.
Transportation[edit]
• 1825 – The first horse-drawn omnibuses established in London.
• September 27, 1825 – The world's first modern railway, the Stockton and Darlington Railway, opens in England.
• October 26, 1825 – The Erie Canal opens, providing passage from Albany, New York to Buffalo and Lake Erie.
• 1825: The Ohio and Erie Canal is dug to extend settlement access and commercial traffic to the Ohio River.
• January 30, 1826 – The Menai Suspension Bridge, built by engineer Thomas Telford, is opened between the island of Anglesey and the mainland of Wales.
• April 1, 1826 – Samuel Morey patents the internal combustion engine.
• October 1, 1826 – Opening of the Monkland and Kirkintilloch Railway in Scotland.[19]
• September 21, 1826 – Construction of the Rideau Canal begins in Canada.
• October 7, 1826 – The first train operates over the Granite Railway in Massachusetts.[20][21]
• 1826 – The first railway tunnel is built en route between Liverpool and Manchester in England.
• February 28, 1827 – The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad is incorporated, becoming the first railroad in America offering commercial transportation of both people and freight.
• April 26–May 24, 1827 - The Royal Netherlands Navy's British-built paddle steamer Curaçao makes the first Transatlantic Crossing by steam, from Hellevoetsluis toParamaribo.[22]
• July 4, 1829 – George Shillibeer begins operating the first bus service in London.[23]
• October 8, 1829 – Rail transport: Stephenson's Rocket wins the Rainhill Trials.
• November 30, 1829 – The original Welland Canal opens for a trial run with a ceremony at Port Dalhousie.
1830s - Where did Phineas go to school and how much education did he have? The school could have been in Lebanon, East Lebanon, Grafton, or Enfield (all NH).
What kind of work and where did Phineas do before working on the Rutland and Burlington Railroad? It may have been on farms, the isinglass (mica) mines in Grafton, NH, and/or on the Northern Railroad that ran through New Hampshire before the R&BRR was built. Was he working near Cortland NY in early- to mid-1848?
Is there a discrepancy between Dr. Harlow’s description of Phineas as a "shrewd, smart business man" and his being the foreman of a construction gang? The terms 'business' and 'business man' had different meanings in the 1850s, from those today and Phineas may have been a sub-contractor employing his own men.
1848 - Accident
1851 - Hanover (10 miles north of Lebanon) - worked for Jonathan Currier, Dartmouth Hotel and livery stable
Cholera epidemic 1850 in Boston
Murder of Dr. Parkman by John Webster - executed on August 30, 1850
Abolitionism gaining strength
Gold rush in California
August 1852 - Embarked to Valparaiso, Chile to engage with a man to establish a line of coaches. 75 miles to Santiago, shipping line. May have moved first to SF with his family. Got extremely sea sick.
June 1859 - Worked for 7 years doing this, then was fighting an unknown illness. Returned to SF for change of climate
The first Concord stagecoach was built in 1827. Abbot Downing Company employed leather strap braces under their stagecoaches which gave a swinging motion instead of the jolting up and down of a spring suspension. The company manufactured over forty different types of carriages and wagons at the wagon factory in Concord, New Hampshire. Concord stagecoaches were built so solidly it became known they didn't break down but just wore out.
The Concord stagecoach sold throughout South America, Australia, and Africa. Over 700 Concord stagecoaches were built by the original Abbot Downing Company before it disbanded in 1847.
Died May 21, 1861
Imagine sitting for hours with the ice cold wind whipping through every pore in your skin, every perforation in clothing, which it will find, seeping into your core. The burn of the reins running continuously through your calloused hands, even gloved. The same route, over and over again, You begin to know the ruts and humps in a turn as intimately as a lover’s body grooved into the soul of your spirit. The steam of animal heat rising from the haunches of the horses, the machines that power your stagecoach enterprise. For it is yours, this journey, this section on the route to Santiago you pioneer, is yours completely during that brief space of flight. Though chartered by the company, you are the sole proprietor of the success or failure of the trip, as experienced by your human cargo, as experienced by your horses, as notated precisely by the amount of time elapsed on the chronometer affixed to the carriage.
Phineas had learned the importance of the initial greeting made to his clients, as he called them, establishing a warm rapport based on discreetly conveyed curiosity, a genuine interest in the happenstance trajectory of his fellow being that for him was unforced, though at times, it must be admitted, they could become mere representatives of a general classification of a certain type of human. Even so, he would take pleasure in the journey itself, the skills and knowledge which he had to draw upon, both consciously and automatically, to successfully navigate the waterboarded hairpin turns in mountain passes. There were always novelties and surprises, circumstances unpredicted for which he must exercise his capacity for sizing up risk within the few real-time moments in the confluence of other travelers on the road, the degree of muddiness within the wet season, the angle of the sun, the mosquitoes feasting on his eyes.
He could regale a client for hours with stories of his adventures. Stagecoach passengers the perfect audience for a good yarn, captive, redundant, as he could test out different versions, new twists and details and descriptions on each new journey. He had even perfected the timing of the delivery of a particularly startling moment in the tale of a girl in Chicago to coincide with the sharp bump when passing just outside of the limits of Valparaiso and descending into a valley.
At first, the initial story he told was his origin story, the tale of the man with a hole in his head, who lived to tell the tale. And here he sits, driving your coach. It must of necessity be the first to tell, he had thought, to set the client at ease with an explanation of why he looked as he did, and why he had a tamping iron beside him at all times, like a spirit guide.
But over the years, he had come to understand the value in building suspense, keeping his audience alert to each and every creatively inspired turn in his various narratives, by withholding this climactic moment of conversion until that moment when he could sense that he was cradling his listener in the arc of his consciousness. Prior to that point, he was the disconcerting man with an unexplained closed eye who told colorful stories. The person sitting in the coach was at first merely amused, chuckling softly and exchanging their own yarns from afar. He would allude to his deformity, interspersing hints of some traumatic moment, as he told of various stories of his time working on the railroad, or driving coaches in Connecticut. Then, in that heightened state, as they ascended towards a mountain pass with a view both back into the coast in which Valparaiso nestled and the plains on which Santiago squatted, he would tell the story of his death and rebirth, thrusting his iron bar towards the setting sun to emphasize the centrality of his place in this listener’s tangential journey to Santiago. He was unveiled in a flash like a Hindu god upon a chariot rounding the crested pass over Locento, and every moment wending thereafter towards the final stage of his time with them was denouement, the listener contemplating already who to share their own story of the journey with the man with a hole in his head, who drove their coach from Valparaiso.
THEME: Convergence with railroad development, infrastructural development - both Chile and New Hampshire
A coach, four driven horses, spittle flecked, h