Is there a name for the sensation of a perfectly purring engine?
Working with unpredictable AI tools and workflows, I find myself wanting a sort of system-level flow state, when everything’s “in sync,” when “things just click” and “run like clockwork,” “humming along,” “a well oiled machine.”
I’m talking about the coordinated dance of a manufacturing assembly line, the ballet of cars on a freeway performing a zipper merge sans red brake lights. I get hints of it when I watch Theo Jansen’s Strandbeests or when the kid’s battery-powered Brio train completes a circuit on the uneven wooden tracks. I feel it here:
(I searched for a Japanese phrase for this and could not quite find one.)
Since I’m using musical terms, and since “orchestration” appears to be the managerial metaphor of the day, let’s look there.
When jazz musicians are grooving with each other they’re “locked in” or “in the pocket.” A “tight ensemble” performs with perfect synchrony and relaxed awareness. Maybe the closest, used in biomusicology and other sciences, is “entrainment.” In chronobiology it’s “the synchronization of a biological clock to an environmental cycle.” Lovely.
But what of the awe and odd satisfaction of observing entrainment?
The best I’ve come up with is “mechanical sublime.” Though, it’s not merely mechanical either, as these systems can have non-deterministic actors, human or agent. Then again, even mechanical systems seize and rust, atoms ground away. Shit breaks.
Maybe the feeling is stronger, too, when you’re a participant, or a former participant, or have enough experience with its workings (e.g. gravity, physics) that the system isn’t entirely opaque. You’re more likely to experience the mechanical sublime riding a motorcycle when you know how the motorcycle works. I don’t feel it when I’m watching my laptop’s boot sequence, but maybe a motherboard designer does.
Whatever the name for this feeling, the surprise that there is possible – unlikely but possible – an ideal harmonious order that excepts the usual brokenness of modern life, is one for which, more by the day, I yearn.