faceless automobiles

I don't remember getting the same welcome response when speaking out in class at Gage Park as Beagles.  I seem to recall more of a what do you want now response.  Maybe it was the difference between earnest youth and some wisenheimer shooting off his mouth.

I knew it wasn't going to be easy to get you guys to join me in flight on the gossamer wings of poesy, but I thought surely it would be no problem getting you guys on board a flame throwing snowblower. I've beem to that site several times now and what strikes me is not so much the fantastic machines as it is the people.  The way they are dressed in that sort of generic future clothes with the geometric design and padded shoulders and that vague military look.  The expressions on their faces like they are aware of how tough things used to be to us less advanced people of the past, and are smiling now because their way of life is ever so much easier.  And the cars.

Especially the cars, they are so flamboyant, so finny, so like Siamese fighting fish or art deco spaceships, fins galore, talk about gossamer wings.  And the time of that Closer Than You Think comic strip was the time of wretched excess in automobile design.  Headlights doubled, fins flew high and proud, chrome traced the lines of the sheet metal, and oh the million dollar smiles of those bumpers.

I say wretched excess because in most cases they took it too far, but I admire the wild spirit, unlike today when grey gumdrops rule the mighty streets of the proud city,  I think it is the front ends, and probably what did them in was the loss of the bumpers, the barbaric pulling off all those gleaming silver teeth to be replaced by a protuberance of plastic, bland, toothless, no smile.  And that doubling of the headlights, that maybe seemed like a good idea in 1958, but it blurred the stare, the bright eyes above the smiling bumper mouth.  Headlights are the eyes of the car, don't  the designers know this?  Apparently not since they now blur them, smooth them into the vapid form of the front end so that the car no longer has a face.  And what of the nose?  I guess that would be the hood ornament. They were already fading when the time of wretched (but inspiring) excess began.  A pity.  How swell it was to see that Indian head or clipper ship cleave the waves of the air as we drove our mighty cars through the USA.

As Gerard Manly Hopkins wrote before there were any automobiles.

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; 

    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; 

    And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil 

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod. 

He goes on as he always does, like the good monk he was I suppose, to bring in Jesus, my mistake, the Holy Ghost.

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent 

    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

And if He could put a smile back on the faces of our cars, why that would be dandy.