Excerpts

When his brown eyes first saw the light of day there was no electron glow, neither grey nor color, to compete with the daylight in saturation of bluesky. No program schedule published daily in paper to guide the sense of a daily life. No spinoffs or reruns or cartoon kids' sugar cereal commercials. His infancy came before TV, tho there were predictions, and he knew of the predictions from an early age. He knew of them and dreamed of them and saw them and heard them. He kept them inside of him, not bothering to lock the locks. They were spices in the soup of his early years, large chunks in the hotdish of his adolescence.

Of all the kindly old men who spent their days and days in the barbershop on main street, the dearest was Parson Brown, now retired, forced into it, many said, for some blot on his good name long forgotten. He wore a close fitting hat with peaks on each side and had a face like Felix the Cat. He talked in a high pitched voice and performed magic tricks with pennies, nickels and buttons for young Philo T. Faustus. "Philo, have you heard the story of Jesus and the giraffes," he would ask and immediately go into a long tale that ended on a moral message.

Philo walked the two blocks from his house to the barbershop every day to surround himself with the old men who seemed to live day by day on nothing more than the thin mist of cut whiskers and aftershave that never seemed to be stronger or weaker but hung like their jackets on the coatrack the same way every single day. When Philo walked thru the door of the shop with his little boy sweater and little boy footsteps, the old men smiled with or without teeth and slapped their thighs. Whoever made the loudest slap would insist that Philo sit on his knee. Philo would, and swayed as magazine covers closed and the usual pennies nickels and buttons were dredged out of full pockets for the usual magic tricks and displays of spinning and shining.

Meanwhile, in his mind, young Philo T. imagined ways to make moving pictures out of dots of light while throwing those lightdots across long distances.

When his brown eyes first saw the dark of night, there were no dramatic blackouts on TV commercials. There were no live and moving live telecasts of the funerals of very important people. No government sifting of TV news accounts during wartime. No station identification or technical difficulties in the middle of a fascinating movie. No game shows where your favorite contestant loses. No talk shows where the most hideous things imaginable are discussed or enacted in front of live audiences of actual real people dressed like movie stars sitting beside other imaginary real people.

Parson Brown would do the famous trick where he would rub a nickel all the way into his arm and thru magic powers pull it out of Philo's left ear. Then he would say, "Philo, did I ever tell you the story about Jesus and the gerbils?" and because Philo couldn't remember whether he had or not he let him and pretended to listen while inventing TV in his mind.

Other stories Parson Brown told to young Philo T.:

In the village where Philo grew up there was no river flowing into the faroff sea. There were no trees or mountains that could be remembered by sight from long distances. The air in that town was stale and stable – it never went to a nearby town to breathe on it for a change. In fact, there were no nearby towns. The sounds there were truly original to it, and the images the people saw by the light of the sun or the darkness of their dreams were images that nobody else in the world would ever know.

In the winter the snow that melted there knew nothing else. For the people of the village, the cities and nations of the world were just words. The birds knew songs the people couldn't realize. But everybody knew the stars by heart, and knew whether it would rain a day ahead of time by just the feel of things. And knew who they were by just the smell and suggestion.

In such an isolation, Philo Faustus' young mind sought distances. He thought about the far away; he wondered at the things he couldn't see and the sounds he couldn't hear. He was in the same old place but he sought different places – and because he did not know the feel of those different places he wanted to bring them to him, to his town and his home in order to keep the feeling the same. Such thoughts gave birth to television, which has such power to make all places seem the same place, no matter how different, no matter how exotic, no matter how far away, no matter how impossible, no matter how eternal, no matter how inevitable, no matter how feeble, no matter how improbable, no matter how unnecessary, no matter how unwanted, no matter how material, no matter how spiritual, no matter how jaundiced, no matter how unfair, no matter how unwieldy, no matter how apathetic, no matter how untouched, no matter how awkward, no matter how impatient, no matter how impolite, no matter how underexposed, no matter how instantaneous, no matter how hideous, no matter how criminal, no matter how unextraordinary, no matter how seemless, no matter how peerless, no matter how silly, no matter how humorous, no matter how deadly, no matter how inconspicuous, no matter how well-known, no matter how shattered, no matter how immoral, no matter how stupid, no matter how powerful, no matter how it turns out, no matter how unpardonable, no matter how unlikely, no matter how many times, no matter how long it lasts, no matter how quick, no matter how it sinks in, no matter how unintelligible, no matter how unlikely, no matter how it violates, no matter how destructive, no matter how little we know, no matter how unprofitable in other ways, no matter how we value, no matter how it battles life, no matter how unconscionable, no matter how many electrons, no matter how dead, no matter how, no matter, no matter, no matter, no matter.

Television is wrong; it doesn't see, itself. It needs vision from someone else. It needs someone to see it, it needs someone to foresee it, it needs someone to see it. That someone is Philo T. Faustus, among others. For our purposes that someone is Philo T. Faustus and nobody else matters.

In one of Parson Brown's stories, "Jesus and the jellied Geronimo," the moral is that you can only invent in your mind for awhile: after awhile you have to invent in the material world or else you will have nothing but one more thing to take with you to heaven. Philo T. took the moral inside himself and began to turn his ideas into a working, televising, telegrabbing, teleshowing thing.

After two years of miscues, false starts and deadends, two years in the unheated garage behind his house, two years of only passive attention at school while his mind and hands tinkered with light, distance and infinity, two years of dedication and little else, two years of wiring, rewiring and unwiring, two years of two years – after all that, he thought he had something. Edward R. Morrow would later call it, "Light and wires in a box."

He considered visions of a mechanical system of televising images impractical; inventors working on mechanical TV used a disk with a spiral of holes cut out that would each cast parts of the picture. Faustus used an electron beam trained by magnets to cast the dots. Such a system, he thought, would lead to an image of much greater resolution, clarity, realism, practicality. Such was his vision and invention. It had many bugs to imagine away: among them the question: Does it work. He needed to do a test. He needed to pit his two years and his sweat and his thoughts and their product, all the work of his hands and tools; he had to pit it all to a test. He had to cast his fate and invention against that which he battled: distance. He needed to do a test that would prove the tele- of television.

For such a test he enlisted the services of one Parson Brown. "It was your stories, your morals, your time and magic, your encouragement, your pocket change and disappearing buttons, your tricks across a distance, your spirit, your face, your sense, your being and sitting and looking and remembering which inspired me and kept me at it," he said to Brown, who couldn't pass up the tribute and chance at immortality. "Yep, I'll do 'er," Brown said.

The invention, a wild accumulation of insight and naïveté, the work of a teenager with such limited knowledge of things outside his head, and the machinery, too complicated to look at easily, was far from refined and perfected. Evenso, Parson Brown agreed to the test, even tho there was a chance it could be risky. He was warned of the hazards but believed enough in the importance of science and the genius of this young man whom he sometimes considered something of a protégé that he consented to them. "Turn 'er on an I'll take m' chances."

In order to make an image, the primitive camera that young Faustus built required a huge bank of hot lights. Philo strapped Parson Brown into a large comfortable chair under the lights and cast the switch that ignited the lights and powered the camera. His instruments told him that his invention was making an image – the camera part was working just as it should. So far so good. Now all he had to do was carry his receiving apparatus away a mile or so and see if it was properly receiving the image thru distance.

Drops of sweat were raining down the forehead of Parson Brown, white from the hot lights, but he said it was no problem. He told Philo to go right ahead with the inventing and testing because he was okay in the comfortable chair to which he was strapped. He said that he wouldn't mind if he sweated off a few pounds, for he believed himself to be slightly overweight. He told Philo to go ahead and carry the experiment thru.

To carry a television receiver a mile or so to pick up a signal may sound quite easy today, but back then there was a little more to it. Philo's portable receiver weighed 600 pounds. He had already winched it onto his pony cart. He gave his two harnessed ponies the signal and set off.

Right away he heard telltale creaks. His pony cart had never before carried such a burden. His ponies strained forward to try to give the ride some momentum. The spokes that held the pony cart's wheels in spin were bowing awfully. Philo had gotten all of three blocks when his pony cart splintered to sawdust and the first of his two faithful ponies expired.

He salvaged some slats from the pony cart and slid them under his receiver. With some strong twine he secured the receiver to the last of his ponies and hoped to ski the device away on the slats. However, the pony died after skidding it only another ten feet. Pushing was next, but that only got Philo another inch or two. Now Philo needed the assistance of one of the three people in his village who had an automobile.

One of those three automobiles belonged to the Mayor, who was also the town butcher. He had been both Mayor and butcher for so long that nobody could remember his real name; everyone just called him either Mayor Butcher or Butcher Mayor, depending on what you needed from him at the moment.

There was one street in the village and Mayor Butcher was driving down it. "Hello, Philo," he said, examining the trail of dead ponies and shattered pony cart. "What seems to be the trouble?"

Philo told him his story of invention, receiver size, etc. and mentioned that he needed to get going soon because Parson Brown was waiting to be televised. Mayor Butcher said, "Okay, I will help you but in helping you I must teach you a moral lesson that will help you in your life. I will drive you and your, uh, receiver to a good location but you must do something for me also so that I can illustrate to you that you cannot get something for nothing in this world."

Philo said Certainly but we should try to make it quick. After thinking for a few minutes, Mayor Butcher decided what he wanted Philo to do for him. He selected several Bible passages that Philo could read to him and expound upon their lessons. In such a way Philo could do a service to both himself and to Mayor Butcher by illuminating the Mayor and mulling over the lessons to be found in the selected passages for his own proper knowledge.

Reading reading. Digesting thinking moralizing expounding. Smiling nodding. Okaying. Hoisting heaving upholstery yielding. Mounting shutting doors. Igniting. Driving driving driving. Waving honking at a slow moving horse-pulled sheep cart.

Up on the top of what passed thereabouts for a hill. Line of sight transmission, you know, that's TV. Why antennae always mark height rather than length, breadth or magnitude. Where we all aspire to be: in the air, sky, heavens. Why you never make it until you reach the top. What we think we all are: on top of things. The best, the biggest, the ultimate: the topper. Our measure of beauty: like a model, like a tall skinny antenna. From the top you can see. The fast way to get around, the best: ascension. Where we will never be: even higher. What we rarely see: the tops of our heads.

Philo's equipment isn't working right – he has his portable generator humming, the receiver switched on, the antenna pointing in the right direction, but nothing. Nothing nothing nothing. Its insides were shaken up quite a bit in all the moving and crashing and killing and destroying and moralizing it took to get the whole thing up here. Repairs are in order: hopefully minor repairs, hopefully.

Philo did not bring his electronic repair kit so he must make his repairs with the personal grooming tools that he did carry with him: a comb, nail file, tweezers to pick out nosehair, fingernail clippers and a little scoop for removing dirt from fingernails already short enough. These double as electronic instruments and tools and allow the young inventor to reroute wires confused in transit. Lacking solder or soldering iron, he uses his own spit. Lacking electrical wire, he makes do with the hair of his head. Lacking insulation materials, he makes do with skin and breath. Before long, he feels his work done and closes the back of his receiver.

Mayor Butcher has been waiting all the time, wondering what all the fuss is about. "This better be good," he mumbles.

Philo switches on his receiver and the electron gun begins firing out light itself. The screen sparks and glows with millions of dots of black and white that itch the mayor's eyes. Philo slides the band control to receive the signal being sent from his workshop. When he reaches the transmission, both he and the mayor jump back in fright. Thru the immaculate haziness of this first TV image the two see but the skeleton left of Parson Brown.

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