wipers, and no wipers

[Image source: http://sawmengzhi.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/how-to-have-good-vision-while-driving.html]


Forty miles in light misty rain, round about midnight, when the windscreen wipers aren't working, isn't great. The cabin heating wasn't working either, but that was a minor consideration. I stopped regularly to wipe the windscreen. After each wipe the rain showed only as diamond pin-pricks, but soon this water reformed into the same veil of heavy drops as before.




Visibility wasn't so bad when I could put the headlights on full beam, except when road-signs reflected the light straight back.  Whenever there was on-coming traffic I had to slow to a crawl. When I joined the motorway I couldn't use full beam so instead I got close up behind a well-lit HGV doing a steady 55 and tailed it all the way to Swindon. The driver may have felt a bit haunted. At speed, the raindrops furled up the windscreen and on to the van roof.


[According to Meng Zhi (link above), in this scenario you can see better if you put on sunglasses.]




Windscreen wipers are one of those parts of a vehicle that are so clearly essential that they haven't changed much in a century. I started to wonder about the origin of windscreen wipers.


The original designs, such as Mary Anderson's in 1903, were manual; the driver operated a lever inside the cabin to clear the wind-shield. Automated wipers arrived in the 1920s. The associated windscreen washer was an idea of the 1930s. Wipers for headlights (remember those?) appeared in the 1970s.




 I didn't have much headspace for thinking as I drove along; most of the time I was peering in case a night walker or parked car suddenly loomed up ahead of me. But I did remember Louis MacNeice's poem "The Wiper". His film noir allegory seemed quite desirable.



The Wiper

Through purblind night the wiper
Reaps a swathe of water
On the screen; we shudder on
And hardly hold the road,
All we can see a segment
Of blackly shining asphalt
With the wiper moving across it
Clearing, blurring, clearing.

But what to say of the road?
The monotony of its hardly
Visible camber, the mystery
Of its invisible margins,
Will these be always with us,
The night being broken only
By lights that pass or meet us
From others in moving boxes?

Boxes of glass and water,
Upholstered, equipped with dials
Professing to tell the distance
We have gone, the speed we are going,
But never a gauge nor needle
To tell us where we are going
Or when day will come, supposing
This road exists in daytime.

For now we cannot remember
Where we were when it was not
Night, when it was not raining,
Before this car moved forward
And the wiper backward and forward
Lighting so little before us
Of a road that, crouching forward,
We watch move always towards us,

Which through the tiny segment
Cleared and blurred by the wiper
Is sucked in under the axle
To be spewed behind us and lost
While we, dazzled by darkness,
Haul the black future towards us
Peeling the skin from our hands;
And yet we hold the road.




(from his book Solstices, published in 1961).


That lulling rhythm, with its few masculine endings -- the word "road" three times, plus a couple of others near the end -- is a little narrative about doing some activity that is sort of automated, but with those stray reminders that there's a world beyond the automation, and an overview in which the road is not just something experienced but something that exists and has significance.


Interesting that the poem always speaks of "the wiper" in the singular. Most 1950s cars had twin windscreen wipers, just as they do today (unless you drive a Toyota Aygo).


On the other hand, the poem speaks of the driver in the plural, not "I" and "me", but "we" and "us".  So the poem speaks of us as a collective who all share the same experience, but it also emphasizes that the experience is a solitary one, each of us staring at his/her driver's-side wiper. We individuals are isolated from each other in our "boxes of glass and water".


But are "we", nevertheless, embarked on a communal enterprise, and buoyed, at least a little bit, by a sense of shared experience?  That's the nub of it, I think. Are we really moving forward together with a collective purpose, or is that just sentimentality, really we're on separate consumerist journeys, each trying to get our own best deal in terms of indulgence vs effort ?