EXILE

The applause and accolades rang on, the crystal tinkling, the wine sparkling ruby red in the raised goblets. Tuxedos and satin, smiles and riches. Somewhere deep within, Marconi looked into a dark comer and saw a young boy tinkering with copper wires in an attic room, and he secretly wept. The crowds left, but a devastating change had come. It was a messenger of hfe, returning to give testimony to a man whose hardened face and stiff poise could not hide a simple fear. Deep within, Marconi had the soft heart of a sensitive little boy, coddled by his mother and hoping to impress his father. Marconi lost his innocence just before he was able to blossom into true greatness. He knew this far too late. Marconi stopped believing that he was invincible. Very gradually, Marconi learned his true status on the world gameboard. The financiers were now demanding a better system, a more economical system, a more easily deployed system, a system without interference and interruption.

The work, no longer a simple upper room experiment with components belonging to others, became an excessive burden set on him by his principle investor. Constantly clamoring for the perfected systemology of instant world-communications, Marconi had to deliver the patron his due tribute in continual successions. This meant that he had to consistently conceive and develop original inventions; a task which proved beyond the ability of the experi-menter-tumed-diplomat. Marconi wished to escape all those whose strings pulled him at every turn. He abandoned his VLF stations to technicians and operators in search of his lost dreams. The manifestation of his discontent took itself in a bizarre self-exile which lasted for the remainder of his earthly life. He had lost his first love. He had forfeited his love, the desire to probe the mysteries of Nature. And what had he in exchange for all this? Fame? A title? Too much too soon. Fame at an early age brings rapid rise and rapid demise. The romantic dream was long gone. The upturned nose, so evident in Marconi’s earliest portraits was now replaced by a deeply embittered condescension. He had sold his youth away, a prodigal who could not return. Despoiled and jaded, he sought at least some respite from this condition in a new epoch of discovery. He launched out to sea, and never returned again.

Youthful inventors require time during which maturation completes the journey ft-om plagiarism to true originality. Unfortunately the approach of fame and fortune delayed this maturation process. Marconi was never before able to reenter the real world of experimentation without the torment of obligations and scheduled performance. Professional industry had no room for creativity. Every idea which he had developed or even thought to develop had a price tag attached to its ankle. Every single idea. He had so long forbad the creation of anything original, that he realized himself bereft of a single new idea. Lost innocence, lost humihty, lost openness, lost willingness to learn. Could these lost treasures return to one who had so offended their presence?

Therefore, Marconi sought refuge in a freedom which he had not long known. The pursuit of his old lost dreams kept him an exile, lost at sea. This self-imposed exile, an absolute necessity for his inner survival, had its terrible price. The price for regaining his lost love and atoning for his years of cruelty to others. Leaving his wife and children behind, he sailed the seas. His wife divorced him, worse than an ultimate insult.

Sailing the world for years in his yacht “Elettra” he finally managed escapes from patrons, media, business, and his own overinflated image. Here there was peace and tranquility, sohtude and space out under the night skies. Marconi returned to his boyhood days where, content to read and experiment, he re-sought his own lost trail. Here, Marconi sought to reconnect with the lost experimenter’s theme which form the basis of his young pursuits. The boyish thrill which propelled him too early and too quickly into world prominence would not now defeat his persistent progress toward originality. There at last, away at sea, he could find some truly original thing, perfecting an original design. Giving such a development to humanity without guilt or the entanglements of financiers would fulfill the vacuous space which wealth could not fill. Perhaps he could atone for all the terrible affairs visited by his terrible ambition. He would seek such a wonderful possibility, but not by cimbitious efforts. He would wait, wait for the visions to return.