In the Footsteps of Genius Page 18

Dorothy Skerritt and Muriel Arbus refused in the same voice. Instead of that they took out some of the remaining money of their own and offered to divide everything jointly. When a few weeks later Tesla had money for the salaries, he added a two-week salary to the envelope.

On the very day when he wished to “divide” the medal, there were in the office safe, in fact, five more dollars. With that money he sent Dorothy to buy fresh food for the pigeons.

With the help of Cito, to whom he also owed a substantial sum, he moved all his things from the office to another building. The next blow followed immediately after that: the management of the hotel politely asked him to leave the apartment, partly because of his friends the pigeons. Some of the birds Tesla placed in a cage and sent them to the estate of a friend in Connecticut. However, the pigeons were very devoted to their old acquaintance and, in the evening, at dinner time, they again landed on the window of his hotel room.

Tesla’s love story

Unhappy because of the unpleasant circumstances in which he found himself, Tesla packed all his belongings and moved to the Pennsylvania Hotel. The pigeons followed him. After the next few years he would be compelled to move to the Hotel Governor Clinton. The last decade of Tesla’s life was spent in the Hotel New Yorker.

Of the white pigeon Tesla’s friends O’Neill and William L. Lawrence, a science journalist of the New York Times, recorded an unusual story, while the three of them were sitting in the lobby of the New Yorker.

John O’Neill, a member of an occult society, noticed some mystical symbols in the markings of Tesla’s white pigeon. Tesla then told them something which Lawrence and others would later call “a love story from Tesla’s life.”

“I have fed pigeons, thousands of them, for years,” he said. “Thousands of them, for who could remember them all? But there was one pigeon, a magnificent bird, pure white with light-gray markings on its wings: it was something else. It was a female. I could recognize her anywhere.

And she could find me anywhere. I had only to think of her, to call her, and she would fly to me. I understood her, and she understood me. I loved that pigeon.

Yes, I loved that pigeon as a man loves a woman, and she loved me. When she was sick I felt it; she would come to my room and I would watch over her for days. I nursed her back to health. That pigeon was the joy of my life. If I needed her, nothing else mattered. As long as I had her, I also had my life’s purpose.

And then, one night, as I was lying in the dark on the bed, and as usual solving some problems, she flew in through the open window and stood on my table. I knew that she needed me; she wanted to tell me something important, so I got up and went to her.

I looked at her and I knew that she wished to tell me that she was going to die. And then, when I understood this, I saw light from her eyes — a powerful beam of light.”

Tesla paused and then, as if expecting a question, continued.

“Yes, it was a real light, strong, brilliant, dazzling light, stronger than the light from the strongest lamps in my laboratory.

When that pigeon died, something went out of my life. Until then I had been quite sure that I would complete all my endeavors, even though I had an ambitious program, but when the pigeon disappeared I knew that my life’s work was finished.

“Yes, for years I fed pigeons, and I still feed them, thousands of them, for, ultimately, who knows…”

Tesla’s mythology

In an article in a journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, Dr. Jule Eisenbud showed that the symbol of the bird in Tesla’s life explained his neuroses and his relation to his mother in childhood. The bird is an ancient universal symbol of the mother and of breastfeeding, Eisenbud says. “It is significant that Tesla believed that he could control the appearance of his marvelous white pigeon, regardless of where he was, by his own will.

“The meaning of this fantasy,” he says, “can only be understood if it is viewed in relation to his constant unconscious fear of the ‘disappearance’ of the mother, which manifested itself both clinically and through his usual attitude toward people and things, and even through his personal mythology, expressed in the unconscious acceptance of the existence of a powerful and all-embracing force, to the curbing and use of which he devoted his whole life.”³⁷

In Tesla’s memoirs, however, there are no indications of a personality preoccupied with the “disappearance” of the mother. Eisenbud, however, sees in his life many characteristics of a man who, in early childhood, emotionally and physically, did not receive the necessary attention in the period of breastfeeding. Tesla consciously idealized his mother, Eisenbud says, but he nevertheless “fled” from her, “a whole life filled with sadness because of unfulfilled expectation. This kind of ambivalence, common in personalities which are clinically described as obsessive-neurotic, which Tesla certainly was, characterizes all his relations and his longing for everything which can be a symbol of the mother or a substitute for the mother.”

Because of that, Eisenbud says, Tesla could not tolerate smooth round surfaces or pearl necklaces on a woman’s neck. He gives the example of one of his patients who, separated from his mother in the second week of life and later, as an adult, could not stand the word “round.”

A full circle of life

Dr. Eisenbud believes that Tesla’s attitude toward money also illustrates his phantasmagoric nature:

“Tesla gave away millions, sometimes with bizarre generosity, only to end up penniless. He, however, obviously succumbed to the pleasant conviction that, in essence, he was independent of both fate and other people and that such trivial things as money could be created in abundance. His ‘supervision’ game over his mother took its clearest form in relation to food. In this lies the negative side of Tesla’s ambivalence.