In Thin Air

… Our networks of wires … form an imaginary hammock that seems to hold us ecstatically suspended in thin air …

Last post from Paraphernalia: The Curious Lives of Magical Things by Steven Connor (2011). Today’s paraphernalia (my choice) are Pipes and Wires:

… pipes … effect a rationalisation of space; they belong to the human effort to re-sort the world’s random assortment of things into more orderly and efficient arrangements. The pipe concentrates and simplifies a ramifying, dilatory and unreliable flow into something express and purposive. The network of pipes, like the network of wires, turns a landscape, with all its jagged accident and lumpy irregularity, into an idea. Where in the past roads would be compelled to cross rivers by means of bridges, it has become common to route whole rivers across roads or railway lines through pipes. As archetypal transports, pipes not only move things from place to place: they change the notion of space itself. They are the sign of our fundamental topophobia, our dissatisfaction with space and with its proximities and distributions. This must go there; that must come over here.

… one view of the human body reduces it in essence to a single tube, which takes in nourishment at one end and expels waste at the other end. At the core of the human apparatus are the intestines, but perhaps the whole corporeal frame is nothing more than a complication or interruption of this tube.

Now Wires:

… Wires and waves are very different things. A world of communication by waves and vibrations and emanations is a world of permeated lives, in which individual identities are dissolved, ecstatically or uneasily as it may be, in universally shared experience. A world of communication along wires offers the delight of communication across vast distances, but with the preservation of intimacy and secrecy. The person on the end of the telephone line, whether God or grandma, could speak to you and to you alone. Waves belong to the magic or angelic otherworld; wires knit us tightly into this one. Waves are expansively, inclusively utopian; wires are suspiciously conspiratorial (there is no such thing as ‘wave-tapping’).

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… The laying of the transatlantic telephone cable in the nineteenth century was accompanied by much heroic fanfaring, but I think that people may also have been haunted by the idea of that wire lying there, indifferently pervaded by our rages, musings and despairs, out of sight, but never satisfactorily out of mind, slithered over by blind, white things, amid the cold and dark that were its natural element. Wires, like serpents and dragons, belong to unseen, inhospitable, inhuman places; they make our words and impulses and feelings pass through invisibility and uninhabitability.

… A wired world is the promise of a world recomposed as a vast telephone exchange, in which everything can make contact with everything else, all calls will be returned, and everything will loop magically back on itself; but there was, and is, a vileness that breeds within wires, with their whispers of dropped stitches and disconnections, crossed wires, mazes and black magic.

But because of this, wires also suggest a thrilling fragility and risk. We depend on them, because our words, and lives, hang on them by a thread. If wires suggest the possibility of binding, they are also closely associated with ideas of hanging on. Callers are asked to ‘hold’; the telephone thins our being into a thread.

… Our networks of wires, though buried under the ground or even under the ocean, form an imaginary hammock that seems to hold us ecstatically suspended in thin air, even as we go our ways about the earth. During the nineteenth century there were slackrope and tightrope walkers in the circuses; by the end of the century, they were just as often known as high-wire artists. We had all come to know something of the giddiness of walking on wires. Wires suggest fragility and vertigo, theirs and ours, as well as power. If the connection is cut, if the line goes dead, then we may fall back to earth.

But it is just this tension that keeps us strung out on wires. High-wire walking has become an image of the refinement of the accidents and approximations of human life to the absolute concentration of purpose required to walk the wire.

… In August 1974, the high-wire artist Phillipe Petit stole into the newly constructed World Trade Center in New York, shot a cable between the buildings with a bow and arrow, and spent 45 minutes walking back and forth between the towers. It seemed to show, as his associate Jean-Louis Blondeau remarked in Man on Wire (2008), the documentary film made of the episode, ‘what the buildings were for.’

movie poster 

… rope-dancers and wire-walkers do not, any more than chickens, want to get to the other side. In fact, the most characteristic gesture of the wire-walker is, once they have apparently completed their walk safely, to go back out on the wire, as Philippe Petit did for forty-five rapturous, electrifying minutes above the streets of Manhattan, in order to invent different, even more improbably serene things to do on it. … The destiny of the wire-walker is an indefinite deferral of destination, a putting off of coming to ground.

… When I gave a radio talk on wires in 2000, I was contacted shortly afterwards by the editor of Wire Industry, who asked me if I would be willing for them to publish my talk. I wondered quite what he was expecting his readers to get from what I had written. For Wire Industry is a trade journal mostly taken up with the technicalities of wires and cables and with wire-related products such as extruders, capstans, stranders and respoolers; it publishes articles with titles like ‘Neural Networks for Quality Control in the Wire Rod Industry’ and ‘The Bending Stiffness of Spiral Strands’. I felt humbled and reproved when I was sent a copy, and found that it was headed by at trail of red hearts fluttering round the caption ‘Rekindle Your Love Affair … With Wire.’

My most recent previous post from Connor’s book is here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/