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2 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Magic and the
machine By Lewis H Lapham
As between the natural and the
supernatural, I've never been much good at drawing
firm distinctions. I know myself to be orbiting
the sun at the speed of 105,000 kilometers per
hour, but I can't shake free of the impression
shared by Pope Urban VIII, who in 1633 informed
Galileo that the Earth doesn't move. So also the
desk over which I bend to write, seemingly a solid
mass of wood but in point of fact a restless flux
of atoms bubbling in a cauldron equivalent to the
one attended by the witches in Macbeth.
Nor do I separate the reality from the
virtual reality when conversing with the airy
spirits in a cell phone, or while gazing into the
wizard's mirror of a television screen. What once
was sorcery maybe now is science, but the wonders
technological of which I find myself in full
possession, among them indoor plumbing and
electric light, I
incline to regard as demonstrations magical.
This inclination apparently is what
constitutes a proof of being human, a faculty like
the possession of language that distinguishes man
from insect, guinea hen, and ape. In the beginning
was the word, and with it the powers of
enchantment. I take my cue from Christopher
Marlowe's tragical drama Doctor Faustus
because his dreams of "profit and delight,/Of
power, of honor, of omnipotence", are the stuff
that America is made of, as was both the
consequence to be expected and the consummation
devoutly to be wished when America was formed in
the alembic of the Elizabethan imagination.
Marlowe was present at the creation, as were
William Shakespeare, the navigators Martin
Frobisher and Francis Drake, and the Lord
Chancellor Francis Bacon envisaging a utopian New
Atlantis on the coast of Virginia.
It was
an age that delighted in the experiment with
miracles, fiction emerging into fact on the far
shores of the world's oceans, fact eliding into
fiction in the Globe Theatre on an embankment of
the Thames. London toward the end of the 16th
century served as the clearinghouse for the
currencies of the new learning that during the
prior 150 years had been gathering weight and
value under the imprints of the Italian
Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation in
Germany. The Elizabethans had in hand the writings
of Niccolo Machiavelli and Martin Luther as well
as those of Ovid and Lucretius, maps drawn by
Gerardus Mercator and Martin Waldseemueller, the
observations of Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes
Kepler, Giordano Bruno, and Paracelsus.
The medieval world was dying an uneasy
death, but magic remained an option, a direction,
and a technology not yet rendered obsolete. Robert
Burton, author of The Anatomy of
Melancholy, found the air "not so full of
flies in summer as it is at all times of invisible
devils". To the Puritan dissenters contemplating a
departure to a new and better world the devils
were all too visible in a land that "aboundeth
with murders, slaughters, incests, adulteries,
whoredom, drunkenness, oppression, and pride".
Think-tanks of the 16th and 20th
centuries In both the skilled and unskilled
mind, astronomy and astrology were still
inseparable, as were chemistry and alchemy, and so
it is no surprise to find Marlowe within the orbit
of inquisitive "intelligencers" centered on the
wealth and patronage of Henry Percy, "the Wizard
Earl" of Northumberland, who attracted to his
estate in Sussex the presence of Dr John Dee,
physician to Queen Elizabeth blessed with crystal
showstones occupied by angels, as well as that of
Walter Raleigh, court poet and venture capitalist
outfitting a voyage to Guiana to retrieve the
riches of El Dorado.
The earl had amassed
a library of nearly 2,000 books and equipped a
laboratory for his resident magi, chief among them
Thomas Hariot, as an astronomer known for his
improvement of the telescope (the "optic tube"),
and as a mathematician for his compilation of
logarithmic tables. As well versed in the science
of the occult as he was practiced in the study of
geography, Hariot appears in Charles Nicholl's
book The Reckoning as a likely model for
Marlowe's Faustus.
During the same month
last spring in which I was reading Nicholl's
account of the Elizabethan think-tank assembled by
the Wizard Earl, I came across its 20th-century
analog in Jon Gertner's The Idea Factory: Bell
Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation.
As in the 16th century, so again in the 20th: a
gathering of forces both natural and supernatural
in search of something new under the sun.
The American Telephone and Telegraph Co
undertook to research and develop the evolving
means of telecommunication, and to that end it
established an "institute of creative technology"
on a 91-hectare campus in Murray Hill, New Jersey,
by 1942 recruiting nearly 9,000 magi of various
descriptions (engineers and chemists,
metallurgists, and physicists) set to the task of
turning sand into light, the light into gold.
All present were encouraged to learn and
borrow from one another, to invent literally
fantastic new materials to fit the trajectories of
fanciful new hypotheses. Together with the
manufacture of the laser and the transistor, the
labs derived from Boolean algebra the binary code
that allows computers to speak to themselves of
more things in heaven and earth than were dreamed
of in the philosophies of either Hamlet or
Horatio.
Gertner attributes the
epistemological shape-shifting to the
mathematician Claude Shannon, who intuited the
moving of "written and spoken exchanges ever
deeper into the realm of ciphers, symbols, and
electronically enhanced puzzles of representation"
- ie, toward the "lines, circles, scenes, letters
and characters" that Faustus most desired. The
correspondence is exact, as is the one to be drawn
from John Crowley's essay "A Well without a
Bottom" that recalls the powers of the Abbot
Trithemius of Sponheim, a 15th-century mage who
devised a set of incantations "carrying messages
instantaneously ... through the agency of the
stars and planets who rule time". Bell Labs in
1962 converted the thought into Telstar, the
communications satellite relaying data, from Earth
to heaven and back to Earth, in less than
six-tenths of a second.
Between the 1940s
and the 1980s, Bell Labs produced so many wonders
both military and civilian (the DEW line and the
Nike missile as well as the first cellular phone)
that AT&T's senior management was hard put to
correct the news media's tendency to regard the
Murray Hill estate as "a house of magic". The
scientists in residence took pains to discount the
notion of rabbits being pulled from hats,
insisting that the work in hand followed from a
patient sequence of trial and error rather than
from the silk-hatted magician Eisenheim's
summoning with cape and wand the illusions of "The
Magic Kettle" and "The Mysterious Orange Tree" to
theater stages in 19th-century Paris, London and
Berlin.
The disavowals fell on stony
ground. Time passed; the wonders didn't cease, and
by 1973 Arthur C Clarke, the science-fiction
writer believed by his admirers to be the
20th-century avatar of Shakespeare's Prospero, had
confirmed the truth apparent to both Ariel and
Caliban: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from magic."
As chairman
of the British Interplanetary Society during the
1950s, Clarke had postulated stationing a
communications satellite 22,300 miles above the
equator in what is now recognized by the
International Astronomical Union as "The Clarke
Orbit", and in 1968 he had co-written the film
script for 2001: A Space Odyssey. The
opening sequence - during which an ape heaves into
thin air a prehistoric bone that becomes a
spaceship drifting among the stars - encompasses
the spirit of an age that maybe once was
Elizabethan but lately has come to be seen as a
prefiguration of our own.
New World's
magical beginnings (and endings) New
philosophies call all in doubt, the more so as the
accelerating rates of technological advance -
celestial, terrestrial and subliminal - overrun
the frontiers between science, magic, and
religion. The inventors of America's liberties,
their sensibilities born of the Enlightenment,
understood the new world in America as an
experiment with the volatile substance of freedom.
Most of them were close students of the natural
sciences: Thomas Paine an engineer, Benjamin Rush
a physician and chemist, Roger Sherman an
astronomer, Thomas Jefferson an architect and
agronomist.
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