Bruce Clarke

Department of English

Texas Tech University

Lubbock, TX 794090-3091

bruno@ttu.edu

When the laws of thermodynamics were first formulated in the 1850s and 1860s, the concept of physical energy arrived already attached, like a Siamese twin, to another scientific hypothesis positing the universal presence of a subtle aethereal medium that supported the propagation of radiation through space [slide: As the aether yields no empirical image, this center-justified industrial allegory of a mediating utility goddess is as good as any]. Thermodynamics first encountered space as a series of mechanical aether media crossed through with electrical and magnetic "lines of force" as well as thermal and optical waves. For the popularizers of Victorian science, light and electromagnetic radiation were to be understood as waves that rippled within a sea of aether filling up all space. [slide: For instance, the Italian Futurist Balla’s painting of a Street Lamp (c.1911) leans toward moderate abstraction because the object to be represented is envisioned as refracted through a palpable rather than impalpable aether.]

Media theorist Friedrich Kittler has noted how even earlier media such as telegraphy and photography were projected as modes of immaterial communication: "the invention of the Morse alphabet in 1837 was promptly followed by the tapping specters of spiritistic séances sending their messages from the realm of the dead. Promptly as well, photographic plates—even and especially those taken with the camera shutter closed—furnished reproductions of ghosts or specters, whose black-and-white fuzziness only served to underscore the promise of resemblance." As the medium for the propagation of radiant energies the luminiferous aether was positioned precisely as the daemonic or intermediating term—the mode of energic andinformatic connection between realms separated by distance in space or time. The aether medium was thus a virtual site of cultural allegoresis serving as an ideological screen for the anticipatory or hallucinatory projection of the communication technologies that would unfold from the radio waves Heinrich Hertz discovered by extrapolating from Maxwell’s equations for the electromagnetic aether. The late-classical doctrine of the aether was a conceptual preparation for the theory of general relativity and for the technologies of wireless radio and television transmissions. But by providing a textual if not a substantial medium between material sciences, spiritual systems, and science fictions, it was also a profound occasion for what I will call visionary scientisms.

Much of the imaginative ambiance of modern space descends to us from this prior, aethereal form. Art historian Linda Henderson has argued, for instance, that the stylization of the striding figure of Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space of 1913—the Futurist art-hero as cosmic traveler—are meant to represent ripples within the luminiferous aether, which was envisioned as a continuous and stationary plenum uniformly dispersed throughout the universe. Even as the scientific status of the physical aether was being challenged, as a transformative and connective medium rippling with real and imaginary energies it continued to inflect the light-scapes, n-dimensional constructions, and space-fictions of late-nineteenth and early twentieth century literature and art. The aether of space itself, however, remained virtually occult—no definitive evidence of its real existence would ever be found. But this rarefaction to the point of absolute impalpability primed the aether for its parallel, parascientific career as a medium of subtle and penetrating vibrations emitted from and received by prophetic and sensitive psyches.

In the decades leading up to Anglo-American and European modernism, the aether provided the transcendentally-inclined with a powerful cultural amalgam of natural science and metaphysical doctrine. "Looking back upon it now," Mabel Dodge Luhan wrote in her memoir Movers and Shakers, published in 1936, "it seems as though everywhere, in that year of 1913, barriers went down and people reached each other who had never been in touch before; there were all sorts of new ways to communicate, as well as new communications. . . . Men began to talk and write about the fourth dimension, interchangeability of the senses, telepathy, and many other occult phenomena without their former scoffing bashfulness, only they did it with what they were pleased to call a scientific spirit. The essence of it all was communication". Mabel’s unabashed and unorthodox spirituality was not a marginal point of view. By the end of the nineteenth century, the solid cosmos in its entirety was being redescribed precisely as a wave phenomenon. And for many besides Mabel, the vibrations, pulses, and undulations of aural, optical, and electromagnetic waves were taken to demonstrate at the physical level and so ratify the more rarefied but equally wavy mechanisms of psychic phenomena: "the essence of it all was communication."

In Lorenzo in Taos, Luhan was forthright about her exertions of psychic will-power to make the aethereal connection she hoped would draw Lawrence to her residence in New Mexico:

And for whatever reason, Lawrence arrived. Not surprisingly, he soon became critical of Mabel’s mystic will, and later would tell her so with particular force in two remarkable letters she reprinted in her memoir. In the first, he wrote: "Surely it is even a greater mystery and preoccupation even than willing, to let the invisible life steal into you and slowly possess you . . . the slow invasion of you by the vast invisible god that lives in the ether. . . . Instead of projecting your will into the ether of the invisible God, let the invisible God interpenetrate into you" (118). Lawrence’s theologized aether medium enables human and divine intercommunication, in the context of the different attitudes the human will can take toward its presumed capacities to induce psychical effects by transmitting or receiving the frequencies of aethereal waves. In a second letter three months later, Lawrence bid Luhan to alter the outcomes of her spiritual force, not by changing the objects of her will, but by desisting altogether from the forcing of volition either to dominate or to submit: "Not any forced will of your own, nor any forced submission, but a certain real trust, and the courage not to care, and the power to laugh a bit. . . . One’s got to put a new ripple in the ether" (129; Letters 4:555).

What do Lawrence’s remarks have to do with the advent of modern technological media? The answer lies in this "new ripple in the ether." This means, I think, an act of cosmic volition, the bringing of something new into the world. But his choice of rhetorical vehicle alludes to the propagation of waves within a communication medium. In this regard, Lawrence’s phrase echoes a late-Victorian usage we also encounter in the writings of Charles Howard Hinton, the main late-19^th century British expositor of the reality and cognitive accessibility of the fourth dimension of space. Originally based on mathematical considerations and augmented by the aether physics of Kelvin and Maxwell, the spatial fourth dimension in Hinton’s treatment borrowed the glamor of the aether’s electromagnetic effectivity and its apparent abolition of material delimitations. Hinton’s discussion of the aether also elicited perennial philosophical issues raised by the new media technologies of telephone and gramophone, their promise of spiritual empowerment and their threat of technological determinism. Hinton questioned the nature of free will in a physical universe of aethereal materialism by hanging this ethical issue on the imagery of an exciting new technology of audio wave functions—the phonograph—and then contributed his own notion of human volition as an inscribing of furrows on the hypersurface of the aether.

In 1880, a few years before Hinton's particular treatment this uncanny media storage-and-delivery device, French philosopher Jean-Marie Guyau published the article "Memory and Phonograph." Reprinted in Kittler’s Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, it offered the following passage of phonographic technoscientism. The function of the phonograph becomes a material allegory of memory and its retrieval:

Hinton's technoscientism is cosmic rather than neurological. He adapts the phonograph to the aether of space, analogizing the rotation of the audio cylinder to the revolution of the earth in its orbit, which orb then becomes both the needle plying the aether grooves and the informatic datum manifested by the vibratory registration of those indentations on the membrane of matter. With the phonograph as the mediating metaphor—the media as allegorical medium—Hinton's intelligent aether parallels Guyau's cerebral nerve-channels, linking the spatial macrocosm to the cerebral microcosm:

Hinton’s groovy phonographic aether encodes a body of data that the material universe instantiates by "playing back" as it moves over the aether-grooves. So far, however, this theory appears to entail not free will but predetermined fate, as with a Gramophone cylinder that can only deliver the same song over and over. However, Hinton continues, "we may suppose that the æther itself is capable of movement and alteration; that it moulds itself into new furrows and marks. . . . It may be supposed that in an action of our wills we . . . may be altering these corrugations of the æther" (197). This is the specific phrase that anticipates Lawrence’s offhand rhetoric forty years later: "one’s got to put a new ripple in the ether." Hinton's speculation also rounds out the original configuration of Edison's phonograph as a reversible device that "combine[s] the two actions indispensable to any universal machine, discrete or not: writing and reading, storing and scanning, recording and replaying. In principle . . . it is one and the same stylus that engraves and later traces the phonographic groove" (Kittler 33). For Hinton, then, the human will is conceived as a potential author of as well as audience for aethereal communications, the active voice driving the stylus into the tin-foil as well as the passive ear at the loudspeaker of the Real.

Some complex of these aural and electrical allegories of vibrating space, I want to argue, grounds the total circulation of electromagnetic metaphors in Lawrence’s scientistic visions of cosmic communication. The intensely "electromagnetic" tenor of Lawrence’s writings has been noticed before, but not to my knowledge fully coordinated with the aether of late-classical physics. Lawrence’s idiom of a spiritual aether alludes to a fundamental cosmic fixture informing his prophetic pronouncements about the ways and means of what he called "vital relation." For instance, the first version of his essay "The Spirit of Place," published in November, 1918, figures the aether as a communication medium, when Lawrence explains Aztec prophecies concerning "the coming of the white stranger" as the reception of aethereal transmissions. The Aztecs’ "consciousness was fluid, not mechanically fixed, and the rarest impressions upon the physical soul, from the invisible ether, could pass on occasionally into uninterrupted consciousness." And in a passage from the essay "Indians and Entertainment" of Spring, 1924, that also figures the aboriginal capacities of native Americans, Lawrence wove into the tableau of a New Mexican Indian Corn Dance his vision of the vital waves that connect a communal human volition to the unfolding recreation of the living world:

At the beginning of the 1920s, however, Lawrence encountered the authorized English translation of Albert Einstein’s popular exposition of relativity. This event appears to have had a subtle but significant effect on his subsequent writings, an appreciable aftereffect sufficient to provide a measure of Lawrence’s concern to update his own critical doctrines by continued conversation with current scientific developments. The situation is compounded, moreover, by Lawrence’s further encounter in 1924 with P. D. Ouspensky’s Tertium Organum: A Key to the Enigmas of the World. The physicist Einstein and the occult philosopher Ouspensky converged in one salient particular. Both offered a cosmological discourse of the "fourth dimension" along with a critique of the concept of the aether. Ouspensky’s consignment of the aether to an outmoded phase of "three-dimensional" physics may have provided a further impetus for Lawrence to reconceive his scientistic figures. In a series of significant doctrinal essays of 1925 we find evidence that the new physical currency Einstein gave to the concept of the fourth dimension, along with the renewed philosophical currency provided simultaneously by Tertium Organum, moved Lawrence to revise his own applications of the aether concept.

In his subsequent writings of that year, Lawrence mostly dismissed the aether from conceptual and rhetorical duty, in favor of an explicit discourse of the fourth dimension. In doing so he transferred the attributes of divinity he most cherished—creativity and vitality—to the fourth dimension, while eliminating them from the aether. His sudden invocations of Van Gogh and Cezanne in these same essays may indicate Lawrence’s renewed awareness that an aesthetic discourse on the spatial fourth dimension had also flourished in important theoretical discussions of post-impressionist, Cubist, and Futurist art. In reacting to Ouspensky’s elaborate reprise of the spatial and evolutionist fourth dimension of late-Victorian hyperspace philosophy, in fact, Lawrence located a way to carry the mystic or absolute aether forward into the new era of relativity and spacetime. To do so, Lawrence would defend and justify the creation and reception of art as an affair profoundly connected to "the much-debated fourth dimension."

Lawrence distinguishes between mere existence and full being as the difference between existential location within the "time-space dimension" where relativity holds, or within its antithesis, the "fourth dimension" of the absolute self. The essential spatiality and corresponding atemporality of Lawrence’s fourth dimension is particularly clear in this passage. He adapts the uncanny geometry of the spatial fourth dimension to his vision of momentaneous consummation by which the body and soul together may bypass the world of mechanical determinism by a transcendental spatial movement perpendicular to all known directions. We return in some fashion to the pre-Einsteinian form of a rectilinear but substantial hyperspace, into and out of which our four-dimensional bodies may "come and go": "Being is not ideal, as Plato would have it: nor spiritual. It is a transcendent form of existence, and as much material as existence is. Only the matter suddenly enters the fourth dimension" (359). Lawrence’s fourth dimension is an uncanny paraspace one enters by passing out of time, momentarily, through successfully placing oneself into a "perfected relation" with an other, another being or self.

The rhetoric of the fourth dimension in later Lawrence revises a spatial metaphorics of relationship already at issue in his earlier novels. For instance, in Women in Love Gudrun amuses Gerald by mocking the pretensions of Birkin’s sexual mysticism: "‘he says he believes that a man and a wife can go further than any other two beings—but where, is not explained . . . –into—there it all breaks down—into nowhere’" (371). Ursula herself is skeptical about Birkin’s obscure destination: "‘But where can one go?’" she asks him: "‘After all, there is only the world, and none of it is very distant’"; Birkin replies: "‘One wants to wander away from the world’s somewheres, into our own nowhere. . . . It isn’t really a locality . . . . It’s a perfected relation between you and me, and others—the perfect relation—so that we are free together’" (398). In "Morality and the Novel," written almost a decade later, Lawrence improvises a passage of higher-dimensional art criticism in order to restate this point:

In this latter locution Lawrence compresses the infinitesimal infinitude of the spatial fourth dimension, its absolute "in-between-ness" or quality of leading off from any given point in an unknown direction. Lawrence’s phrase recalls earlier theories of the aether as the hypersurface that forms where three-dimensional space rests, like a sheet of paper on a table top, upon the higher foundation of the fourth dimension.

In the period following his leadership novels Aaron’s Rod, Kangaroo, and The Plumed Serpent, having removed both the urgency of direct political organization and desisted in part from the more strident advocacy of male primacy in forging new sociopolitical as well as erotic directions, where now would Lawrence lead his reader? It is a question, simply stated, of finding a "new direction" within human space and time. Lawrence tackled this problem explicitly in "Him With His Tail in His Mouth," a doctrinal satire on the Ouroboros or serpent that bites its own tail as a symbol of infinity and eternity in which the end of time and purpose of being is one with the beginning. Lawrence castigated both science and religion for the spiritual bullying performed by their claims to dictate the proper direction to the possession of ultimate knowledge. However, if we cannot know the beginning or the end, how is any direction any better than another? If Life has neither origin nor end, how can we move in its direction? His answer is—by trusting it enough to turn away from it. The unknowable dark river of Life "flows into us from behind and below. We must turn our backs to it, and go ahead. . . . But which way is ahead?"

The spatial fourth dimension enters the text of "Him With His Tail in His Mouth" at this point to provide a complex metaphor for the direction living things must go in order to have Life drive them onward into Being. Rejecting Darwinian accounts, he reconceives the origin of diverse species as the taking of separate and "distinct roads across the fourth dimension" (313): "When the cuckoo, the cow and the coffee-plant chipped the Mundane Egg, at various points, they stepped out, and immediately set off in various directions. Not different directions of space and time, but different directions in creation: within the fourth dimension" (312-13). This is a remarkable rewriting and synthesis of previous evolutionary vitalisms. Lawrence amalgamated and reworked both the Bergsonian and hyperspatial schemes, retaining some the unpredictable irreversibility of Bergson’s creative evolution while modulating it towards the metatemporal geometries of hyperspace discourse: "As for the goal, which doesn’t exist, but which we are always coming back to: well, it doesn’t spatially, or temporally, or eternally exist: but in the fourth dimension, it does" (314).

Lawrence’s fourth dimension also brings about the rewriting of his earlier rhetoric of equilibrium, as in the "star equilibrium" Birkin had offered Ursula in Women in Love, or in his many tropes constructed on the "balance of polarities": "I want, in the Greek sense, an equilibrium between me and the rest of the universe. . . . Equilibrium, in its very best sense—in the sense the Greeks originally meant it—stands for the strange spark that flies between two creatures, two things that are equilibrated, or in living relationship. It is a goal: to come to that state when the spark will fly" ("Him," 315-16). But the luminiferous and electromagnetic aethers remain embedded in this description of the fourth dimension as a medium for the propagation and reception of vital "sparks," entities defined in physics as momentary luminous disruptive electrical discharges. Lawrence’s fourth dimension is a dynamical system or rhetorical energy field within which he can revise previous discursive and fictive tropes both of temporal process, as in the irreversible and "exquisite" trembling of the existential balance, and of the instantaneous sparks that "fly" through space when the balance momentarily pauses at a point of perfected equilibrium: "How marvellous is . . . the exquisite frail moment of pure conjunction, which, in the fourth dimension, is timeless" ("Him," 316).

The metamorphoses of the electromagnetic field that began with the Romantic unfolding of physical polarities, that developed through the force fields of Faraday and the luminiferous aether media of Maxwell and his circle, that accompanied a geometrical revolution climaxed by the local and universal relativities of Einstein, have arrived in Lawrence at a moment finely poised between doctrinal obsolescence and mythopoetic stability. In this canny critical revision of modernist technoscientisms, the fourth dimensions of philosophical hyperspace, evolutionary vitalism, and mathematical physics pass by an axis perpendicular to them all into the fourth dimension of Lawrencean art-speech. In this existential allegory of space and time, modernism’s fourth dimensions take up textual cohabitation in a complex trope of selfhood as an absolute relativity founded on the propagation of "frail moments of pure conjunction."