7. Alice and the Assault on Reality (Part 7 of 12)
You have landed right in the middle of John Mulholland’s parody of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. If you wish to start at the very beginning of their adventures together, you should click here to follow them down the rabbit-hole.
Chapter Seven — A Mad Tea-Party
Alice sighed wearily. ‘I think you might do something better with time,’ she said, ‘than waste it in asking riddles that have no answers.’
‘If you knew Time as well as I do,’ said the Hatter, ‘you wouldn’t talk about wasting it. It’s him.’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Alice.
‘Of course you don’t!’ the Hatter said, tossing his head contemptuously. ‘I dare say you never even spoke to Time!’
‘Perhaps not,’ Alice cautiously replied:
‘but I know I have to beat time when I learn music.’
‘Ah! That accounts for it,’ said the Hatter. ‘He won’t stand beating. Now, if you only kept on good terms with him, he’d do almost anything you liked with the clock. [45]
Chapter Seven is dedicated to the Legendary American Land Speed Record-breaker Craig Breedlove who recently died of cancer aged 86.
Immortality is what we crave, and it is out there, glimmering in a salt-flat mirage. It’s the kind of immortality accorded to men who have walked on the Moon — to those who have outdone mythology by undoing the distance between here and there. But it is also the kind of mortality that comes fixed to a machine.
Craig Breedlove glimpsed it shimmering over the desert in October 1996 as his Spirit of America jet car flipped on its side at 675 mph — a speed no other human had experienced on land [46]. But he saw it transform into a more terrifying unknown, his own mortality.
“The vehicle becomes an extension of yourself and you operate it from that level. You are the guidance. You are so intergraded with the hardware, it’s like there’s an absolute synergy between man and machine.” [47]
Such Gibsonesque ruminations on the man-machine interface are part of our fascination with an era of speed. We yearn to fly. We ache to visit space. We play video games that deliver the visual sensation of being the ghost in the machine.
Information technology allows us to live so much faster in our minds than we can in our bodies. But that is less true if you happen to be driving a land speed record car where speed is registered by the earth moving beneath your wheels, and control has perfectly correlating consequences.
For the rest of us, the battle is perceptual.
Unconsciously or not, we want our bodies and senses to respond as quickly as our brains move and process information. Roaring jet cars parody technology by removing us from the body’s limitations.
Craig Breedlove is no stranger to such heightened high-speed perception. When interviewed immediately after the wreck, Breedlove delivered a connected account of what he thought and did during a period of some 8.7 seconds.
His narrative amounts to about 9,500 words. Compared to the interval he refers to, his ecstatic interview represents a temporal expansion in the ratio of 655 to 1.46 [48].
‘You know the song, perhaps?’
‘I’ve heard something like it,’ said Alice.
‘It goes on, you know,’ the Hatter continued, ‘in this way:
“Up above the world you fly,
Like a tea-tray in the sky.
Twinkle, twinkle — ”’
Here the Dormouse shook itself, and began singing in its sleep ‘Twinkle, twinkle, twinkle, twinkle — ’ and went on so long that they had to pinch it to make it stop.
‘Well, I’d hardly finished the first verse,’ said the Hatter, ‘when the Queen jumped up and bawled out, “He’s murdering the time! Off with his head!”‘
‘How dreadfully savage!’ exclaimed Alice. [49]
Ultimately, the details of what Breedlove said in that hour and a half are less important than the fact that there were details at all.
“It’s amazing how much information you actually pull in and how much you can pull back. You can have your attention interrupted for just an instant and miss some type of data input, a marker or location — at the speed that vehicle’s going that could be a fatal mistake.” [50]
There is a dizzying irony in chasing immortality by driving a land-speed record car: the faster you go, the more mortal you become.
Some top conceptual thinkers entertained this possibility in November 1996 at the fourth annual Doors of Perception conference [51].
The subject was “Speed”.
The presentations, given by more than forty speakers, ranging from architect Rem Koolhaas to environmental guru Wolfgang Sachs to film archivist Rick Prelinger, coalesced around two major points:
Firstly, the vectors of technology and natural resources are out of sync and diverging, leading to an industrial ethic that designs and markets products much faster than natural resources can be grown, mined, or recycled.
And secondly, this is happening on a personal level, in that our rapidly changing, media-oriented lives diminish the physical realities of our bodies. Isn’t it time to build ‘selective slowness’ into our lives?
“For the modern mind, space and time are the basic forms of hindrance,” said Sachs, a member of the Wuppertal Institute environmental think tank, in his address.
“Anything that is away, is too far away. The fact that places are separated by distances is seen as a bother. And anything that lasts, simply lasts too long. The fact that activities require time is seen as a waste.
As a consequence, a continuous battle is raged against the constraints of space and time; acceleration is, therefore, the imperative which rules technological innovation as well as the little gestures of everyday life.” [52]
Modern culture worships speed above all else, but what is the price of this religion of fast, faster, fastest?
A telephone conversation, an email, a television show: they all strive to ignore the distance they span, and they need no surrounding space for us to understand them as what they are. Technology does not transfer us into a new space of information; rather it allows information to warp the space of our reality, creating new proximities and possibilities for change.
But at the same time as technological innovations affect the loss of many limits to our possibilities; society has begun to realize that other limits not previously recognized exist.
Next: Chapter Eight — The Queen’s Croquet-Ground
References
[45] The quotation is from Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Macmillan & Co., 1995), pp.101–102.
[46] See Hollis Frampton, Circles of Confusion (New York, 1965).
[47] David Diamond, The Fast American Hero (Wired 4.11, p.184); The quotation is from Craig Breedlove p.266.
[48] See Hollis Frampton, Circles of Confusion (New York, 1965).
[49] The quotation is from Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Macmillan & Co., 1995), pp.103–104.
[50] David Diamond, The Fast American Hero (Wired 4.11, p.184); The quotation is from Craig Breedlove p.266.
[51] See Luigi Cappuchi, Doors of Perception 4: A Quest for the Ethic of Speed (Domus 791, 1997).
[52] Dean Kuipers, The Need for Speed (Wired 5.10, p.108). Environmental expert Wolfgang Sach’s opening address at Doors of Perception 4: A Quest for the Ethic of Speed, pp.109–110.
