Alias Arts

"I collected the
instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being
into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet…By the glimmer of the
half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature
open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs."¹ Thus the magic moment in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
(1818) when the creature is brought to life by what is usually
considered (though Shelley does not say so outright) the infusion of an
electric "spark of being" into a constructed body. Shelley’s story
emerged amid heated disputes among London physicians over the nature of
life itself. Against the view of mechanists and materialists, who
argued life could be reduced to the complex organization of physiology,
vitalists asserted that some other force or spirit must be superadded
to bodies to achieve living animation. Vitalist John Abernethy thus
declared, "The phaenomena of electricity and of life correspond."²­­­

What happens to levitation, one of the great imaginative figures of art and literature, in the transition from a religious culture to the disenchanted universe of modern science? What becomes of ecstasy, rapture, ascension, transcendence, grace wh­e­n these give way to "space oddity": man enclosed in a tin can floating far above the world? Is the cosmonaut a prophet of the erotic future, avatar of man’­s stellar renaissance, as Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke once imagined? Or is he like Nietzsche’s madman, proclaiming as Gagarin himself was rumored to have said: "I don’t see any God up here"?

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LEVITATION: WHAT IS IT?
­The word levitation has several senses and connotations: miraculous, magical, oneiric, but also scientific and technological. ­Levitation is equally an affair of mystics and engineers, charlatans and poets. One thinks of the feats of the Scottish medium Daniel Dunglas Home, who on December 13, 1868 (one of the most auspicious days in the history of levitation) floated out of a third- story window and returned through the window of an adjoining room; or the ascension of Christ, archetype of all saintly air travel; or the magnetic levitation train zipping commuters between Shanghai and the Pudong International Airport at a maximum speed of 431 km/h.