You turn in the entranceway of illusion, gaping down the airplane aisle, and you make it out. For God’s sake, call it God. That’s what we’ve called it forever, and it’s so cheap, so self-promoting, to invent new vocabulary for every goddamned thing, at this late a date. The place where you’ve been unfolds inside you. A space in your heart so large it will surely kill you, by never giving you the chance to earn it.
—Richard Powers
I FIRST encountered Richard Powers indirectly—through his image rather than in the flesh. In the pre-Amazon days, when I still had leisure time to browse in bookstores, I stumbled on his arresting novel Galatea 2.2. I had heard of neither Powers nor this book, but I scanned the jacket description, and his work seemed interesting. At the time, I was reading about the recent advances in neuroscience and cognitive science that had grown out of the appropriation of models of complex adaptive systems for understanding mental processes. While long avoided by both philosophers and scientists, the problem of consciousness suddenly had become a hot topic. One of the critical issues in these debates was the question of whether the brain functions like a computational machine to which all mental activity can be reduced and, if so, whether it is an analog or digital device. Scientists who were convinced that mind emerges from digital processes in the brain were developing artificial intelligence programs and machines that simulate cognitive functions to prove their point. With these thoughts circulating through my own neural networks, Powers’s translation of the Pygmalion story into an account of an artificial intelligence program named Helen that apparently passes the Turing test was particularly intriguing. It was not, however, the substance of the novel but the author’s photograph that really caught my attention. When I saw the image of the young Powers, with his riveting eyes, it was clear to me that he knew things others do not and that he’s only going to let you in on his secrets gradually. I immediately said to myself, “I know this person—I have met him somewhere before.” As I pondered this experience, the only word adequate to describe it was “uncanny.” Though I could not place him for sure, I managed to convince myself that he once had been my student. That was enough to make me buy the book.
When I returned home, I began the novel and quickly was captivated. Galatea 2.2 tells the tale of a young writer by the name of “Richard Powers” who returns to the United States after living abroad for several years to become the humanist-in-residence at the Center for the Study of Advanced Studies, which recently had been established at his Midwestern alma mater. One of the fellows at the center was conducting cutting-edge research in artificial intelligence. In an effort to demonstrate that the brain is nothing more than an information-processing machine whose operations can be reduced to a few simple algorithms, Philip Lentz, a leading cognitive neurologist, enlists “Powers” to create an elaborate Turing test for his AI program. “Powers” is charged with tutoring the machine, Helen, in the Western literary canon. The culmination of the experiment is a contest between Helen and a twenty-two-year-old master’s student that tests their knowledge of the history of literature.
The more deeply “Powers” is drawn into Lentz’s labyrinthine machinations, the more uneasy he becomes about the implications of the experiment. Having already published four novels at a young age, “Powers” is a recognized writer of some accomplishment. Unlike so many artists and humanists who cannot bridge the chasm separating C. P. Snow’s two cultures, his interest in science runs deep. After graduating from high school, he attended the university to study the natural sciences but switched direction after a life-changing freshman literature seminar. Struggling to reacclimate to life in the United States and readjust to a university that has changed in their absence, “Powers” and his partner, C., gladly accept a dinner invitation from his erstwhile professor, whom he credited with “ruining a promising scientific career.” Though looking forward to catching up on old times and the most recent faculty gossip, he is more interested in discussing some of the philosophical questions and ethical dilemmas posed by his deepening involvement with Helen. Having thought I recognized Powers as one of my former students, imagine my surprise when I read the fictional account of his reunion with his college professor:
After my mother, the man had taught me how to read. Taylor was reading for me. Through Taylor, I discovered how a book both mirrored and elicited the mind’s real ability to turn inward upon itself. He changed my life. He changed what I thought life was. But I’d never done more than revere him from a distance, forever the eighteen-year-old student. Now, to my astonishment, we became friends.1
My surprise doubled, and I became even more curious about Powers. Who was imitating whom? Another Taylor had first taught me how to read—my mother was a high school literature teacher, and her favorite poet was Emily Dickinson. When I began reading Galatea 2.2, I discovered that the epigram to Powers’s story about “Powers,” Helen, and Taylor is a poem by Emily Dickinson:
The brain is wider than the sky,
For, put them side by side,
The one the other will contain
With ease and you beside.
The brain is deeper than the sea,
For, hold them, blue to blue,
The one the other will absorb,
As sponges, buckets do.
The brain is just the weight of God,
For, heft them, pound for pound,
And they will differ, if they do,
As syllable and sound.
If the brain is wider than the sky, deeper than the sea, and just the weight of God, Helen will never be able to contain it. Nor will any machine be designed to program thinking.
But my astonishment did not stop with the poem by Emily Dickinson. The syllabus for “Powers’s” freshman seminar could have been from a course he had taken with me. In preparation for the dinner party, his partner, C., quizzes “Powers” about Taylor’s course:
“What did you read?” C. wanted to know.
“He started us out on Freud’s Introductory Lectures. Then we applied the dream work to fairy tales and lyric poetry. After a while, we went on to longer stuff—short stories, plays, novels.”
(142)
Once again, the uncanny. More convinced than ever that Powers had been one of my students, I called the college alumni office and asked if Richard Powers had graduated from Williams College and, if so, what year. A few hours later, the director of alumni relations called to say there was no such name in his files. When he asked why I had asked, I hesitated to tell him the real reason.
Though Richard Powers never took a course from me, he might as well have been one of my students. During their dinner with the Taylors, “Powers” and C. learn that his teacher is dying of cancer. Before leaving town a few months later, “Powers” visits his mentor and gives him the first bound galley of his new book, Prisoner’s Dilemma, which was, in fact, written by Richard Powers. “‘I don’t know how to say good bye,’ I told Taylor. The book was my goodbye, because symbols are all that become of the real. They change us. They make us over, alter our bodies as we receive and remake them. The symbols a life forms along its way work back out of the recorder’s office where they wait, and, in time, they themselves go palpable. Lived” (204).
A year or so after I read Galatea 2.2, a former student, one whom I had actually taught, José Márquez, and I were invited to give a presentation on art and technology at Hofstra University. I had recently published Hiding, in which I analyze the complex circuits joining art, religion, and technology. In an effort to integrate word and image, I developed an elaborate visual design for the book. In Hiding, I pushed the book as far in the direction of multimedia hypertext as I could at the time. José and I then translated the argument into an electronic format by creating a CD-rom named Motel Réal: Las Vegas, Nevada, which is a video game built around the interface of a slot machine. Each of the hotel’s fifty-two rooms has a narrative that probes questions raised in Hiding. Players navigate through Motel Réal by inserting tokens in the slot machine. The game presents an account of late twentieth-century media culture through an interpretation of Las Vegas. Vegas is where the real becomes virtual and the virtual becomes real. Though I have never said so directly, Hiding and Motel Réal are two parts of a single work. Our presentation had lots of bells and whistles and was very heavy on graphics. After our talk, Richard Powers introduced himself to me and said that he had been thinking about many of the same questions. This brief exchange began a conversation that has continued intermittently over the years. There was no way I could have known that afternoon when we first met that Richard was working on the novel that one day would lead me to write this essay.
It is, of course, Freud who has taught us more about the uncanny than any other writer. In his seminal essay entitled simply “The ‘Uncanny,’” he suggests that the word unheimlich harbors clues to the meaning of this primordial psychological condition. Exploring the multiple dimensions of unheimlich, Freud identifies two seemingly unrelated meanings of heimlich. First, heimlich, heimlig, which derives from Heim (home), means belonging “to the house, not strange, familiar, tame, intimate, friendly, etc.” Heimlich, by extension, suggests “intimate, friendly, comfortable; the enjoyment of quiet content, etc., arousing a sense of agreeable restfulness and security as in one within the four walls of his house.” The second meaning of heimlich is “concealed, kept from sight, so that others do not get to know of or about it, withheld from others.” The prefix un-, Freud explains, carries the negative connotation of “eerie, weird, arousing gruesome fear.” Unheimlich, then, is un-homelike—something strange that can engender fear or even dread. What makes the word unheimlich so rich is an ambiguity that borders on a contradiction:
among its different shades of meaning the word “heimlich” exhibits one which is identical with its opposite “unheimlich.”… On the one hand it means what is familiar and agreeable, and on the other, what is concealed and kept out of sight. “Unheimlich” is customarily used… as the contrary of the first signification of “heimlich,” and not of the second…. On the other hand, we notice that Schelling says that something throws quite a new light on the concept of the Unheimlich, for which we were certainly not prepared. According to him, everything is unheimlich that ought to have remained hidden but come to light.
Homelike and unhomelike, familiar and strange, reassuring and disconcerting, hidden and exposed, attractive and repulsive—what is the secret of the uncanny?
While the details of Freud’s argument need not concern us here, two closely related points are important for the interpretation of Powers’s fiction. First, Freud argues that the uncanny is inseparable from repetition, which is integral to the déjà-vu experience. What was so strange about first seeing the photograph of Richard Powers was my firm conviction that I had seen this person before. Unable to persuade myself that this belief was an illusion, I attempted to reconnect image and person by tracing the representation to its origin. Second, drawing on his psychoanalytic experience, Freud associates the experience of the uncanny with the mother.
It often happens that neurotic men declare that often they feel there is something uncanny about the female genital organs. This unheimlich place, however, is the entrance to the former Heim of all human beings, to the place where each of us has lived once upon a time and in the beginning. There is a joking saying that “Love is home-sickness” and whenever a man dreams of a place or a country and says to himself, while he is still dreaming: “this place is familiar to me, I’ve been here before,” we may interpret this place as being his mother’s genitals or her body.2
In Freud’s developmental theory, life is an archaeoteleological process in which the goal of life is to return to the origin that gave us birth. The mother represents the home from which we come and to which we both long and dread to return. Simultaneously womb and tomb, the mother is the primal origin we profoundly desire yet cannot bear. Life begins with loss and becomes a circuitous route to a recovery that is repeatedly deferred. In the absence of what we most desire, we are left with substitutes for the real that always leave us wanting. This story, which is cosmological, theological, and psychological, is as old as creation itself.
The far-reaching implications of Freud’s analysis of the uncanny become apparent in his late work, Civilization and Its Discontents, written in the shadow of World War I, when cancer was devouring his body. The argument begins with an account of religion that is reminiscent of Freud’s earlier interpretation of the longing to return to the mother’s body. He notes that his comments on religion are a “response to a call” from a friend who was responding to The Future of an Illusion: “I had sent him my small book that treats religion as an illusion, and he answered that he entirely agreed with my judgment upon religion, but that he was sorry I had not properly appreciated the true source of religious sentiments…. It is a feeling that he would like to call a sensation of ‘eternity,’ a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded—as it were, ‘oceanic.’”3 Describing this oceanic sense as “a feeling of an indissoluble bond of being at one with the external world as a whole,” Freud traces its source to the original unity of the ego and the world. In the prelapsarian condition of plenitude, all desires are satisfied and every longing is fulfilled; more precisely, neither desire nor need has yet emerged because self and world remain one. For Freud, the source of this archaic satisfaction is, of course, the mother. Once the maternal bond is broken, life becomes a ceaseless effort to return to a home that forever disappears.
While admitting that the oceanic feeling exists in some people, Freud denies that it is the fons et origo of religion. Trying to salvage his argument in The Future of an Illusion, he reasserts that religion originates in the infant’s sense of helplessness and the longing for a protective father that sense engenders. Having broached the issue of oceanic consciousness, however, Freud is forced to confess that his analysis might be incomplete: “The origin of the religious attitude can be traced back in clear outlines as far as the feeling of infantile helplessness. There may be something further behind that, but for the present it is wrapped in obscurity” (19). Though Freud never quite admits it, what lies behind the father is the mother. The loss of the mother creates desires that can never be fulfilled. In the absence of true satisfaction, a series of supplements inevitably emerges. The four “substitute satisfactions” Freud identifies represent gradual refinements of the method for sublimating base instincts into generally acceptable cultural currency.
If, as Marx insists, religion is an opiate, then opiates are, in a certain sense, religious. By incorporating “intoxicating drugs,” Freud argues, people attempt to overcome the suffering caused by their incompletion and inadequacy.
The crudest, but also the most effective among these methods of influence is the chemical one—intoxication. I do not think that anyone completely understands its mechanism, but it is a fact that there are foreign substances which, when present in the blood or tissues, directly cause us pleasurable sensations; and they also so alter the conditions governing our sensibility that we become incapable of receiving unpleasurable impulses.
(25)
The artist refines the strategies of the pharmacist. From this point of view, art is, in effect, a drug synthesized to relieve the symptoms of loss and deprivation. In art, Freud concludes, “satisfaction is obtained from illusions, which are recognized as such without the discrepancy between them and reality being allowed to interfere with enjoyment” (27). Psychoanalytic theory claims to show how thin the line can be separating the hallucinations of the addict and the fantasies of the artists from the delusions of the madman. To avoid falling into the prison house of solitary madness, individuals tend to join together to create shared fantasies. The result, according to Freud, is religion.
A special importance attaches to the case in which this attempt to procure a certainty of happiness and a protection against suffering through a delusional remolding of reality is made by a considerable number of people in common. The religions of mankind must be classed among the mass-delusions of this kind. No one, needless to say, who shares a delusion ever recognizes it as such.
(28)
A shared delusion is nonetheless still a delusion. While effecting inward transformation, chemical, artistic, and religious fixes cannot bring about outward changes necessary for pleasure. This transformation of reality and its principles is what technology promises. To explain the modern, Freud once again returns to the “primitive.”
Technology is not, of course, new. To trace its origin one must return to prehistoric times. In the beginning was light… fire… heat. If we go back far enough, we find that the first acts of civilization were the use of tools, the gaining of control over fire and the construction of dwellings. Among these the control over fire stands out as a quite extraordinary and unexampled achievement, while the others opened paths that man has followed ever since, and the stimulus to which is easily guessed. With every tool man is perfecting his own organs, whether motor or sensory, or is removing the limits of their functioning.
(37)
Tools forged in the heat of fire function as “extensions of their [creators’] organs.” But which organ is at stake in technology? Freud appends to his myth of the origin of technology a footnote in which he explains: “The legends that we possess leave no doubt about the originally phallic view taken of tongues of flame as they shoot upwards” (37). If fire is the trope for technology, the organ of technology appears to be the phallus, whose appearance returns us once again to the maternal matrix.
In the sentence following the one whose footnote discusses the phallic significance of fire, Freud lists the technological developments that have helped man correct his defects and overcome his inadequacies: motor power, ships and aircraft, spectacles, the telescope and microscope, the photographic camera, and the gramophone disk. He concludes this catalogue with the instrument he believes most effectively represents the function of technology: the telephone. “With the help of the telephone he can hear at distances that would be respected as unattainable even in a fairy tale. Writing was in its origin the voice of an absent person; and the dwelling-house was a substitute for the mother’s womb, the first lodging, for which in all likelihood man still longs, and in which he was safe and felt at ease” (38).
The string of associations released in this brief passage is dazzling. The lines Freud connects suggest that the telephone, which is a synecdoche for technology, binds us back to our original “dwelling-house.” Within this psychic economy, the telephone is “a substitute for the mother’s womb.” Our deepest desire, our most profound longing, Freud insists, is to return to the womb-tomb of Mother Earth, where eros and thanatos are one. “These things that, by his science and technology,” Freud admits, “man has brought about on this earth… not only sound like a fairy tale, they are an actual fulfillment of every—or almost every—fairy tale wish.”
Long ago [man] formed an ideal conception of omnipotence and omniscience which he embodied in his gods. To these gods he attributed everything that seemed unattainable to his wishes, or that was forbidden to him. One may say, therefore, that these gods were cultural ideals. Today he has come very close to the attainment of this ideal, he has almost become a god himself…. Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times. Nevertheless, he is entitled to console himself with the thought that this development will not come to an end precisely with the year 1930 A.D. Future ages will bring with them new and probably unimaginably great advances in this field of civilization and will increase man’s likeness to God still more.
(38–39)
Freud’s prediction was more accurate than he ever could have imagined. He could not have anticipated the globalized telecommunications matrix that now encompasses us all. Nor could he have known that “The Dream” would become real in virtual realities that form, in the words of the cyberpunk writer William Gibson, a “consensual hallucination.” His analysis of the close relationship of religion, art, and technology remains one of the best guides to unraveling the web in which we are caught.
Richard Powers’s writing career, like my introduction to his work, began with an uncanny experience with a photograph. After spending much of his youth in Indonesia, Powers returned to Illinois to attend high school and university. Like “Richard Powers,” he intended to study science at the University of Illinois but changed direction when he took a freshman literature course. After completing his undergraduate degree, Powers began a graduate program in English during the heyday of critical theory but quickly became disillusioned with what he described as the “shrill solipsism” of literary theory. He completed a master’s degree, dropped out of graduate school, and got a job writing code for a company in Boston. For Powers, like a character in one of his novels, “a good, polished program was everything… poetry was supposed to be.”4 While strapped to the computer turning out code by day and reading Walter Benjamin at night, Powers’s imagination was busy creating an alternative reality that increasingly became his home. One day, chance intervened and changed his life.
In the early eighties, I was living in the Fens in Boston right behind the Museum of Fine Arts. If you go there before noon on Saturdays, you could get into the museum for nothing. One weekend, they were having this exhibition of a German photographer I’d never heard of, who was August Sander. It was the first American retrospective of his work. I have a visceral memory of coming in the doorway, banking to the left, turning up, and seeing the first picture there. It was called Young Westerwald Farmers on Their Way to the Dance, 1914. I had this palpable sense of recognition, this feeling that I was walking into their gaze, and they’d been waiting seventy years for someone to return the gaze. I went up to the photograph and read the caption and had this instant realization that not only were they not on the way to the dance, but that somehow I had been reading about this moment for the last year and a half. Everything I read seemed to converge onto this act of looking, this birth of the twentieth century—the age of total war, the age of the apotheosis of the machine, the age of mechanical reproduction. This was a Saturday. On Monday, I went in to my job and gave two weeks notice and started working on Three Farmers.5
Three Farmers on Their Way to the Dance (1985) has all the characteristics that have become Powers’s signature. He weaves together three narrative strands: first, the story of the three young European men depicted in Sander’s photograph as they suffer through World War I; second, the story of Peter Mays, who edits a technology journal and is preoccupied with photography; and third, the narrator’s critical reflections on photographic technology and Henry Ford.
If William Gaddis is the most theologically sophisticated novelist America has produced, Richard Powers is the most scientifically literate novelist in the history of American literature. He is a philosopher’s novelist—his works are bursting with big ideas and difficult questions. Powers, like Freud, is intrigued by the complex interplay of art, religion, and technology. Though he never directly invokes Freud, his novels explore the experience of abandonment and the longing to return to an origin that forever eludes us. Reviewing his 2000 novel Plowing the Dark, the late John Leonard writes:
On the road, on the raft, on the lam—ours is a culture of Shane-like vanishing acts, an agitated itchiness from Huck Finn to the Weather Underground, with intermediate stops at the Last of the Mohicans, the Lost Generation, Dean Moriarty, Billy Pilgrim, Rabbit Angstrom, and Henderson the Rain King. It’s no big surprise to find lonesome rangers on every page of Powers—teachers who leave hospitals to wander in the atomic desert; scientists who desert their labs for night shift scut work, secretly composing music; librarians who quit their decimal systems to look for the human genome; doctors running away from war crimes and nightmare third-world childhoods; novelists hiding out in a neuroscience research project; single-mother real estate agents marooned in metastatic randomness; Adie who has lost her art.
What does startle is the urgent longing of these pilgrims to go home again, if they can figure out where home is. In one of his novels, Galatea 2.2, Powers describes another, The Gold Bug Variations, as “a songbook of homesickness.” But so are they all. And history keeps getting in the way. In each novel, he seems to hope that by striking out in two directions at once, then rigging a convergence, he can circle back to the sanctuary.6
Powers transforms the genre of science fiction from futuristic tales to imaginative explorations of the implications of present-day contemporary scientific theories and technologies. All his novels are organized around a particular scientific idea or technological innovation: Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance (1985), photography and the assembly line; Prisoner’s Dilemma (1988), game theory; The Gold Bug Variations (1991), genetic code; Operation Wandering Soul (1993), psychological and surgical technology; Galatea 2.2 (1995), artificial intelligence; Gain (1998), market mechanisms and industrial pollution; Plowing the Dark (2000), virtual reality; The Time of Our Singing (2003), the relation of physics to medieval, baroque, classical, romantic, and modern music, including jazz and blues; The Echo Maker, (2006) cognitive science; and Generosity: An Enhancement (2009), neuroscience and psychopharmacology.
Each work is a composite of plots and subplots that join characters from multiple worlds and ideas that initially seem unrelated. The novels taken together appear to be a mosaic whose pixilated parts somehow form a coherent whole. Reading a Powers novel is like looking at a Chuck Close painting—examined close up, each piece of the mosaic seems a self-contained part sealed off from all the others. But as one slowly assumes a broader perspective, the separate parts gradually self-organize until they suddenly click together to form a coherent whole. In The Gold Bug Variations, which has been described as “the most daunting American novel since Moby-Dick,” a Midwestern molecular biologist, Stuart Ressler, is on the verge of cracking the genetic code when he falls in love with a lab assistant and disappears.7 Twenty-five years later, a librarian and her art historian lover team up to find out what happened to Ressler. Their quest takes them through a dizzying series of connections: self-replicating molecules, differential engines, Klein bottles, polypeptides, Pythagoras, Pascal, Rilke, singing, ATMs, Brueghel, Vermeer, protein chains, Poe, Bach, and “tetragrammatonic golem recipes.” Though seemingly disconnected, Powers detects a common thread joining these disparate phenomena. “In Bach’s polyphony, as in the double helix, as in kabbala, variations on just four notes, four nucleotides and four letters in the name of God spell out everything we need to know about ‘that string of base-pairs coding for all inheritance, desire, ambition, the naming of need itself—first love, forgiveness, frailty.’”8
Such baffling connections not only permeate each book but also expand to create an intricate web that encompasses all his works. When asked about the disciplinary diversity of his novels, Powers’s response is as revealing of our time as of his work:
The economics of higher education now prevent the kind of interdisciplinary vision that I’m describing. I think that a literary critic’s work would only be enhanced by a more sophisticated sense of, say, evolutionary paleontology, or molecular biology, or cognitive science, or cosmology. We want to be able to ask answerable questions, but we also want to be able to situate those answers in a broader geography, an engagement with larger human questions. And that’s how my books work; they work by saying you cannot understand a person minimally, you cannot understand a person simply through his supposedly causal psychological profile. You can’t understand a person completely in any sense, unless that sense takes into consideration all the contexts that that person inhabits. And a person at the end of the second millennium inhabits more contexts than any specialized discipline can easily name. We are shaped by runaway technology, by the apotheosis of business and markets, by sciences that occasionally seem on the verge of completing themselves or collapsing under its own runaway success. This is the world we live in. If you think of the novel as a supreme connection machine—the most complex artifact of networking that we’ve ever developed—then you have to ask how a novelist would dare to leave out 95% of the picture.9
It is hard to imagine a better description of the structure of Powers’s novels than “a supreme connection machine—the most complex artifact of networking that we’ve ever developed.” When so understood, the fabric of his oeuvre reflects the world in which he writes and we live. It is fractal—the same patterns operate at every level within and among his works. Rather than gradually unfolding linear narratives within narratives, he fashions stories in which each work emerges from and folds back into the other to form recursive loops that draw readers into the creative process. To see how Powers’s works work, I will concentrate on the interplay of art, religion, and technology in his seminal novel Plowing the Dark. As I have suggested, Powers does not shy away from difficult ideas and big questions. In an age of jaded cynicism and recycled ideas, he dares to ask: Why do people believe in religion? What is the purpose of art? Does technology transform reality? What is the nature of life?
Philosophy, religion, and art began in a cave. In his well-known allegory of the cave in book 7 of The Republic, Plato describes a group of people huddled around a fire who mistake the shadows projected on the wall for reality. The philosopher, who is freed from this prison house, has a clear vision of the pure forms that are the substance of reality. Christianity and Islam both trace their origins to the underworld—early Christians gathered in caves once used by the followers of Mithra and as Roman catacombs. And for the Prophet Muhammed, the cave is the site of illumination rather than ignorance and bondage. Succumbing to a life crisis at the rather typical age of forty, Muhammed retreated to a cave named Jeba Hira in the mountains around Mecca. There, during the month of Ramadan, he received his first revelation from God and three years later started preaching a message that has transformed the world.
The relation of art to caves is more obscure but no less important. In his suggestive book Lascaux; or, The Birth of Art, Georges Bataille maintains that “Lascaux provides our earliest tangible trace, our first sign of art and also of man.” He proceeds to argue that there have been two pivotal events in human history—the making of tools and the creation of art. “Tool-making was the invention of Homo faber—of him who, while no longer an animal, was not yet fully a man. That sufficiently well describes Neanderthal Man. Art began with full-grown man, Homo sapiens, who first entered the stage in the early Upper Paleolithic times: in the Aurignacian period.” For Bataille, art is constitutive of human being as such. But the tale he tells is not free from ambiguity because there is something disturbing about the heritage that makes us human. “At Lascaux,” he insists,
more troubling even than the deep descent into the earth, what preys upon and transfixes us is the vision, present before our very eyes, of all that is most remote. This message, moreover, is intensified by an inhuman strangeness. Following along the rock walls, we see a kind of cavalcade of animals. But this animality is nonetheless for us the first sign, the blind unthinking sign and yet the living intimate sign, of our presence in the real world.10
It is difficult to read “this message… intensified by an inhuman strangeness” without recalling Freud’s account of the uncanny. From a psychoanalytic perspective, caves that are openings in Mother Earth are figures of the beginning that is our end. Powers is aware of the multiple connotations of caves and traces direct lines connecting primitive caverns and today’s most sophisticated information, communications, and media networks as well as telepresence and virtual reality technologies. For one of the central characters in Plowing the Dark, the Koran is a lifeline that allows him to imagine an alternative reality that makes the pain of daily life endurable. “You listen to the archangel Gabriel, dictating to the Prophet in his subterranean cave. This story extends itself only in the hinted wisps, as if all readers already know the plot. But the more gloriously cryptic, the better” (323). Alluding to Plato’s cave, another character insists that what appears to be real is but the faint shadow of forms that now can be coded. “The lamp, the food, the brass keys, all led him deeper into the labyrinth, from one state-of-the-art implementation to the next. Each line of his code inched toward that higher library of manipulable Forms” (112–113). For latter-day demiurges, these codes create a virtual reality chamber that is the contemporary version of Lascaux.
You have to read this. The author claims that the Upper Paleolithic caves were the first VR.
Sure. Spiegel twisted his palm in the air. What else can you call them?
No. Literally. Theater-sized, total-immersion staging chambers where they’d drag initiates by torchlight. The shock of the supernatural surround-and-light show supposedly altered the viewer’s consciousness. Lim stopped, amazed by the idea. Can you imagine? Catching your first ever glimpse of images, flickering out of pitch-darkness. Like nothing you’ve ever seen. Your deepest mental illusions made real.
Adie held up her hand to stop the stream, until she could improvise a bridge across it. You’re saying that cave art begets all this? She waved to include the whole RL. That Lascaux starts a chain reaction that leads to…?
I’m saying that art explodes at exactly the same moment as tool-based culture. That cave pictures prepared the leap, after a million and a half years of static existence. That pictures were the tool that enabled human liftoff, the Urtech that planted the idea of a separate symbolic existence in the mind of—…
I read somewhere that Lascaux has become a simulation of itself? Tourism was killing the paintings. So the authorities built these complete underground replicas so that—
Lim’s impatience cut him dead. You still don’t get it. They were simulations to begin with. Consciousness holding itself up to its own light, for a look. An initiation ceremony for the new universe of symbolic thought…The mind is the first virtual reality.
(129–130)
From the ancient to the modern. During the 1990s, there was no better place to explore the Internet and virtual reality technologies than the school where Powers was an undergraduate—the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, which is the home of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). Two of the most important developments of the Internet era came from the University of Illinois. The first graphical Web browser—Mosaic—was released by the NCSA in 1993. A team led by Marc Andreessen, who was still an undergraduate at the time, created this wildly popular browser that led to the Internet boom of the 1990s. Andreessen and his colleagues later revised Mosaic to create Netscape. In his book Architects of the Web: One Thousand Days That Built the Future of Business, Robert Reid notes that Andreessen and his fellow geeks sought
to rectify many of the shortcomings of the very primitive prototypes then floating around the Internet. Most significantly, their work transformed the appeal of the Web from niche uses in the technical area to mass-market appeal. In particular, these University of Illinois students made two key changes to the web browser, which hyper-boosted its appeal: they added graphics to what was otherwise boring text-based software, and, most important, they ported the software from so-called Unix computers that were popular only in technical and academic circles, to the Microsoft Windows operating system, which is used on more than 80 percent of the computers in the world, especially personal and commercial computers.11
Mosaic not only changed the face of the Internet but literally transformed the world.
It is tempting to read connotations into “Mosaic” suggestive of the three religions of the book: the Byzantine art that is characteristic of Hagia Sophia, the great church and mosque where Christianity and Islam meet, as well as the person who led the Jewish people out of bondage and into exile. The name of the first Web browser Mosaic echoes in Powers’s description of one of the principal characters in Plowing the Dark, “a mini-Moses, still shepherding around the dream of starting an artist’s colony where he could gather all those who needed a hideout from the real world” (8). But, alas, Andreessen denies all such connotations. In a personal e-mail he recalls:
Hi Mark—great to hear from you! Unfortunately Mosaic is purely prosaic :-). At the time, all of the good projects in the industry were being given acronyms. (All of the bad projects got random strings of characters and numbers, e.g. every Sony product in existence.) I thought if I gave it a name, it might stick in people’s heads. The name Mosaic just seemed evocative.
Later I found out the religious connotations. Which are appropriate… unfortunately my childhood religious education was limited to whatever burned-out hippies the local Methodist church could attract as pastors :-).
Best,
Marc
Meaning, however, does not have to be intentional to be significant.
The second innovation that plays a leading role in Plowing the Dark was developed in the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois, Chicago. The CAVE—Cave Automatic Virtual Environment—was first introduced at the 1992 SIGGRAPH convention. Explicitly referring to Plato’s cave, the CAVE is an immersive virtual reality environment in which art comes to life and life appears to be a work of art. The actual environment is a 10 × 10 × 9 foot structure located in a 35 × 25 × 13 foot room, which is completely dark. The walls of the cave are rear-projection screens where high-resolution projectors display images through reflecting mirrors. Inside the chamber, users wear 3D stereoscopic LCD shutter glasses whose lenses are synchronized with computers to create different 3D images for each eye. There is also a 3D audio system that transmits sound from multiple speakers carefully positioned at precise angles throughout the room. The projection technology of the CAVE fashions a more realistic environment by creating perspective based on the viewer’s position rather than a predetermined angle of vision. The walls of the room, in other words, must constantly know where the viewer is located. This is accomplished by feedback loops between a sensor mounted on the goggles and computers that constantly interpolate moving positions from data transmitted in real time.
At the time Powers was writing his novel, this technology was being used to simulate architectural spaces, project walk-through hyperbolic geometries for exploring strange attractors, and create a manipulatable model displaying the brain’s anatomy and metabolism and an anatomical atlas of a near-term fetus. Powers is completely conversant with these scientific theories and technological innovations. Indeed, it is possible to learn more from his novels than from many textbooks and technical journals. Like an experienced teacher, he has the ability to explain difficult concepts clearly and concisely to the uninitiated. In the final analysis, however, his interests are not primarily scientific but philosophical, artistic, and even religious.
When I first met Powers after my lecture at Hofstra, I did not know that he had cloistered himself in a small apartment nearby and was writing Plowing the Dark. In a 2003 interview, he explained that this book was inspired by a lecture he heard Terry Waite give. In the 1980s, Waite, serving as the envoy of the Archbishop of Canterbury, traveled to Lebanon to try to win the release of four hostages. During the negotiations, he himself was taken hostage and was held captive from 1987 to 1991. Reflecting on Waite’s talk, Powers recalled:
After the lecture, he took questions from the audience and someone bluntly asked, What was the main thing you learned in being locked up for five years? In the moment after my stomach lurched at the question, I ran through all the possible answers: love life while you can; never take people for granted again. But his answer was shocking. He said, “Contemporary humanity has lost the ability to engage in productive solitude.”
What most struck Powers about Waite’s comment was how well it expressed his understanding of his own craft. The acts of writing and reading, Powers believes, are, in effect, religious activities designed to lift one outside travails of time by creating an alternative reality less fraught than quotidian existence.
The currency he [Waite] was speaking of is very much the care and tending of individual salvation. To me, his comment legitimized the process of reading and writing. The thing that makes reading and writing suspect in the eyes of the market economy is that it’s not corrupted. It’s a threat to the GDP, to the gene engineer. It’s an invisible, sedate, almost inert process. Reading is the last act of secular prayer.
Like a medieval monk, Powers retreated to a tiny apartment above a garage in Setauket, Long Island. “I wanted to see what the world looked like,” he explains, “when I was thrown back entirely upon my imagination, cut off from all material sources.”12
The novel Powers composes in his simulated cave is structured around three cells located in Seattle; Beirut, Lebanon; and Lebanon, Ohio. Plowing the Dark weaves together two stories of events taking place on opposite sides of the world. The book begins in two empty white rooms that mirror each other. The first is a computer lab reminiscent of Microsoft where a team of researchers is developing a virtual reality environment named the Cavern. The second is in Beirut, where an English teacher fleeing the confines of a failed marriage is mistaken for a CIA agent, kidnapped, and held captive from the late 1980s until the early 1990s, which is, of course, the precise period during which Waite was imprisoned. Powers explains the importance of his own isolation for writing the novel:
It mirrors the central experiences of the novel’s two main characters—imprisonment in a Beirut prison; and the isolation produced by technology, the isolation of people immersed in virtual reality. These two kinds of removal from society required me to have a first hand visceral solitude. And knowing that I was going to write about such excruciating solitude gave me an excuse for creating my own immobile condition—although at times I think that’s just an excuse, because I really do believe that most writers start out learning how to cope with isolation and end up desiring it.13
In order to fast track their virtual reality research, the company funding the virtual reality research, TeraSys, sets up the Realization Laboratory. Here as elsewhere, names matter for Powers. In common usage, Virtual Reality (VR) is contrasted with Real Life (RL); by naming the research facility the Realization Lab—RL—Powers scrambles this neat opposition and obscures the line separating the real and the virtual. In addition to the typical geek squad of bitjockeys from different Asian countries, the main characters in the RL narrative are erstwhile college roommates from the 1960s and former artists—Adie Klarpol (Klar, clear, transparent, pure; Pol, pole), Steven Spiegel (Spiegel, mirror, reflecting surface), and Ted Zimmerman (Zimmer, room, apartment, chamber). This threesome attended the University of Wisconsin in the early 1970s, shortly after students protesting the Viet Nam war bombed Sterling Hall, killing a university physics researcher and injuring four others. Adie was a budding painter, sometimes poet, and the girlfriend of the campus stud, Ted, who was already an accomplished composer. Stevie, like Powers, came to the university to study science but was converted to literature when he heard Adie recite lines from the final stanza of Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium.”
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing…
These lines return repeatedly and form the leitmotif of the novel. Powers suggests that we are always sailing toward Byzantium—the dream of art, religion, and technology is to step out of nature by leaving bodily existence behind.
To step out of nature would be to kill time. In this work, Powers is preoccupied with time and the struggle to master or escape it. The opposition between time and timelessness (or eternity) mirrors the tension between body and mind and, by extension, real life and virtual reality. In the first lines of the novel, Powers frames the question of time in terms of the space where his narratives unfold.
This room is never anything o’clock.
Minutes slip through it like a thief in gloves. Hours fail even to raise the dust. Outside, deadlines expire. Buzzers erupt. Deals build to their frenzied conclusions. But in this chamber, now and forever combine.
This room lingers on the perpetual pitch of here. Its low local twilight outlasts the day’s politics. It hangs fixed, between discovery and invention. It floats in pure potential, a strongbox in the inviolate vault.
Time does not keep these parts, nor do these parts keep time…
Out in the template world, flowers still spill from the bud. Fruit runs from ripe to rot. Faces still recognize each other in surprise over a fire sale. Marriages go on reconciling and cracking up. Addicts swear never again. Children succumb in their beds after a long fever. But on this island, in this room: the faint rumble, the standing hum of a place that passes all understanding.
(3)
To program a place that passes all understanding would be to create a heaven of sorts.
While the chamber seems timeless, the world is not. The late 1980s and early 1990s was an unusually tumultuous period in world history—the end of the Soviet Union, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, Tiananmen Square, the early days of the dot-com boom, the emergence of financial capitalism, the spread of Islamic fundamentalism, and the outbreak of the Gulf War. While seemingly random, these events suggest an emergent pattern that Powers had already identified in his study of neural networks and artificial intelligence. These outside events inevitably intrude on the Realization Lab. Growing unrest in Eastern Europe and the impending fall of the Soviet Union lead to a revealing discussion among the virtual reality researchers.
This is not about forms of government or appropriations of power or anything of the sort. This is about the globalization of markets, the apotheosis of consumerism. Your… human chain—Kaladjian spat both words out—is nothing more than a glorified product-promotional placement.
Well I’m not going to stand around discussing the fall of Eastern Europe with this crypto-fascist.
Absolutely astonishing, Dale Bergen said, to no one. It seems to be self-assembling.
Michael Vulgamott snorted. You mean the human chain, or the global socialist meltdown?
I’m just a biologist, Bergen answered. I couldn’t tell you about the thing’s politics. But from this distance, it looks an awful lot like a long polypeptide growing itself out of side chains.
Adie broke in on the speculating circle. This isn’t happening, she said. Again? Didn’t this dream die two months ago? I can’t take any more developments. I’m overloading.
You think you’re overloading? Jackdaw gestured toward a screen where news of the latest upheaval coursed through the system. You ought to see what’s happening to the network access points. Every time there’s a new development, the whole Net grinds into gridlock.
(189–190)
This is a very important exchange. Powers suggests that emergent self-organizing systems are similarly structured and function the same way in all media. In other words, molecular processes, neural networks in the brain, weather systems, financial markets, and media networks are isomorphic and display the same operational logic. Furthermore, these systems are, like Powers’s novels, fractal—they have the same structure at every level. One of the primary goals of the research conducted at the Realization Lab is to understand how these complex systems work so that predictive models can be developed.
When the novel opens, Stevie is working for TeraSys, and Adie is a magazine illustrator in New York City. In 1979, Adie launched a promising career in art with her show Halations. Attracted to her as well as to her art, Stevie asks Adie about the title of her show.
A well-received show, as these things go. Some kind of awful literary name…
“Halations.” What’s so awful about that?
What does it mean, anyway? It sounds like bad breath caused by asthma.
It’s a technical term. Describing what I did.
Pastel penumbra halo stains. Lots of high-frequency colors. Not uninteresting. Inkblot tests on mirror hallucinogens. Seemingly abstract, until you looked closely enough to make out the ghosted high realism. There was one called Infinite Coastline, if I remember right. Kind of a hand-drawn Mandelbrot, a couple of years before everybody in the industrialized nations was dosed out on Mandelbrots.
(92–93)
This apparently inconsequential remark establishes a series of surprising associations. “Infinite Coastline” is a direct reference to Mark Tansey’s “Coastline Measure” (1987), which is an illustration of Mandelbrot’s fractals.14 Fractals, which became very popular in high and low art during the 1980s, are based on self-iterating mathematical equations that form feedback loops whose recursions generate stunningly lifelike figures. What few people realize is that Mandelbrot discovered fractals while studying financial markets. In his seminal book Fractals and Scaling in Finance: Discontinuity, Concentration, Risk, he establishes principles that form the foundation of all statistical approaches to economics and finance. Fractals, therefore, mark a fascinating intersection of art and mathematics that lies at the heart of the research going on at the Realization Lab.
While code runs the machines that generate virtual reality, art fashions the surface that creates all the buzz. Since the geeks in RL cannot paint and are artistically illiterate, Stevie calls Adie to try to persuade her to come to Seattle and join the team. With her artistic career in shambles but her dream of creating a better world still alive, Adie resists, saying that she already sold out once and is not going to do so again. Digital technologies of reproduction, she insists, destroy originality and creativity, which are essential to art. Stevie pushes back, reminding her of William Gaddis’s lesson in Agape Agape—art actually created the information age because the original punch-card computer is the direct descendent of the player piano. “Art made all this happen, you know. The whole digital age. Music did it. Hollerith got his idea from the punched data card from the player piano. From the Jacquard tapestry loom” (216).15 Not fully persuaded but nonetheless intrigued, Adie agrees to visit Seattle and check out RL.
One look and she is hooked. Echoing Freud’s take on technology, she exclaims, “that’s like drugs” (169). Stevie agrees and might well have replied, “Yup. Just like what we were doing in the sixties. Same trip, different junk.” The machine that blows Adie’s mind is a prototype total immersion environment named the Cavern, which is directly modeled on the CAVE. Donning goggles and data gloves and tethered by cables linking her to data processors, Adie loops and soars through virtual space until vertigo overcomes her. The experience is exhilarating, but Adie still resists, saying she is an artist and that this is not art. Stevie does not disagree but draws a different conclusion. “It’s not paint.” “No paint involved at all. No original expression required, Ade. It’s all drawing by numbers out here. Don’t think of it as art. Think of it as a massive data structure. What SoHo doesn’t know won’t hurt it” (17).
The more time she spends in this alternate reality, the more appealing it becomes. Eventually, Adie relents and agrees to work with Stevie and his team. The virtual world the geeks have created more closely resembles a cartoon than the real world. For the Cavern to be commercially viable, it has to be an environment that is as realistic as possible. While agreeing to work on the project, Adie does not give up her commitment to art. Indeed, the more deeply she becomes immersed in the virtual, the more closely it seems to resemble art; conversely, her growing appreciation of the Cavern reveals virtual dimensions of art she never before had recognized. As her work progresses, Adie gradually comes to suspect that art and technology are not so different after all but are actually playing the same game.
Having come of age as an artist during the go-go 1980s, when copying and counterfeiting were all the rage, Adie knows how to play the appropriation game. Drawing on the resources of a vast data bank with programs mimicking the styles of countless great artists, she creates a copy of a copy of an original that is forever lost. The two paintings she decides to replicate in the Cavern’s Jungle Room are Henri Rousseau’s “The Dream” (1910) and Vincent van Gogh’s “Bedroom in Arles” (1888). With seemingly endless processing power at her disposal, Adie not only reproduces “The Dream” but actually brings it to life. Rousseau’s popular painting depicts an Edenic jungle before the fall as a paradise in which the natural world and human beings exist in undisturbed harmony. The realization of this dream would be the fulfillment of humankind’s deepest and most enduring wishes. Powers describes Adie’s uncanny creation with words that carry religious, psychological, and cosmological connotations. As Freud leads us to suspect, this enveloping forest feels strangely familiar.
Your eye recognizes the place all at once, it has never been there. Or say your eye has been there, long ago. Back before childhood’s childhood. Before your eye was even an eye. And say that you’ve toted this spurge around inside ever since, a keepsake of long-abandoned cover.
Origins converge in the Jungle Room. Choose your myth or preference: the garden banishment, the wayward chromosome. Either way, this green is a return engagement. Nostalgia sprawls from the overgrown nooks. Life leverages every cranny. Moonlit creepers spread a welcome mat. The pennant of mangrove branches announces Old Home Week….
Something yearns to return to first vegetation, only this time at a cool remove. The body wants back in its abandoned nest, but now free to come and go, like a shameless tourist, without the fatal danger of travel, free to name the lush sprawl of this place from the safe vantage of a divan.
(67)
To return to the Garden from which we originally came would be to close the circle that marks the end of time.
But Adie’s artistic concerns and even spiritual longings are not shared by all the members of the research team. While she is busy creating knockoffs of works by Rousseau and van Gogh, others are using the Cavern’s VR technology to create simulations to manage events in the so-called real world. This research has two primary aims: first, to develop models that can predict the activity and measure the risk of complex weather, biological, financial, and economic systems; and second, to engineer simulators that can be used for everything from entertainment and theme parks to sophisticated weapons systems for the military. In addition to the Jungle Room, the Cavern has a Weather Room, Large Molecule Docking Room, Therapy Room, Economics Room, and Futures Room.
Powers realizes that this research, which has grown considerably since his novel was published, raises the most basic questions about life itself. Is life—human as well as nonhuman—computational? If so, is it digital or analog? Is there a code of codes that programs the cosmic order? In Plowing the Dark, the strongest believer in the possibility of calculating all aspects of human life is an Irish economist named Ronan O’Reilly, who created the Economics Room and the Futures Room to program statistical models of human behavior. Late one night, the usual banter turns to the unexpected subject of religion. Two of O’Reilly’s colleagues from Sri Lanka are watching a television show on Mormonism and are baffled. Assuming O’Reilly is Christian, they ask him to explain Mormon belief and express incredulity at what they hear. O’Reilly turns their questions back on them by asking about their fundamental beliefs, and, when they deflect his questions, he grows impatient with their evasive answers.
You both believe—as all good lab rats do—that reality is basically computational, whether or not we’ll ever lay our hands on a good, clean copy of the computation. At the core of your deepest convictions about the universe lies a Monte Carlo simulation.16
Sounds about right, Vulgamott said.
Even miracle-preaching evangelists, God love them, make their point statistically. Every modern mind is out there with a yardstick, a stopwatch, and a chi-square.
Hang on. You’re not saying there’s a hidden order behind all this? Vulgamott cast his eyes abroad. Something bigger than statistics?
O’Reilly smiled. What do you mean, hidden order? That the universe is formalizable, but not from where we’re standing? That it’s unformalizable? Now there’s a one-word contradiction in terms.
Ronan, baba. Some of us believe in contradictions in terms.
O’Reilly faced down Rajasundaran. Even mysticism is a non-Euclidean geometry. No, gentlemen. The world is a numbers racket all the way down.
(82–83)
What O’Reilly does not realize is that his argument proves the point he is trying to dismiss. If it’s numbers all the way down, the ancient philosophers and theologians were right all along—codes and algorithms are nothing more than the latest version of Plato’s Forms and the early Christian apologists’ Logos. Philosophers, theologians, and VR researchers might be chasing the same holy grail.
Powers recognizes the importance of this issue and returns to it later in the novel. A few days after O’Reilly’s conversation, Kaladjian, a programmer from Armenia, demonstrates the virtual environment he has created for Adie. As she flies through space freed from the burden of flesh, she is captivated by the experience.
She looked out across a sweeping interstellar pinwheel, its slow spokes lapping around her midriff. Each wash of stars unfolded another billion years of cosmic evolution. She swelled to the size of God’s recording angel, attending at the day of Creation.
It’s… magnificent. I had no idea. She felt her eyes spilling over, and did not care. There was no foolishness, no vanity, no shame in anything a body felt on this.
(265)
When Kaladjian is sure she is hooked, he literally pulls the plug. “‘Yes. Now here is the math behind it.’ He pushed a button and the expanding universe fell away into a few polynomials, breathtaking in their slightness” (265). At this moment it is as if Adie were staring into the mind of God.
But questions remain, and lingering uncertainties generate more questions. Is code the final word? Is the world real or virtual? Are there rules to the Game of Life? Are nature and history programmed, i.e., scripted in advance? Is the world running on a cosmic computer? Is what we take for reality a faint shadow of a metacode or algorithm of algorithms that has not yet been deciphered? Are programmers latter-day demiurges who bring together form and matter to fashion the engine of creation? Does high-speed computer technology make it possible to decode all of life’s mysteries? Powers does not answer these questions directly but, taking the long view of human development, suggests that the Cavern is the culmination of an ancient religious and philosophical quest.
Millennia pass in the war against matter. Every invention bootstraps off the next. The tale advances; thought extends its grasp over things until it arrives at the final interface. The ultimate display, the one that closes the gap between sign and thing.
In this continuous room, images go real…. The room of the cave is something more than allegory. But the room of the cave is something less than real. Its wall shadows ripple with an undercurrent of substance, more than representation, but not yet stuff. Notion springs to life from the same, deep source in which the outdoors is scripted—what the run-on Greek once called the Forms.
(400)
The final interface… the ultimate display that closes the gap between sign and thing…. Notion springs to life… what the Greeks once called the Forms. Perhaps the human race is finally on the brink of emerging from Plato’s cave. When images become real, we return to the questions of home and homelessness that haunt uncanny chambers from Lascaux to the Cavern.
But what might “the final interface” be? Paradoxically, it is an interface that is not an interface. The dream inspiring VR technology is to render the virtual real and the real virtual by erasing the interface separating mind and matter. As “human intelligence migrate[s] wholesale into its artifacts,” technology has the capacity “to break the bonds of matter and make the mind real” (395, 396). At this point, art comes to life and life becomes a work of art; programmers and engineers create what artists promise but never deliver—a Gesamtkunstwerk grander than Wagner ever imagined. Stevie explains to Adie,
The computer changes the tasks. Other inventions alter the conditions of human existence. The computer alters the human form. It’s our complement, our partner, our vindication. The goal of all the previous stopgap inventions. It builds us an entirely new home… You know what we’re working on, don’t you? Time travel, Ade. The matter transporter. Embodied art; a life-sized poem that we can live inside. It’s the grail we’ve been after since the first campfire recital. The defeat of time and space. The final victory of the imagination… Invented worlds that respond to what we’re doing, where the interface disappears. Places we can meet in, across any distance. Places where we can change all the rules, one at a time, to see what happens. Fleshed-out mental labs to explore and extend. VR reinvents the terms of existence. It redefines what it means to be human. All those old dead-end ontological undergrad conundrums? They’ve now become questions of engineering.
(159–160)
“The final victory of the imagination” is code rather than poetry or, more precisely, code as poetry. “Software,” Stevie explains to Adie, “is the final victory of description over thing” (307). In the enchanted realm of VR, saying is doing and doing is making—“In the beginning is the Word.” The vision inspiring the Cavern is the latest chapter of the ancient dream of killing time by escaping the body. If the world is computational, the future is calculable, and time is but an illusory shadow of a program that has already been coded. The body lends life weight and the sense of gravity that VR is designed to overcome. Adie struggles to grasp Stevie’s understanding of the stakes of their research:
The technology meant nothing. The technology would disappear, go transparent. In a generation or two, no one would even see it. Someone would discover how to implant billions of transistors directly into the temporal lobes, on two little squares of metal foil… The clumsy mass of distracting machine would vanish into software, into the impulse that had invented it. Into pure conception… It was not even a tool, really. More of a medium, the universal one. However much the Cavern had been built from nouns, it dreamed the dream of the unmediated, active verb. It lived where ideas stepped off the blackboard into real being. It represented humanity’s final victory over the tyranny of matter.
(267)
Like ancient Gnostic initiates gathering in subterranean caverns to undergo rituals that will beam them up to the distant heavens, cybernauts rev up their processors until their speed reaches escape velocity. Kaladjian draws the final conclusion: “We’re approaching the point of full symbolic liberation” (336). But it is left for the tattooed and pierced code junkie, Jacksaw, to give the date for “The Great Escape.” “You know, 2030 is right around the time that we’ll finally be out of here” (339).
Science fiction or fictionalized scientific facts? It’s hard to know. With proliferating prostheses, implants, transplants, the engineering of molecules, and the reengineering of the genetic code, it is difficult to be sure if there is any longer a line between form and matter, body and mind, original and copy, or virtual and real. Powers’s science fiction anticipates the argument of the respected computer scientist, inventor, entrepreneur, and futurist Ray Kurtzweil, who writes in his controversial 2005 book, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology:
The Singularity will allow us to transcend these limitations of our biological bodies and brains. We will gain power over our fates. Our mortality will be in our own hands. We will be able to live as long as we want (a subtly different statement from saying we will live forever). We will fully understand human thinking and will vastly extend and expand its reach. By the end of this century, the nonbiological portion of our intelligence will be trillions of times more powerful than unaided human intelligence…
The Singularity will represent the culmination of the merger of our biological thinking and existence with our technology, resulting in a world that is still human but that transcends our biological roots. There will be no distinction post-Singularity, between human and machine or between physical and virtual reality.17
For people interested in exploring this new frontier, Kurtzweil has established a virtual university: http://singularityu.org. According to the website, “Singularity University is an interdisciplinary university whose mission is to assemble, educate and inspire leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies in order to address humanity’s grand challenges.” Undergraduate, graduate, and executive programs include the following areas: Futures Studies and Forecasting, Networks and Computing Systems, Biotechnology and Bioinformatics, Nanotechnology, AI and Robotics, and Space and Physical Sciences. Predictably, Singularity University is all the rage in Silicon Valley. In a promotional video, Google’s co-founder Serge Brin declares, “If I was [n.b.] a student, this is where I would want to be.” (It appears that Serge should have taken a few more English courses at Stanford.)
Again, it’s hard to know if this is science fiction or fictionalized science. As I write these words, an article appears on the front page of the New York Times: “Scientists Worry Machines May Outsmart Man.” That might have been from a review of Michael Crichton’s novel Prey. John Markoff reports, “Impressed and alarmed by advances in artificial intelligence, a group of computer scientists is debating whether there should be limits on research that might lead to loss of human control over computer-based systems that carry a growing share of society’s workload, from waging war to chatting with customers on the phone.” Eric Horvitz, a researcher for Microsoft and president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, convened a conference to respond to what he regards as the realistic prospect of
superintelligent machines and artificial intelligence systems run amok…. The idea of an “intelligence explosion” in which smart machines would design even more intelligent machines was proposed by the mathematician I. J. Good in 1965. Later, in lectures and science fiction novels, the computer scientist Vernor Vinge popularized the notion of a moment when humans will create smarter-than-human machines, causing such rapid change that “the human era will be ended.” He called this shift the Singularity.
But, alas, Plato’s grotto, Lascaux, and the Cavern are not the only caves in Plowing the Dark. Jebel Hira, the cave in the mountains near Mecca where the archangel Gabriel dictated God’s words to the Prophet Muhammad, is another piece in Powers’s intricate mosaic. While artists, programmers, and engineers at the Realization Lab are sealed in a bubble plotting designs for their migration to the next dimension, a very different story is unfolding on the other side of the globe.
Trapped in an unhappy marriage and a dead-end job in Chicago, Taimur Martin flees to Beirut, where he secures a position teaching English. Though his mother is Muslim, he knows little about the Middle East and almost nothing about Islamic culture. In one of his first classes, he tries to engage the students by making what he intended as an ironic comment about the CIA. A fundamentalist student who is literalistic and has never heard of irony misunderstands the remark and reports to one of the terrorist cells that Taimur is a government agent. Several days later, Shi’ite guerrillas, who know nothing of the suspicions surrounding him, randomly kidnap Taimur and hold him captive for five years. Tai’s story is a fictive version of Terry Waite’s experience, which, as I have noted, initially inspired the novel.
Though Powers draws an explicit parallel between Tai’s prison cell and the Cavern, the worlds could not be more different. The Cavern is a white room that is ten feet wide and twelve feet long; the root cellar where Tai is held is ten feet by six feet but is dark, damp, and filthy. The style of the two narratives is as different as the stories they tell. While Powers uses first-person dialogue for his account of the Realization Lab, he tells Taimur’s story in the second person:
The crib where they’ve dumped you is too dark to see. Inch by inch, your fingertips cover its surface. Good for passing a couple of hours, if nothing else. You are on a dirt floor, in a more or less rectangular room maybe ten feet by six. The floor is little more than the flight of five steps they shove you down. It stinks of soot and vegetables. Three of the walls are wooden; one is stone. The crumbling ceiling is too low to stand up under. Your heart begins to race, despite your forced calm. You will perish here. Suffocate. You will never see the light of day.
(69)
Every detail of Taimur’s world is calculated to contrast with RL.
Real/Virtual
Material/Immaterial
Body/Mind
Dirty/Clean
Random/Computational
Uncontrollable/Controlled
Hell/Heaven
Powers goes into graphic detail about the filthy conditions in which Tai is held. He is fed fetid gruel that throws his stomach and intestines into convulsions, but he is only allowed out of his cell to go to the toilet once a day. He has no choice but to shit and piss in his cell and then must endure the stench. He hears bugs and creatures he cannot see and sometimes is awoken by a cockroach crawling across his face. Though he eventually disciplines himself to eat in order to survive, he grows steadily weaker as the days, weeks, months, and years wear on.
At first Tai assumes his kidnapping is a mistake and tries to explain that he is only a teacher who has recently come to Beirut to teach English to the Lebanese. But his captors either do not understand or do not believe him. As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that nothing is farther from the Seattle lab than this Beirut prison. Yet as the two stories unfold, they become intertwined in a way that suggests that these seemingly opposite worlds share more than it appears. Details accumulate that make it necessary to reread the opening lines of the novel as a description of Taimur’s cell, as well as RL.
The room is never anything o’clock.
Minutes slip through it like a thief in gloves. Hours fail even to raise the dust. Outside, deadlines expire. Buzzers erupt. Deals build to their frenzied conclusions. But in this chamber, now and forever combine.
(3)
The now that is forever in Beirut is not the same as the now that is forever in Seattle. Far from the moment of release when time is left behind, the now becomes the endless expanse of time that is inescapable.
The question of time is the cement that holds the two aspects of Powers’s mosaic together. While programmers at RL plot the future in order to control time, Taimur is relentlessly subjected to the contingencies that mark the openness of the future. His kidnapping was a mistake—a random error that never could have been calculated in advance. The play of chance is the sting of time—if contingency can be figured and risk modeled, the future is closed and time is an illusion.
Taken by surprise. Taken by accident. An insignificant foreign language teacher who never took sides in his life. Half Islamic, for God’s sake. You mean nothing to your government. Nothing you can be swapped for. You’re of no value to your captors whatsoever…. You wake up still horrified, unwilling to go near yourself. But by noon, you creep back again. You replay the mistake, consider the spy. It passes the time, at least. And time is more of an enemy than any other terrorist.
(47)
No one would seem to need a technological fix to reach escape velocity more than Taimur. Though more frightful than any terrorist, Tai’s relation to time is more complex and interesting than that of his counterparts on the other side of the globe. Imagine—just try to imagine—what it would be like to be trapped in a dark, stinking cell for five years! With no interruption other than a morning toilet break and an occasional outburst from the guards that has no more rhyme or reason than your kidnapping, days blur into one another until time becomes an unfathomable abyss.
In time, whole days start to vanish. For a long while the orderly egg carton of the calendar has regulated your mind, kept it, if not productive, at least aligned. But now the carton starts to crumple, the eggs begin to break against one another in an angry omelet.
You carry on numbering the days, desperate for form, although the tally no longer correlates with anything. The week arrives when you can’t make it from one Friday call to prayer to the next without disorientation. It pulls you up out of a night’s sleep and runs you under the freezing fire hose—this drift into terror, into utter timelessness.
(321)
What the dreamers in RL do not know is that timelessness not only promises the eternal ecstasy of escape but also harbors the terror of endless imprisonment. The only thing worse than dying too young is living too long.
As days pass, Tai is forced to admit that escape is impossible and release most unlikely. Trapped in a time warp, he knows nothing of the world-historical events raging outside—the collapse of communism, heralded in apocalyptic terms as “the end of history”; demise of the Soviet Union; turmoil in the global financial markets, the Gulf War. What makes time so terrifying is its undifferentiated flow, in which everything passes but nothing changes. Tai realizes that the only way to cope with his situation is to manage time by punctuating its flux. “But which day? You can’t say, and it crazes you. You’ve lost count, by as much as two full days. Lost your link to the world that they’ve stolen you away from. Market day, school day, wash day, holiday, birthday: you fall into limbo. You can’t live, without a date to live in” (98). While the researchers seek release from time, Tai seeks release through time.
Tai’s strategy is to turn to two ancient methods of marking time—ritual and story. “Desperate for form,” he establishes a series of rituals intended to impose structure on his formless days. As he settles into a routine, terror is transformed into fear, which is more manageable. But rituals are repetitious and quickly become meaningless if they are not placed in a broader context. From the time Paleanthropus gathered around fires in ancient caves, human beings have told themselves stories to get through the night. Whether fiction or nonfiction, narrative creates meaning by translating serial events into coherent stories with a clear beginning, middle, and end. Though rarely noted, there is an unresolvable paradox in all storytelling—narrative simultaneously marks time by articulating temporal sequence and relieves the press of time by lending comprehensive form to contingency and chronicity.
In the absence of books, Tai recalls stories his Persian mother used to read to him in Farsi. These narratives wrap him in a blanket as warm and reassuring as the cave is cold and distressing. But memory is weak, and time is strong. When he has exhausted the library of his mind, Taimur begs his captors to give him a real book. They resist but do not say no, so he asks them to bring him a copy of one of his favorite childhood books—Great Expectations. Several days later, much to his surprise, an unexpected “presence settles in his cell.” Hesitant at first, he finally picks up the book.
Your sight scans up the book’s length, seeking out the title that will sentence or deliver you. Terror is no less than desire with the chrome stripped away. In your atrophied eyes, the letters read like a line of alien hieroglyphs. Bizarre analphabetic randomness. English has no such series. Then your pulse shoots into your ears. Great. Your word. Your title…. For a long time, your eyes refuse the title’s second word. Instead, they insist on the word that the word should be. But the surety of print survives your stare. You look again, and the title skids off into senselessness. You remove your blindfold and look dead on. Expectations somehow mutates into Escapes.
(254)
Not Great Expectations but Great Escapes—not a great work of literature but a cheap collection of stories Tai never would have read in his previous life. But these throwaway tales become a lifeline that allows him to mark time. “Great Escapes must be your daily introit and gradual. A single paragraph to serve as a matins service, another two sentences every other hour. The need to make astonishment last far exceeds your immediate urge to swallow it whole. The point is not to finish but to find yourself somewhere, forever starting” (256). But, of course, Tai does finish Great Escapes, and with its completion what Bataille aptly describes as “the deleterious absurdity of time” returns with a vengeance.18 When he pleas for another book, his captors give him a copy of the Qur’an. Once again, Tai is less interested in the substance of the story than the structure of the narrative. As if to impose a digital code on an analog tale, he parcels the Qur’an into ten-verse sections, which he reads one day at a time. “Each ten-verse maze holds you longer than the Sunday Times crossword ever did” (323). As he reads day after day, Tai’s cell is transformed into the Prophet’s cave: “You lie in the Prophet’s slime-laden cave, taking the complete dictation all over again” (324). Ritual is a repetition compulsion that marks time by imposing form on formlessness. Myth and history are not opposite; to the contrary, history originates with the eternal return of the same. As Tai repeats the verses day after day after day, his cave not only morphs into the Prophet’s cave, but both cells become virtually indistinguishable from the Cavern. While Adie floats through the Garden that is forever lost, Tai slips into a dream that seems to be real. “You and lucidity have been parting company without your knowing. Mind has been resorting to the quietist drift, a protective hallucination finally gentler than the alternative” (323).
In another Lebanon half a world away, somewhere between Beirut and Seattle, the “protective hallucination” is beginning to show cracks. With virtual reality technology reaching liftoff velocity, Stevie and Adie are brought back down to earth by the third member of their collegiate triangle. Ted, the handsome stud whom girls found irresistible, had come down with multiple sclerosis several years earlier. His career as a composer having failed, he is teaching extension courses in a prison located in Lebanon, Ohio, for a third-rate college. The prison is built on what was the original site of a utopian Shaker community. With a looming deadline for the design of a new prototype for the Cavern to be used in marketing VR technology, Steve and Adie receive word that Ted’s condition has taken a turn for the worse and decide they must visit him. By the time they reconnect with their friend, Ted is confined to a wheelchair and has to be strapped into his bed in a bare cinderblock room. As cells proliferate, prisons become darker. Zimmerman has become a true Zimmer man, confined to his cell-like room and never going out. To relieve the boredom and sense of entrapment, Stevie and Adie push Ted’s wheelchair from the nursing home down the main street of town, stopping at shops he used to frequent. His pleasure with the outing deepens the despair of the return to his room.
“Where the body is chained,” Powers avers, “the brain travels.” Travel, however, takes people in different directions. What painting is for Adie, virtual reality is for Stevie, and literature and religion are for Taimur, music is for Ted. Technology becomes the supplement that enables Ted to pursue music even as his body betrays him. When Stevie uses a synthesizer to play the chamber symphony Ted has been composing for years, he and Adie are startled by what they hear. Body reprograms mind even as mind permeates body. Gone are the edge, irony, and flamboyance of Ted’s youthful atonal compositions, and in their place there is beautiful tonal music, intended to soothe and reassure, that “proved nothing but its own raw need for redemption” (319). “If I could just finish all four movements,” Ted despairs. “It’s music… that people might love. That people might think about… and feel. Not like that alien stuff we used to make” (319). As if recalling Wyatt’s infinite deferral of ending, Stevie and Adie know he will never finish what he has started, because he does not have enough time. We never do. Before leaving for the last time, they lift Ted’s naked body onto the bedpan and help him prepare for a night that has no end.
Depressed beyond words, Stevie and Adie return to the motel, where they engage in frenzied sex for hours. When mind finally returns to body, the two lie side by side, and Stevie asks Adie to repeat the words that changed his life.
By the tips of her fingers, Stevie felt that his temples were wet. Remind me, he said.
She rustled up close to his ear. Remind you what?
Once out of nature. To look for something better than this body.
She stroked his temples, counterclockwise [n.b.]. Each trace round the circle undid one spent year. Then she placed his words—the past, the poem that he was quoting. Her fingers clenched. Go on, she commanded. Desperate. Say it. Say the rest.
He could not refuse her anything. He’d given her worse, more irreversible, already this night. His own voice rang strange to him, speaking into the black:
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling…
That’s it, she whispered into the gaping motel room. That’s the room we’re supposed to build. And set upon the golden bough to sing. The place we’re after. Byzantium.
(321)
But where is Byzantium?
Byzantium is the place where opposites meet but do not quite come together. In an interview, Powers explains the significance of Yeats’s poem in Plowing the Dark.
One of the motifs that I use in the book is Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium.” The last project that the heroine in Seattle takes on is the construction of the Hagia Sophia, which is the crowning achievement of Byzantium. Yeats’s Byzantium is the magic place where the inimical war between spirit and body is finally resolved. As it’s resolved in this atemporal setting. “Once out of nature I shall never take / My bodily form from any natural thing.” It’s exactly that. The idea that the soul doesn’t want to be fastened to a dying animal. That’s what drives the desire for art, the desire for a materially transcendent technology.19
Byzantium, of course, is also where West meets East and Christianity encounters Islam. The greatest expression of Byzantine art and architecture, Hagia Sophia, was “for close to a thousand years, the greatest church in Christendom. And for another five hundred years after that, the greatest mosque in Islam” (341). This is where great iconoclastic controversies have raged for centuries and, indeed, continue today.
Ancient theological disputes in the three religions of the Book probe questions that the most recent technology raises: can the Real be represented? The hidden mosaics that adorn the walls of Hagia Sophia reveal the passions that images stir. In his influential essay “The Precession of the Simulacrum,” Jean Baudrillard underscores the theological stakes of contemporary media and VR technology:
But what becomes of the divinity [i.e., the Real] when it reveals itself in icons, when it is multiplied in simulacra? Does it remain the supreme authority, simply incarnated in images as a visible theology? Or is it volatized into simulacra that alone deploy their pomp and power of fascination—the visible machinery of icons being substituted for the pure and intelligible Idea of God? This is precisely what was feared by the Iconoclasts, whose millennial quarrel is still with us today. Their rage to destroy images rose precisely because they sensed this omnipotence of simulacra, this facility they have of effacing God from the consciousness of men, and the overwhelming, destructive truth that they suggest: that ultimately there has never been any God, that only the simulacrum exists, indeed that God himself has only ever been his own simulacrum. Had they been able to believe that images only occulted or masked the Platonic Idea of God, there would have been no reason to destroy them. One can live with the idea of a distorted truth. But their metaphysical despair came from the idea that the images concealed nothing at all, that in fact they were not images, such as the original model would have made them, but actually perfect simulacra forever radiant with their own fascination. But this death of the divine referential has to be exorcised at all cost.20
Iconoclasts understand the power of images better than the people who worship them.
Though she is unaware of the theological genealogy of virtual reality, Adie cannot give up the dream of “perfect simulacra forever radiant with their own fascination.” She decides that she will recreate Hagia Sophia for the Cavern’s final demonstration. Far from erasing the original, her simulation merely updates an earlier virtual environment using the latest technological fix. “Mosaic saints man the walls at strategic points. Deep-color tile squares of hammered gold leaf dusted over a layer of glass tesserae and finished with a layer of glass paste become the world’s first bitmaps. Up close, their resolutions pixilated into discrete rectangles. But from down below, at the eye’s prescribed distance, the folds of a gown hang full,” and geometrically fashioned “faces escape the waste of history into some stilled, further conviction” (343). The Fall is always a fall into time and history that disrupts the eternal harmony of our original home. Far from la recherche du temps perdu, life becomes the search for a timelessness that is always already past. Hagia Sophia is the simulacrum of the prelapsarian garden that Adie artfully recreates as “The Dream” in the Jungle Room. In this work, it becomes clear that art, religion, and technology are all chasing the same dream. It takes fellow Irishman O’Reilly, whose calculations and machinations are designed to master time, to explain the point of Yeats’s poem to Adie and Stevie.
The man never found a place where he could put down and live in good conscience. A place where heart and head could sit at the same table. That was his Byzantium fantasy. The zero point, the fulcrum for the whole insane machine of civilization. Sages standing in God’s holy fire. The mechanical bird—tiny, gold-enameled gears and sprockets, singing perfectly, forever, of all things.
Beats the hell out of anything that Silicon Valley has come up with yet, Stevie said. Or even the Japanese, for that matter.
But you see, it’s all the same project. That’s what’s so demoralizing. The thing that’s best in people, the thing that wants to be pure and whole and permanent, the thing that won’t rest until it builds its eternal bird…
(335)
The end is near, the volume almost finished, only a few pages remain. To Taimur or, perhaps, the reader locked in a room reading Plowing the Dark, Powers writes:
You learn to steer your fragile machine. You skim above the surface of a dark sea. You dive beneath these scattered reefs and float in your birthright air. The flight feels like reading, like skimming a thousand exhilarated pages, but without the brakes and ballast of an ending…. You fly too freely, or the land’s geometry is wrong. Some titan fails to hold up his corner of the air’s tent. Or you simply reach the edge of a story that, even at this final stage, remains eternally under construction…. The scene crashes before you do. The room of the cave slams to a breakpoint and empties itself into error’s buffer. There on the wall where the oceans and olives and temples were, where the marble crags ran from their spine down into their unbroken chasm, the machine seizes up, the faulty allegory crumbles, the debugger spits out a continuous scroll of words.
Only through this crack can you see where things lead. You step through the broken symbols and into something brighter.
(401)
And into something darker. Byzantium always remains virtual because the zero point that is the navel of the universe as well as the dream forever withdraws to leave us to follow in its wake. Since Byzantium is never present, we are destined forever to sail toward a horizon we cannot reach.
When all the images are stripped away and only code and algorithms remain, the Cavern appears to be a “House of Leaves” that is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. “In the mystery of sealed volumes, the space is larger than its container” (408). The volume might be a book, cathedral, mosque, cave, prison cell, or even the body itself. There is always noise that cannot be filtered, data that cannot be processed, and “desire that outlives its burn.”
We’re approaching the point of full symbolic liberation. Loque almost sang it, gospel-style.
What’s the point? Ebsen asked. Wasn’t there enough imagery out there already?
But reality had never been large enough, because the body had never been large enough for the thing it hosted. Where else but in the imagination could such a kludge live?
(336–337)
Efforts to the contrary notwithstanding, in the very effort to cover the abyss, the imagination reveals a concealment that can never be decoded. This opening keeps everything in play by constantly generating the “hum of a place that passes all understanding” (3).
While Adie and Stevie are putting the finishing touches on their rendering of Hagia Sophia, Taimur is released as abruptly and inexplicably as he had been seized. Overwhelmed by how much the world has changed during his five years of captivity, Tai, dazed and confused, rediscovers the lesson Terry Waite had learned about “the lost ability to engage in productive solitude.” Powers writes, “There is a truth only solitude reveals. An insight that action destroys, one scattered by the slightest worldly affair: the fact of our abandonment here, in a far corner of sketched space. This is the truth that enterprise would deny. How many years have you fought to hold at bay this hideous aloneness, only now discovering that it shelters the one fact of any value?” (414) And then, in an unexpected twist, Powers concludes his mosaic on an explicitly theological note:
You turn in the entranceway of illusion, gaping down the airplane aisle, and you make it out. For God’s sake, call it God. That’s what we’ve called it forever, and it’s so cheap, so self-promoting, to invent new vocabulary for every goddamned thing, at this late a date. The place where you’ve been unfolds inside you. A space so large it will surely kill you, by never giving you the chance to earn it.
(414)
“The place where you’ve been unfolds inside you,” yet you cannot contain it. Everyone is bigger on the inside than on the outside because the imagination can never be contained by the figures it forms. It is as if Adie’s virtual Parasite Room is in reality an uncanny internal cavern that can never be fathomed. Is this room the “place past place” where ghosts holy and unholy dwell? And what might be the name of this nameless place? Powers gives an answer that is not an answer: “For God’s sake, call it God.” Literature, Technology, Religion… Mind/Body, Spirit/Matter, Eternity/Time, VR/RL—“it’s all the same project.”