And just like that mangrove thicket, hyperspace isn’t empty and dark and cold. They go together like a terrapin and mangrove thicket. If the spacecraft is the baby, then hyperspace is the milky bathwater. A spacecraft enters hyperspace very suddenly, like a marble plopped into a perfectly marble-shaped hole. Hyperspace is “there” whether or not you “make” it (a verb people sometimes use when they are about to travel faster than light in sci-fi). Hyperspace is the ecological niche of the spacecraft, its habitat. It’s a swirl with blobs called quasars and cockatoos. It’s not swallowing everything and being ontologically bigger than everything. It means that the “whole” of the universe is one thing, the same as its parts (black holes and boots), so that the whole is amazingly “less” than the sum of its parts. The creamy phenomenology of hyperspace means that space is palpable, not different from galaxies and gnus. The way hyperspace is visualized as kind of roaring blue and white cream is a wonderful sign of real political, intellectual and artistic progress. It’s about a feeling of reality.īut if space itself isn’t different from other phenomena such as planets and people reading a book called Spacecraft, it means that it’s not omnipresent, and that omniscience and omnipotence are therefore impossible. Realism, as she herself argued, isn’t about detailed descriptions of things. Woolf’s genius was to push a logical consequence of narrative realism to its limit. Her streams of consciousness appear wide enough to contain more than one person’s mind, as if everyone were capable of flowing into everyone else through some kind of telepathy. Of the two of them, Woolf is the most radical. We associate it most with the work of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. There was a special kind of prose that arose in English literature around 1900, the kind we call stream of consciousness. Hyperspace is the basic stuff- hyper no longer in the sense of beyond, but in the sense of concentrated or condensed, like condensed milk or consommé. On this view, poems are little islands like planets or water lilies in a more general liquid like a pond or spacetime. But at some stage there’s a flip, when I determine the students are ready for it, and instead of teaching prose as really long poetry, I teach prose as the overall medium which sometimes can become “hotter” or more “lumpy” or “reified” as poems. When I teach my how-to-read-literature classes, I start with the idea that prose is really poetry with really, really long lines that have to be turned into parcels called paragraphs (nowadays anyway). It’s also just like how some experimental novelists imagined prose. And you can say the inverse: that spacetime is a deep property of the things that make up the universe. So tight is the connection that it’s correct to say that stars and planets and black holes are pockets and wells and holes in spacetime. It’s a rippling, flowing liquid that emerges from the massive qualities of things in the universe. This is just like how Einstein imagines spacetime. And Monet’s paintings are the yolk, a gorgeous, mauve-blue-green yolk. An oval is also an egg, an obvious container that isn’t just a container, but a living habitat for an embryo. An oval is a circle that’s been squeezed, just like spacetime isn’t totally regular but is squeezed and stretched by gravity. Immersive, strangely anticipatory of VR, you find yourself surrounded by gigantic ovals of color. In these rooms, you can visit Claude Monet’s astounding water lilies paintings. The Orangerie is a pair of oval-shaped rooms in the Jardin des Tuileries in Paris. But this is a place where they grow experiences of gorgeous paintings. “Orangerie” means a place where they grow oranges. Secondly, there’s that amazing innovation in narrative prose-the stream of consciousness. First, the water lily paintings of Claude Monet. There are two kinds of art I want to share. The science is Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Like a gorgeous mirage, hyperspace wavered into being, in philosophy, science, literature and art. The thing called hyperspace, in movies like Star Wars, the thing that you reach by traveling faster than light-it started to shimmer into existence in the early 1900s. What happened was, human beings began to sense the reality of hyperspace. Something happened in Europe at the start of the 20th century.
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