The Four-Dimensional Human by Scott Laurence

Author:Scott, Laurence
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473505254
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2015-06-18T04:00:00+00:00

Porn-time

H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, published in 1895, imagines a future extending well beyond Lovelock’s apocalyptic twenty-first century, though admittedly humans as we know them are conspicuously absent. In the story, the intrepid late Victorian known as ‘the Time Traveller’ courses through the centuries, ‘in great strides of a thousand years or more’,18 from the comfort of his rigged-up armchair. His travels take him late into the planet’s life, when earth lies dying and no longer spins on its axis, so that the same cheek now permanently faces ‘the huge hull of the sun, red and motionless’. Like Shirley Valentine, he finds himself on a melancholy beach, thinking about time. The last crustacea – giant crabs – lumber along the shore and when he throttles his machine once again, they too disappear as the ‘red-hot dome of the sun had come to obscure nearly a tenth part of the darkling heavens’.

Wells was a witness to the late nineteenth century’s four-dimensional mania, and The Time Machine begins with some exposition on the debate. The Traveller, having returned home from his cosmic adventures, gathers some sceptical friends together and tells them:

Really this is what is meant by the Fourth Dimension, though some people who talk about the Fourth Dimension do not know they mean it. It is only another way of looking at Time. There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it.

Once time is thought of as being akin to space, it becomes possible to imagine traversing it bi-directionally, like someone pacing up and down a room.

If the Traveller hailed from our own era, he would no doubt be branded as a purveyor of ‘Time-porn’. His descriptions of the years elapsing in an accelerated blur before his eyes would never get past our hair-triggered pornographic sensors. Imagine what BuzzFeed would make of sketches such as this: ‘the sky took on a wonderful deepness of blue, a splendid luminous colour like that of early twilight; the jerking sun became a streak of fire, a brilliant arch, in space; the moon a fainter fluctuating band’. Only nineteen more examples to find. The early years of this decade have seen a concerted rise of this suffix ‘-porn’, which gives a jade-coloured vapour trail to both our innocent and pernicious amusements.

One explanation for all these porn metaphors in digital life would follow the same reasoning as why shepherd-poets would be inclined to liken all sorts of things to hills and the trees and the sky. Another explanation is that we are alert to the mediated quality of our digital experiences, a by-product of the inevitable voyeurism of going online. The metaphor is, on the face of it, spatial, referring to how digital technologies allow us to experience life from a distance. But I want to suggest that there is also a temporal reason, that all this metaphoric porn also stems from the ways in which porn’s particular style of timekeeping has begun to pervade the rest of life.

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